Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 19/08/2026

What Ryan says:

“Law firm and Solicitor SEO is still one of the most competitive business niches there is here in the U.K.

Consider the UK as a whole: how many solicitor practices are within each city?

There are many, all busy competing with one another. To stand out, you need strong, solid search engine optimisation.

Thankfully, we at Walsh & Partners have over 10 years’ experience in this space, so my team are one of the agencies leading the way when it comes to solicitors’ SEO, AEO and GEO– come to the best”

 

 

With a huge number (over 9,000) of law firms in England and Wales, lawyers need the best search engine optimisation they can find. As with all SEO, you have to get the fundamentals right: keyword research and backlinks, but more and more it’s about standing out in the emerging field of AI search, such as Google AI answers and within the LLM’s or GEO. Your business must be considered the “go-to authority”, whether that’s for optimising your business for ChatGPT or for Google’s organic results.

 

AI models and answer engines

So, here’s the dilemma or the opportunity; it depends on how you want to look at it. AI search, such as AI answers directly in Google search, is actively reducing organic visitor numbers right now. Fewer people are now clicking the “traditional blue link results”, a.k.a as the organic results. Therefore, there’s an opportunity to be the cited answer in AI search. Still, if you don’t get cited, the organic results are obtaining fewer clicks, meaning less opportunity for increasing sales. That means the clicks your business does get have to work harder, and you need strong CRO to convert those fewer visitors into paying customers.

 

High intent

The good news is there’s still bucket loads of opportunity out there, because you can focus on high-intent and valuable keywords. You can also diversify the keywords you rank for to attract different customers seeking services your solicitors’ practice may not have promoted before. Through careful keyword analysis, you can choose keywords that have a higher chance of turning a visitor into a paying customer. To do this, create compelling content marketing (High Google E-E-A-T score) that’s super helpful and the best in the business.
CRO and how to do this:

• Focus on your website design- could it do with improving?
• Bounce rates- which pages have the highest bounce rates, and can you improve these?
• Dwell times- which pages have low dwell times, and how can you improve these?
• Outdated content marketing: which pages need a refresh, updates, and new helpful information?

 

Should solicitors still invest time/marketing budgets in SEO in 2026?

Google is still the main way that businesses and the general public find services and retailers online. However, you cannot afford to let the grass grow under your feet anymore; AI is becoming increasingly popular, and more shoppers are using tools like ChatGPT and other AI models to find the products and services they want.

 

Authority

A key part of search engine optimisation was always authority building. It’s a key component stipulated in Google EEAT guidance. However, with authority building through semantic SEO and link building, it’s more important than ever to improve authority to appear in Google Gemini answers, DeepSeek, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, for example. As each new AI system comes along, it will bring in more customers who like using it and prefer using it; therefore, organic visitors will likely continue to decline over time.

Okay, create a diagram, in the Walsh and Partners style, to explain this: AI Overviews appear for a query; click-through rates to traditional organic links can drop by 34–65%.

This is a very interesting statistic, one which opens our eyes when we read it here at our agency.

That is, when AI Overviews appear in the SERPs, organic click-through rates drop massively; some respected marketing websites report drops of 34- 65% in CTR.

Now, in the same style, do the same for: Google still processes over 16 billion daily queries, and roughly 9.5 million searches occur every minute.

This sheer volume of questions shows how many shoppers rely on Google to find local and national businesses. That’s why law firms often partner with winning agencies like ours, which can analyse which keywords have the highest “search volume”. Then, through technical, off-page, and on-page work, we can help your business rank higher for these terms so you can capture more of those organic visitors.

 

What makes solicitor practice SEO different?

Customers often give legal services a lot of thought before contacting a legal practice or a single solicitor to obtain your advice. This means web design, content marketing, and SEO must be excellent. Plus, YMYL sets a much higher threshold for getting a page indexed, which we cover later. For national or local SEO, the ranking factors to optimise are the same as for any other business (200 Google ranking factors).

However, what makes solicitors’ practice SEO slightly different is how fiercely competitive this space is; the business sector is competitive, so weak SEO will not cut it.

Plus, solicitor practices with large teams won’t hire a half-baked SEO company; they will want the best talent serving them. The point therefore being made here is, when competing in this business niche, not only in the competition high between solicitor practices, but you’re also competing with the best agencies, with the most experienced staff that are behind each of their clients competing to achieve the same thing you are, that is to bring in more sales.

