Legal
Why law firm websites do not rank, and how the transparency rules can fix it
Because almost every page on them is about the firm rather than about a question somebody typed. A practice-area page that says the firm has extensive experience in family law is not an answer to anything, and there are ten thousand of them.
The fix is already sitting in your compliance obligations. The SRA's price and service transparency rules require you to publish exactly what a client is trying to find out, and most firms bury it in a PDF.
What a law firm site is usually competing with
Not other law firms. On most commercial legal queries the results are dominated by directories, national brands with content teams, and comparison sites, all of which have been publishing structured answers for years. A firm with eight practice-area pages and a news section is not in that fight.
The queries themselves also split in a way most firms ignore. There are people looking for a solicitor, and there are people trying to understand a problem they have just been landed with. The second group is far larger, arrives earlier, and is nearly unserved by firm websites.
The transparency rules, read as a brief
The SRA requires published cost and service information for a defined set of work. Read past the compliance framing and look at what it actually asks you to publish: what the work costs, what is included, what is not, who will do it and what their experience is, how long it takes, and what happens if something goes wrong.
That is a near-complete specification for the highest-intent page on a professional services website. It is the page a client compares you on, and the rules have already written the brief.
Check the current rules before you publish. The required areas of work and the thresholds have been amended more than once since the transparency rules were introduced. Take them from sra.org.uk directly rather than from a summary, including this one.
Why almost every firm gets this wrong
Three ways, consistently. It is a PDF, so it is not a page and cannot rank. It is written defensively, in ranges so wide they tell the reader nothing. And it is hidden, linked from the footer under a heading nobody clicks.
Done properly it is a real page per area of work, with the fee structure, the disbursements named and priced, the realistic timescale, the named person doing the work, and the complaints route. It is the single most useful thing on the site and it converts better than anything else, because the person reading it has already decided they need a solicitor and is now deciding which one.
The structure that ranks
One page per service, per location you genuinely serve. Not one page listing everything. A firm doing conveyancing in three towns needs three pages, each of which is actually about that town rather than a template with the name swapped.
Underneath that, answer the questions people ask before they instruct anyone: how long does probate take, what happens at exchange, do we have to go to court. These are the queries with volume, they are the ones an answer engine reaches for, and a firm that answers them properly is the firm they contact when the general reading turns into a specific need.
Both halves are covered in more detail on the solicitors page.
What the rules do not stop you doing
They constrain claims, not voice. Nothing in them requires the passive voice, stock photography of a gavel, or a homepage that could belong to any firm in the country. The credibility you are trying to project comes from specificity, and specificity is exactly what the transparency rules force.
The broader version of this argument, across FCA-regulated firms and accountancy as well as legal, is in websites for regulated firms.
The part that happens after the enquiry
Ranking better produces more enquiries, and more enquiries expose the next bottleneck. In most firms that is the document work between enquiry and instruction: the client care letter, the scope, the terms, all assembled by copying the last one.
Generated from a form rather than copied from a file, that goes out the same day and cannot inherit a previous client's name. That work sits on the contract and document automation page. The search work itself, including the audit that tells you which of this applies to your site, is from £495.
Questions solicitors ask
Why does my law firm website only rank for the firm name?
Because the pages are about the firm rather than about questions people search. Practice-area pages that describe experience rather than answering a specific question have nothing to rank for, and the commercial queries are held by directories and national brands.
Do the SRA transparency rules help with SEO?
They can, because they require you to publish precisely what a prospective client is searching for: costs, inclusions, timescales and who does the work. Published as real pages rather than a PDF, that is usually the highest-intent content on a firm's website.
How many pages should a law firm website have?
One per service, per location genuinely served, rather than a single page listing everything. Plus pages answering the questions people ask before instructing anyone, which is where most of the search volume actually sits.