Content strategy for UK law firms.
Content strategy that respects the SRA Code of Conduct and is built for both AI Overview citation and long-tail organic ranking. Practice area pillar pages, FAQ content, partner-bylined thought leadership, citable statistics. The content patterns AI Overviews and Perplexity surface most often.
SRA-compliant content strategy for UK law firms. Built for AI Overviews and topical authority.
Most law firm content fails in one of two ways: it is generic enough to risk the SRA’s rules on specialist claims and outcomes, or it is so thin and keyword-led that neither Google nor an AI assistant has any reason to cite it. The firms that win have genuine depth in a practice area — properly structured pillar pages, partner-bylined commentary, valid schema, and specific, citable answers to the questions clients actually ask. That is exactly what AI search surfaces, and what compounds in organic search over time.
SRA-aware content is the only kind that works long term
Generic agency content breaches Rule 8.8 on specialist claims, testimonials and outcomes. Not optional.
AI Overview citation requires structured content
Clear headings, citable stats, named author with credentials, FAQ schema. Not just keyword density.
Topical authority is how regional firms win
Depth across a practice area beats breadth across many. Compounding wins go to firms with proper pillar structure.
What this engagement actually does.
Content audit and gap analysis
What content you have, what is missing, what is diluted, where AI Overview opportunity sits.
Practice area pillar page architecture
Properly structured pillar pages for each priority practice area with supporting article hubs.
Editorial calendar and brief library
Monthly content briefs prioritised by commercial impact and AI Overview opportunity.
SRA-compliance review process
Every piece of content reviewed against Rule 8.8, Transparency Rules and specialist claim rules before publication.
AI Overview citation programme
Structuring content (headings, stats, schema, author credentials) for AI Overview extraction.
Partner-bylined thought leadership
Named partner content with proper credentials. AI assistants weight this heavily for legal content.
Content marketing for law firms, done strategy-first.
Legal content marketing usually fails in one of two ways. Either the firm publishes nothing for eight months and then three articles in a week, or it publishes constantly and none of it is built to rank, be cited or convert. Both come from the same root cause: content marketing treated as an output target rather than a strategy.
Content strategy is the part that comes first — deciding which questions your buyers actually ask, which of those you can credibly own, how the pages link together into topical authority, and what has to be true for Google and the AI assistants to treat your firm as a source. Content marketing for lawyers is what happens after that is settled: the writing, the publishing rhythm, the internal linking, the updates.
I do both, in that order. Every piece is written to the SRA Code of Conduct, structured so an AI assistant can quote it cleanly, and mapped to a specific commercial outcome rather than a word count. If you have been sold legal marketing content by the article before, this is the opposite of that arrangement.
Competing with yourself, and the approval bottleneck.
The most common reason a firm with plenty of content ranks for none of it is that the content is competing with itself. Five articles across four years all answering roughly whether you need a will, each written by a different fee earner, none of them linked to the others. Google has to pick one and has no good basis for choosing, so it rotates between them or picks the weakest. Worse, the practice-area page that should be ranking gets outranked by one of its own blog posts, and the visitor lands on a 600-word article instead of the page built to convert.
The fix is structural rather than editorial. One page owns each commercial question. Everything else supporting it links to it and is clearly subordinate to it. Where two pages genuinely overlap, one gets merged into the other and redirected rather than left to compete. This is usually the single highest-return piece of content work at an established firm, and it involves deleting more than it involves writing.
The second failure is approval. Legal content has to be reviewed by someone qualified, and since the SRA clarified in October 2024 that AI-generated content needs review by a qualified person before publication, that is not optional. The problem is that most firms have a review requirement and no service level for it. A draft goes to a partner, the partner is in a completion, three weeks pass, the moment the piece was written for has gone. An editorial calendar dies in the approval queue far more often than it dies at the drafting stage, so part of this engagement is agreeing who reviews what and inside what window, before anything is commissioned.
Content Strategy FAQs.
FAQ 1Can you write the content for us?
Yes — with proper input from your fee earners. Pure ghostwriting reads like ghostwriting. The model that works: 30-minute partner interview, drafted by me, partner reviews and approves.
FAQ 2How much content do we need?
Depth over volume. Three to five properly built pillar pages per practice area will outperform fifty thin articles, and they are cheaper to maintain. For most firms the honest answer is that you already have too much content and not enough structure. The first pass is usually consolidation rather than commissioning: work out which existing pages should own which questions, merge the ones competing with each other, and only then decide what is genuinely missing.
FAQ 3What about AI-generated content?
SRA requires qualified person review of all AI-generated content before publication. I respect that. AI-assisted research is fine; AI-generated content shipped without solicitor review is not.
FAQ 4How long before content lifts rankings?
Three to six months before the compounding is visible, and that assumes the technical foundation is sound and the pages are not competing with each other. Consolidating existing content can move things faster than publishing new work, because you are concentrating signals that already exist rather than starting from nothing. AI Overview citation can happen quicker if a page answers a question cleanly, but it is not something to plan a quarter around.
FAQ 5What does it cost?
Usually part of a retainer. Standalone content strategy projects available.
FAQ 6How does content strategy support AI search visibility?
Directly. AI assistants cite clear, well-structured, credibly authored answers — so the content work and the AI search work are the same effort viewed from two angles.
FAQ 7Do we need technical work in place first?
Ideally in parallel. Content compounds fastest on a sound foundation, so it pairs naturally with technical SEO and a clear pillar structure.
Related work.
SEO for solicitors
The full engagement for UK law firms.
Digital PR
Where partner commentary earns coverage.
Technical SEO
The foundation content compounds on.
Want to discuss Content Strategy for your firm?
Book a 30-minute intro call. Or commission the SRA-Compliant AI Visibility Audit and get a formal picture of where this service would deliver the most value.