 

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL)

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content marketing covers pages that offer advice that could directly impact someone’s well-being and life if they rely on the information offered on that page. Therefore, the work must be more trustworthy and accurate. Every paragraph must offer rock-solid, reliable advice, and the work needs regular updates.

Vague, “content thin” writing won’t satisfy the YMYL update. Instead, the work needs a high Google E-E-A-T score. It also needs input from a subject-matter expert to ensure it includes helpful, accurate advice.

 

Some key things to consider:

AI visibility

Remember, when creating content marketing, you’re not just optimising for organic results anymore. Instead, now what you have to optimise for is AI answers, plus improve the E-E-A-T score; then you stand a much better chance of appearing in Perplexity, in ChatGPT and in Google AI Overview answers.

 

Organic Search

Marketing agencies like to say the GEO and AEO have totally reinvented the wheel; they haven’t. If you hold to the principle of offering the best advice you can, the best helpful content marketing supported by endorsement signals, such as backlinks, you can rise to the top, not just in organic Google results, but also in the AI platforms as well. So the two work hand in glove: get one right, and the other naturally follows.

 

E-E-A-T signals

Across all businesses, it’s now super important to optimise your content marketing so that it displays clear experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness signals. This means the information you offer readers needs to be high quality. This is what SEOs call “improving the E-E-A-T” for a website’s pages. There are many ways to achieve this for solicitor practices in general; we have highlighted some below.

 

Relevant registrations

Make sure, for example, SRA registration and accreditations to organisations such as Resolution are clearly noted on the website with outbound links to the accrediting body.

 

Good content marketing

Don’t use AI; avoid duplication where possible. You need to spend a lot of time crafting content marketing which shoppers will genuinely find useful and helpful. By that, we mean answering in FAQ format and offering the best advice you can. These pages keep people’s attention longer; in digital marketing, we call that dwell time. When the dwell time is high, plus consistently high for long periods, what this does is it tells Google you’re simply offering advice and helpful information that’s able to retain the shopper’s interest for longer.

 

Technical foundations

Just as a racecar needs the right setup to handle well, your company website does too. Your company website needs to be super-sonic fast, so think carefully about which website hosting company you use. You need super-fast, reliable website hosting. Also consider Google Core Web Vitals; design your website from the start with speed in mind.

 

Link building

We’re experts in law practice link building. However, it is an art form, and it has to be done right. You can’t just build links anywhere; you have to start with link velocity. Then the backlinks need to have a high DA score; they must be relevant, plus the on-page SEO that accompanies that backlink, such as the anchor text, that has to be optimised correctly. In essence, the stronger the backlink profile, the stronger the link equity flowing through to the page, filtering through to the related pages, which increases the “Authority” aspect of Google E-E-A-T, which means that the connected page, plus the internal pages connected to that, can then benefit from being placed higher in Google’s SERPs.

 

Technical SEO

Tell me what AEO, or Answer Engine Optimisation, is.

This is the new battleground where businesses compete for GEO and AEO visibility.
In short, for those who don’t know, answer engine optimisation is when Google’s AI decides to cite part of your business’s content as a direct answer in the SERPs. This often happens when Google is highly confident the answer is reliable, and it will answer the question with just a line or two of text. However, getting your business to appear as an AEO answer can be hard work because your Google EEAT score has to be high. Plus, AEO answers typically come from established, trusted businesses.

AI systems such as Google AI answers, therefore, look for answers which offer the following:

Clear answers
Googlebot doesn’t want to wade through thousands of lines of text to offer an answer. Instead, algorithms want a page with a high DA score. Plus, the content marketing must be super high quality. This means the Google EEAT score must be good, and the page should be written in an FAQ style with questions and answers; this way, Google’s algorithms can extract a precise answer easily.

 

Simple definitions

What you find is that the answers that Google’s AI answers, or the AEOs, come from pages that offer a very clear answer. This is written in plain English with very little in the way of using complicated jargon.

What exactly is GEO or Generative Engine Optimisation?

GEO is something new, or relatively new for most businesses. It’s when your business is cited in an AI platform such as ChatGPT. The business may show up as a suggestion, such as a restaurant, with a direct link to the website. Or someone could have a question; your business’s content marketing gets cited as an answer. The source is then mentioned, giving the shopper a direct link to your website. Now for GEO optimisation, well, this depends on which GEO or AI platform you want to optimise your website for. However, generally speaking, if your organic SEO is already incredibly strong, you’re already on the right path for GEO success.

