Solicitors & law firms
Twenty years of reputation, and invisible to anybody who has not heard of you.
The referral pipeline is the strongest asset most firms have and the least controllable. Search is the part you can actually turn on.
Werehouse Media works with UK solicitors and law firms on search visibility, website design and the document systems behind fee earning. The demand pattern in this sector is strongly weighted towards being found: UK search volume for seo for solicitors runs several times that for web design for solicitors, and the competition figure on the search term is unusually low for its value. Most engagements therefore begin with a £495 audit rather than a rebuild. Websites are built to handle the SRA Transparency Rules properly (published price and service information for the practice areas the rules cover, complaints information, and the SRA digital badge) rather than treating compliance as a footer afterthought. Behind the website, contract automation, client onboarding, engagement letters and matter opening are the highest-value systems work in this sector, with contract automation carrying one of the highest advertiser costs-per-click measured anywhere in this research. Websites from £995 and £1,495 upwards, redesigns from £1,495, SEO audit £495, search from £695 a month, process audit £495, bespoke builds from £4,500.
The search problem
High value, low competition, and almost no firm taking it.
The measured position in this sector is unusual: seo for solicitors carries substantial UK volume at a moderate difficulty and a competitive density close to zero, alongside one of the higher advertiser costs-per-click in the professional services set. High commercial value with almost nobody competing organically is not a combination that occurs often.
The reason is cultural rather than technical. Law firms grow on referral and reputation, marketing is often a partner's side responsibility, and search is treated as either beneath the firm or as something the directories handle. Meanwhile the directories, the claims aggregators and a handful of national practices take the traffic.
What actually moves the needle for a firm
- A page per practice area, written for the client rather than for another solicitor. Conveyancing, probate, employment, family, wills, commercial property and dispute resolution are separate searches with wildly different values and completely different emotional registers. One "Services" page covering all of them ranks for none.
- Price and service information, published. The SRA Transparency Rules already require it for the practice areas they cover, so a great many firms have the content and have buried it. Surfacing it properly is simultaneously a compliance improvement and the highest-converting content on the site, because a client comparing three firms will choose the one that told them.
- Named solicitors with real profiles. People instruct a person. Photographs, actual experience, admission dates and areas of practice, not a grid of headshots with job titles.
- Genuinely useful answers to the questions clients ask before instructing. How long does probate take. What happens if the chain breaks. What a tribunal claim costs. This is also precisely the content that AI search retrieves and cites, which matters increasingly for a sector where people research before they ring.
- Local terms where the work is local and national terms where it is not. Conveyancing is local; specialist commercial work frequently is not, and scoping it to a town discards most of the demand.
The website
Compliance done properly is a conversion advantage, not a tax.
Most law firm websites treat regulatory requirements as an obligation to be discharged in the smallest possible font. That is a missed opportunity, because the requirements happen to line up almost exactly with what a nervous client wants to know.
The SRA Transparency Rules
Firms are required to publish price and service information for the practice areas the rules cover, along with complaints information and the SRA digital badge. What the rules ask for (what the work costs, what is included, what is not, who will do it, how long it takes, and what to do if something goes wrong) is a nearly complete specification for a page that converts. Built as a proper page rather than a PDF nobody opens, it is frequently the best-performing page on a firm's site.
The rest of the credibility layer
- SRA number and regulated status where a client will actually see it.
- Complaints procedure and Legal Ombudsman route, findable rather than buried.
- Professional indemnity position stated where the client base expects it.
- Accessibility taken seriously, which matters more in this sector than in most: clients arriving at a wills, probate or care page are frequently older or dealing with a bereavement.
- Sensible handling of anything a prospective client might type into a form. A contact form on a family law site should not encourage disclosure it cannot protect.
The general argument about looking credible without looking like every other regulated firm is set out in websites for regulated firms.
The systems behind it
Contract automation, and the retyping that fee earners should not be doing.
Law is a document business, and documents are where the systems money is. Contract automation carries one of the highest advertiser costs-per-click found anywhere in this research, which is a reliable signal of what firms are prepared to pay to solve it.
Document generation, not template files
The difference matters. A template file is a Word document somebody copies and edits, which means version drift, retyped client details and the occasional previous client's name left in a paragraph. Document generation builds the document from structured data: matter details entered once produce the engagement letter, the client care letter, the contract and the file-opening paperwork, consistently, with no retyping and no copy-paste errors.
