Twenty years in search. Selective UK law firm engagements. SRA-aware throughout. No account managers. No juniors. No tie-in contracts. This page is the longer version of how that works and why I built the consultancy this way.
I’ve spent twenty years in search and marketing — agency-side first, then in-house, then freelance, then founder, then independent again. Across all of it, one pattern held: the firms getting the best results were the ones with senior people doing the work, on a small number of accounts, with deep context.
That observation doesn’t scale. Agencies grow by adding clients, adding juniors, and adding layers between the strategist who pitched and the work that ships. I tried to do it the agency way for a while. The results were always worse than when I was doing the work myself.
So I went the other way. A selective number of law firm clients. Me as the consultant who actually does the work. No layers, no delegation, no excuses. If the work is wrong, it’s because I was wrong. If the work is right, it’s because the model lets it be.
Three reasons I no longer take non-legal work or non-UK clients.
SEO for a regulated profession is a different job. Rule 8.8, the Transparency Rules, the rules around specialist claims and testimonials, the October 2024 AI content clarification — all of it shapes what can and can’t be written. Generic SEO consultants don’t know any of it. I built the consultancy to.
Google UK, Google Maps, ReviewSolicitors, Chambers, Legal 500, SRA register, Lexcel, CQS. The signals that move legal SEO and AI visibility in the UK are not the signals that move it in the US or Australia. Trying to do all three would dilute the offer.
How a probate searcher in Warrington behaves is not how a SaaS buyer in San Francisco behaves. Twenty years of patterns — mostly UK, increasingly UK legal — compounds. Diluting across other sectors would forfeit most of the value.
Started in search around 2005, when SEO was still mostly link directories, keyword stuffing and PageRank arithmetic. Worked agency-side through the era of Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird — mid-2010s, when Google started seriously punishing low-quality content and rewarding genuine expertise. That shaped how I think about content: depth and credibility compound, shortcuts decay.
Moved in-house in the late 2010s, leading search and digital for several UK businesses. That period was where I really learned the difference between SEO theatre (rank tracking screenshots, monthly reports nobody reads) and SEO that earns revenue. Being inside the business made the gap obvious.
Went freelance, then briefly founded a small agency, then dissolved it because I could see what I’d warned other firms about: the moment you grow past one senior practitioner, the work quality starts dropping. I’d rather stay small and good than scale and dilute.
Returned to independent consulting in 2022. Spent two years working across sectors before recognising that the deepest, most defensible work was always in regulated professional services — especially legal. Niched fully into UK law firms in 2026, because that’s where the consultancy creates the most value and where the AI search opportunity is most concentrated.
The frame I bring to every law firm engagement.
The SEO that wins for law firms is the work that compounds month-on-month: depth, credibility, authority, citation. Sprints win Q1 dashboards. Compounding wins the year.
The model only works because the senior person is the one doing the work. The moment that breaks, the consultancy stops being worth premium fees.
The Code of Conduct isn’t a constraint to work around — it’s the floor that everything sits on. Work that breaches the SRA isn’t valuable even if it ranks.
77% of UK legal queries trigger AI Overviews. The buyer journey now starts inside an AI assistant for a growing share of clients. Treating AI visibility as a 2027 problem will cost firms the next three years.
The firms that get the best long-term results are the ones who can hear “this isn’t working, here’s why, here’s what to do differently”. Pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time.
Based in Warrington, Cheshire. Most work is remote. In-person meetings possible across the North West (Manchester, Liverpool, Chester, Preston, Leeds). For firms further afield, video for monthly working sessions and quarterly travel for in-person reviews if useful.
Monday to Friday, UK business hours. Out-of-hours work is reserved for genuine emergencies (algorithm updates, urgent regulatory issues, crisis SEO). I respect your evenings and weekends and expect you to respect mine.
I default to written communication for anything that doesn’t need a conversation. Monthly reports are concise and partner-readable. No 200-tab spreadsheets. No 40-page PDFs. If a meeting could be a tight email, it should be a tight email.
Book a 30-minute intro call. I’ll tell you honestly whether what you’re describing is something I can help with.