SEO, GEO, and AEO: Which do law firms need?

In essence, SEO, GEO, and AEO all do the same job: direct relevant traffic to a website. However, our marketing experts at Walsh & Partners know that when you improve your organic ranking factors, work on semantic SEO, and strengthen your E-E-A-T score, your website will rank much higher in Google. Then your work is much more likely to be read and scraped by LLMs such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. That’s why we always advise our clients to focus on organic ranking factors first and build a trusted, established brand. What you often find then is that the LLMS will want to cite your written work also.

 

How does Google know which law firms to rank highest?

Google’s algorithms are massively complex and well-engineered. Various spam filters, such as Google Panda and the Google Penguin updates, along with hundreds of other Google updates, have made the algorithm more of an art form than a ranking algorithm. Therefore, through AI enhancements, constant updates, and monitoring areas such as bounce rates, Google has made it a fine art to rank websites and place businesses in its index.

 

Here’s how Google’s algorithm works in three easy-to-understand steps:

Crawling and indexing

All websites, including your solicitor’s practice website, need to be crawled and indexed. This means allowing Googlebot to crawl and index the website, and not blocking it from crawling and indexing pages you want to appear for in Google’s SERPs. You want pages indexed, but you also want Googlebot to recrawl them, since businesses often update their content marketing and make on-page SEO improvements over time.

Understanding the content marketing

After crawling and indexing content, Google’s algorithm tries to understand what questions it answers. This is the process of placing the page or post in its index. Pages which have a high Google E-E-A-T score will naturally rank higher. If the page already has inbound backlinks, this will improve the page’s authority.

Ranking

After crawling and indexing the work, Google’s algorithm will rank it and constantly compare it with other businesses’ work. For example, if another business’s answer receives higher dwell time, lower bounce rates, and more quality backlinks, that page may rank higher. The point is that Google constantly evaluates your content marketing against the competition, so the best possible answer to that question is always ranked at the top of Google.

 

What are the 200+ ranking signals that Google uses to rank content marketing?

Google’s algorithm uses in excess of 200 ranking factors; this is to calculate how strong, or indeed how weak, the business’s on-page, technical and off-page SEO is. For example, one ranking factor is backlinks, but there are many more. We have split the ranking factors into broad categories so you can better understand how Google’s algorithm works.

Relevance

Googlebot crawls and reads each page on your website. The algorithm then tries to understand the content marketing by what questions it answers. This is why writing in an FAQ style is important, as it helps Google better understand the context of the work.
Google assesses content quality through EEAT.

Google uses its algorithms to assess content accuracy. Remember that YMYL content has a much higher standard for accuracy. Google’s algorithm wants to understand whether the work is well researched and well written; it uses its complex EEAT guidelines to check this.

 

User engagement

Google constantly uses RankBrain to determine what real shoppers think of the page. For example, what’s the bounce rate like? Is it super high? How high is the dwell time? Then compare user engagement metrics with the direct competition to see whether your business offers a better answer.

 

Backlinks

The best SEO agencies spend hundreds of hours every year building high-quality backlinks. Google uses over 200 ranking factors to determine a page’s importance, and backlinks are among the most important. Basically, if the page has really powerful backlinks, which have a super high DA score, say 90 or above, and if you have enough of these backlinks, that page will most likely rank higher in Google search.

That is why top digital marketing agencies employ dedicated link-building teams. These teams use tools like Ahrefs or Moz Pro and build backlinks from competitors.

 

How do we get our solicitor’s practice to appear in the Google Business / Google Map pack?

Optimise your Google Business Profile

Each location your business has, for example, each office in different cities, will need a Google Business Profile created. Add NAP information and keep it up to date. After adding the business name, address, and phone number, keep photos updated regularly. Also, reply to customer feedback; this helps inform Google that the account is still active and up to date.

 

NAP consistency is key

NAP consistency is very important; note the solicitor’s practice name, address, and phone number, and keep them consistent across the company website and business directories. For example, when the business is mentioned on Yelp, Chambers, or Resolutions’ website, the NAP information must be correct and consistent.

 

Google Business Reviews

When a customer leaves a review on Google Business, it provides feedback to the business, prospective customers, and Google’s algorithms. Google can tell whether a business offers good customer service and how active it is in that area.

