I’ve spent time on more UK law firm websites than I’d care to count. Some are genuinely excellent. Most have at least one of the following five problems, and quite often three or four. They’re not technical edge cases — they’re foundational, and they’re costing firms the inbound enquiries they should be winning.
1. The practice area pages are organised for the firm, not the buyer
Internal practice area structure mirrors how the firm itself is organised — by department, by partner, by whatever’s been there longest. Then the website carries the same structure. “Commercial Property” sits under “Commercial Services” alongside “Corporate” and “Banking & Finance”.
The buyer doesn’t think like that. The buyer thinks “commercial lease dispute” or “office lease review” — specific, intent-led queries. The firms that rank don’t have one “Commercial Property” page; they have ten or fifteen sub-pages, each targeting a specific buyer intent. Same writer, same expertise — just unbundled into the queries actual buyers search. (This is mostly a content strategy problem dressed up as an SEO one.)
2. Author profiles that aren’t actually authored
The “About the team” page shows partner photos and bios. Then the insights or articles page has posts attributed to “The Firm” or to no-one at all. Google increasingly looks for named, credentialled authors on YMYL-adjacent topics, and legal sits squarely in that category. E-E-A-T is real. Posts on legal topics without a named solicitor as author signal “we generated this content for SEO” rather than “this represents the firm’s thinking”.
The fix is dull and slow but meaningful: name the partner who wrote it (or who reviewed it), link to their bio, add proper Person schema. Google starts to recognise individual solicitors as entities. So do AI search systems — increasingly the place a worried client checks before they pick up the phone.
3. A generic Google Business Profile
Most firms have GBP set up — that’s not the problem. The problem is the setup is generic. The primary category is “Lawyer” or “Solicitor”. Practice-specific service categories are missing. The Q&A section is empty. The Posts section hasn’t been touched in two years. Opening hours don’t reflect the after-hours emergency line that buyers actually want to know about.
GBP is one of the highest-ROI activities in legal SEO and one of the most consistently neglected. A properly configured profile for a regional firm — accurate categories, populated service list, monthly Posts, an actively-managed Q&A — is often the difference between appearing in the local pack for half a dozen high-intent queries and not appearing at all.
4. Content written for compliance, not for clarity
Legal content has a tendency to read as if it was drafted to survive SRA scrutiny first and to help a worried client second. Both can be true at once — the same content can be regulatory-clean and actually useful — but compliance language tends to dominate when the partner who reviewed it spent twenty years drafting for adversarial readers.
What helps: short paragraphs, plain English explanations of what something means in practice, named examples with appropriate caveats, clear next steps. The content can still be compliance-reviewed and still be useful. Most firms err so far towards compliance that they end up with content that ranks for nothing useful, because nobody finishes reading it.
5. No AI search visibility work at all
ChatGPT and Perplexity are increasingly where considered-purchase research happens. “Best [practice area] solicitor in [city]” is a query a sceptical buyer will ask an AI assistant before they search Google. The firms cited in those AI answers get the shortlist call. The firms not cited don’t.
Most UK firms aren’t doing any AI search work because they’re not even tracking it. The tactical work isn’t complicated: proper Person schema, named authors, authoritative content with clear factual claims, an llms.txt file, knowledge graph alignment. The mistake is treating it as a 2027 problem when buyers are already using these tools to make decisions today.
Closing the gaps
None of these five are new. None of them require a rebuild. They’re all unsexy, unglamorous foundational work — which is probably why so many firms keep parking them.
If you’d like to talk through which of them apply to your firm, the intro call is here. Or look at how I work with law firms more broadly, or what a full SEO audit looks like in practice.