Client onboarding and matter opening
Conflict check, identity and anti-money-laundering verification, engagement letter out, terms accepted and recorded, matter opened, file structure created, and the client told what happens next. In most firms that is a sequence of manual steps across three systems performed by whoever is free. It is the single most automatable process in a law firm and the one where mistakes are most expensive.
The rest
- Enquiry response and triage. New enquiries acknowledged immediately, routed to the right department, and conflict-checked before anyone spends time on them. See enquiry automation.
- Matter progress updates. Clients ring for updates because nothing tells them. A client portal or scheduled milestone update removes a substantial share of inbound calls.
- Billing and disbursement chasing, which nobody enjoys and everybody delays.
- A phone answered out of hours. Conveyancing and family enquiries frequently arrive in the evening; see AI receptionist, with the strict boundary that it never gives anything resembling legal advice.
Everything here starts with the £495 process audit, and where a mainstream practice management product covers it, the audit will say so.
Pricing
Published, like everything else.
The same published prices as everywhere else on this site. Quoted in writing before anything starts, fixed, and never adjusted because of the sector on the invoice.
| What | Price | Usually right when |
|---|---|---|
| SEO audit and fix list | £495 | You already have a site and nobody finds it. Credited against a build if a rebuild turns out to be the answer. |
| Local SEO | From £695/month | You need to be found in your own town and the map pack matters. |
| Full search programme | From £995/month | Content, technical work, earned links and AI search visibility together. |
| Website build | From £995, multi-page £1,495 upwards | No site, or one that cannot be extended. |
| Website redesign | From £1,495 | A site with rankings worth protecting that has run out of road. |
| Process audit | £495 | Before any system is quoted. Credited in full against builds over £2,000. |
| Bespoke build | From £4,500 | A system with its own data model: CRM, portal, internal tool. |
| Care | From £49/month | Anything live that needs watching. Never a condition of the build. |
The incumbent specialists in most sectors publish no prices at all and put a book-a-call form where the number should be. That is the gap this practice works in, and it is the same gap on every one of these pages.
Straight answers
Common questions.
A one-off audit and fix list is £495 and is the right first purchase for almost every established firm, because the usual finding is that the site is serviceable and nothing on it targets anything a client actually searches for. Ongoing search work runs from £695 a month for a firm competing locally and from £995 a month for the full programme, which covers content, technical work, earned links and AI search visibility together. Everything is cancellable with 30 days' notice and there is no minimum term.
It satisfies the rules, and it is usually doing nothing commercially, because it is generally a PDF or a page written to be compliant rather than to be read. The information the SRA requires (cost, inclusions, exclusions, who does the work, timescales, and the complaints route) is almost exactly what a client comparing firms wants. Rebuilt as a real page with the numbers in the text rather than in an attachment, it is frequently the highest-converting page on a firm's website and it improves the compliance position at the same time.
The client-facing content, yes: practice area pages, the questions clients ask before instructing, fee explanations and the profiles. Anything that constitutes legal advice or a statement of law is written or approved by the firm, because it must be, and the process is built around that rather than around pretending otherwise. In practice the fastest arrangement is an hour-long interview with the fee earner who owns the area, drafted here, then reviewed and signed off by the firm.
Increasingly, and this sector is unusually exposed to it. People asking a chatbot what happens if a chain breaks, or how long probate takes, are exactly the people who instruct a solicitor a fortnight later. Whether a firm gets named in that answer depends on whether it has published clear, specific, attributable answers to those questions and whether it is described consistently across the web. That work is included in every search engagement rather than billed separately. See the AI search page.
Yes, and most search terms in this sector are national rather than local anyway. The practice is based in East Sussex and meetings in person around Sussex, Surrey and the Gatwick corridor are straightforward. For firms elsewhere the engagement runs on calls and shared drafts, which is how most of it runs regardless.
Up to a point, and the constraint is worth stating early. This is a one-person practice with capacity for a small number of concurrent projects, so a multi-office rebuild with several stakeholder groups and a formal sign-off process is usually better served by an agency with cover and a project manager. Well-scoped pieces of work (a practice area rebuilt properly, a transparency page done right, a matter-opening process automated) suit this size of supplier very well. The full capacity and due diligence position is on the capabilities page.
Worth reading next
Written for owners, not for marketers.
Next step
Which practice area would you most like more of?
That is the whole brief, usually. One area, done properly, tells you within a few months whether the rest is worth doing.