For example, a local restaurant that receives good reviews every week signals to Google’s algorithm that it’s a popular business in the local area. Therefore, Google uses the business reviews to understand how popular that business is.

 

Why it’s important to get the on-page SEO right

On-page SEO is what Googlebot reads to understand what the page is about, so it needs to be well written. On-page, you need to use H1-H6 and also, for example, alt text to help Google’s algorithm understand what the page is about.

Here are some of the ways that you can improve your business’s on-page search engine optimisation:

Page content

Page content is the text written to offer advice. Make sure the text is well written, unique, and not duplicated. The content marketing that’s written should also have a high Google E-E-A-T score. Make sure the text helps the customer; you will often see page-one Google results packed with helpful advice. Consider using an FAQ-style format, and answer commonly asked questions.

 

HTML elements

In certain content management systems, such as WordPress, you can add H1-H6 tags. You can bold the anchor text, add meta titles, and add meta descriptions. All of these parts help Google’s algorithm understand what the page is about.

 

Page structure
Page structure is super important; consider how you’ll split the text. For example, if you use H1-H6 tags, you can split the text into clear chunks.

This helps readers, as they can skip to the section they want to read more about. Plus, it helps Googlebot better understand the questions the page answers.

 

Internal linking

Internal linking helps shoppers navigate your website more easily. Let’s take a common example: a piece of content marketing, such as a blog post answering a commonly asked question, ranks on page one of Google. Then, when shoppers find an answer, internal links often point to different product pages. This allows shoppers to find the right product; internal links also offer SEO benefits because they can spread link equity to product pages. Link equity, also commonly referred to as link juice, can give a page more authority, meaning it can rank higher in organic search as it accumulates more backlinks.

 

Schema markup

Add schema markup, whether that’s product schema or schema to mark up your business’s NAP information. Adding schema to the page increases the business’s chances of appearing as a Google Rich Snippet. Rich snippets attract a higher click-through rate, which can lead to more sales.

 

Title tags and meta descriptions

To improve CTR (click-through rate), spend time creating well-written meta titles and descriptions. For example, people sometimes forget simple things when writing meta descriptions, such as adding brand and product names to the description itself. Then add something your direct competitors may not, such as free next-day delivery when ordered by a certain time.

 

High-quality content

More than anything, the content marketing across your solicitor’s practice website must be high quality. Top law practices use well-written content marketing to offer visitors helpful advice. Don’t use AI or duplicate content; instead, write helpful content marketing. We recommend that whoever writes your content marketing read and understand Google E-E-A-T; this clarifies what Alphabet (i.e., Google) is looking for.

The main thing is the content marketing; that’s the text that you write. It needs to show Google that you’re an expert and have real-life experience with the product or service. Therefore, in the case of solicitors, of course the customer doesn’t want to read overly technical articles, full of legal terms; however, if you can explain your advice, showing that you are aiming at helping the customer, but also showing you’re an expert on the subject, this is important. Pages with high Google E-E-A-T will rank higher. Google compares your knowledge and expertise with its Knowledge Graph; if the advice is accurate, the page will rank higher in organic search results.

Keyword placement

Contrary to what some agencies say, don’t aim to place keywords at certain points on the page. If you want our advice, and we are a highly successful SEO agency, aim to offer the best advice and make the page as helpful as possible. This is one of our trade secrets, but we’ll share it: write each page, whether it’s a blog post or a main page, as if you have a client in front of you at your solicitor’s practice. So don’t write for SEO gains; instead, offer really good, valuable advice to customers. When the page is as helpful as possible, you satisfy that “experience” and “expertise” part of Google E-E-A-T we talked about earlier. Not only are dwell times likely to be higher, meaning you retain shoppers’ interest longer, but Google will also notice.

 

Internal Linking

Google wants to understand how the content marketing on your website connects. For example, how do the blog posts you have written connect to the main pages? Internal links also help search engines understand which pages are most important on your company website. For example, if a product page is linked to the most internally, this signifies that it is the most or one of the most important products you sell. Use descriptive anchor text to help shoppers and Google’s algorithms understand what the page is about.

Dwell times

Once you’ve designed your website the way you want, you need to add content marketing regularly. Then you can use various SEO tools, such as Google Analytics, to start monitoring dwell time. This is an important ranking factor when calculating how strong a business’s SEO is. That’s because it basically gives the average time a shopper spends on your website reading pages. If they read a page for a long time, it signals to Google that you’re holding the shopper’s interest. It therefore tells Google’s algorithms that you are offering helpful advice that the shopper wants to read.

 

Off-page SEO strategies for law firms

Solicitors need to have a strong backlink profile. Some agencies call this authority building; it’s also an important part of Google E-E-A-T.

Authority building helps you earn backlinks from multiple sources, which strengthens what SEO consultants call the website’s “domain authority.” Strong incoming links can pass link equity to connected pages, improving their authority. Because Google crawls and indexes these links, the more strong backlinks it sees, the higher the page will rank.

What exactly is a backlink?

A backlink is like a business recommendation; instead of being recommended, you’re linked to via a hyperlink. If the link is “do-follow”, what this can mean is link equity is transferred to that page. If enough authoritative sources link to you, you build what agencies call “a strong backlink profile”. Building backlinks is hard work; there’s no two ways about that, because the linking business, the business offering the outbound link, needs to link to you; therefore, there needs to be a reason why that company wants to link to your website.

 

What are some of the reasons other businesses/organisations will want to link to a law practice?

– Accreditations- the organisation has offered an accreditation such as being a member of Resolution if you are a family law practice
– Supplier- often suppliers link to you; for example, you may rent a prestigious office block, the management company or owner may link to you to show which brands rent from them
– Offer quality advice- however, the more common reason is that you have written content marketing that has offered such quality advice; another solicitor’s practice may want to quote and reference your work

Not all backlinks are created equal.

What separates businesses ranked at the top of organic results for “magic circle solicitors” from those at the bottom is backlinks. However, before you start building backlinks from wherever, you need to understand that backlink quality varies massively.

Backlinks are often graded on a DA score, which ranges from 0-100. If you have too many “spammy” backlinks within your backlink profile, this dilutes how effective those backlinks are. There becomes a “tipping point” where the backlink profile becomes too spammy and too toxic; this is when the business can obtain what’s known as a Google algorithm penalty or a manual action penalty.

So, in short, you need to build only quality backlinks. Leading solicitor practices that rank high on Google for the most competitive keywords will almost always have very strong backlink profiles.

 

Here is what makes a strong backlink profile

Must be quality backlinks
The backlinks need to be from a relevant website
The anchor text must be descriptive and white-hat.
You need backlinks from a diversified list of businesses
You need to consider link velocity so the backlinks can’t be built too quickly
You don’t want spam links; these dilute the effectiveness of the backlink profile
Use quality SEO tools, such as Moz Pro, to research and analyse competitors’ backlinks.

 

Technical SEO for law firms

The right technical setup is important to ensure Googlebot, plus other AI platforms, can read your content marketing. If bots get lost in a maze of duplicated content, broken links, and page redirects, you waste your website’s crawl budget. This means that the important pages may not be getting crawled as often, or when you add, say, a new piece of content marketing, that might not be getting indexed as fast or at all, if the crawl budget is used by a maze of duplicated pages, for example.

 

Here are some of the technical SEO areas to get right:

• Website structure and main navigation
• Getting the site structure right is key; through the main navigation, Googlebot should understand the page layout and which products and services the business offers. More important services, such as employment law services, if this is what your legal practice specialises in, should be moved higher up the main menu.
• You often hear SEO businesses talk about “clean architecture” and “topical authority”; in essence, it means making sure there’s a good website layout.
• Don’t waste your crawl budget on duplicated pages.
• Page Experience Signals (Google’s Core Web Vitals)

Many SEO articles discuss “Google’s Core Web Vitals,” and web designers and SEO consultants actively work to improve loading speed (LCP), interactivity (FID), and visual stability (CLS). This all sounds complicated, but it boils down to this: you need to make your solicitor’s practice website as fast as possible. Choose fast hosting, and adjust the design to speed up the website.

 

Mobile-friendly website design

Imagine how many organic visitors to a law firm come via mobile; it’s likely a large percentage of overall visitors. So you need responsive design, and you need to ensure your law firm’s website works on smartphones and tablets. Plus, as we mentioned earlier, it’s not just about functionality; it’s about speed. So the website must work on mobile, but it must also load on a smartphone screen in the blink of an eye.

 

How we can help your business:

If you run a solicitor’s practice in the U.K. and would like help improving your company’s SEO, GEO, or AEO, give us a ring today.