Marketing for a law firm that has never marketed
A firm that has never marketed has 90 days of sequence ahead of it, not a campaign. Weeks one and two settle ownership and measurement, weeks three to six build the pages, and the rest is publishing. The Firm Site is £2,400 and the Price Transparency Pack is £890.
Last updated: 5 August 2026
What has to be settled before anything is published?
Three things, and not one of them is a marketing decision.
A firm at a standing start usually has a website somebody built years ago, no analytics property anyone can log into, and no named person whose job this is. Those are the reasons marketing never started rather than marketing problems in themselves, and each costs a decision rather than a fee.
- Who owns the domain and the hosting account. Not a former supplier, not a partner's personal email address from two firms ago. Both should sit in the firm's name and be recoverable by somebody currently at the firm.
- Whether anything on the existing site is worth keeping. For a firm at zero the honest answer is usually the domain, the address and the names of the fee earners. The rest is faster to rewrite than to rescue.
- Which two practice areas the firm actually wants more of. Not the eight it can do. The two it wants the diary filled with, because those get pages first and the rest wait.
A damaging admission, before anything else: we do not begin until somebody at the firm has agreed to about thirty minutes a week for sign-off. A firm that cannot spare that in the first quarter should not buy this yet, and we would rather say so before the invoice than after the third unanswered email.
What does the first ninety days actually look like?
Instrumentation, then building, then publishing — in that order, because measuring after the fact is guessing.
| Period | What happens | What exists at the end of it |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1–10 | Ownership settled, analytics installed on the old site, baseline recorded, two practice areas confirmed | A number to compare against, and a written scope |
| Weeks 3–6 | The site is built: home, the two practice areas, price and service information, fee earners, contact | A site that answers the questions people already type |
| Weeks 7–9 | Publication, redirects from the old pages, structured data, the technical layer | Pages that can be found rather than only reached |
| Weeks 10–13 | Questions asked before instruction, one page each, written from the fee earner's answers | Coverage of the searches nobody bids on |
The Price Transparency Pack finishes inside the first period on its own, in ten working days, which is why a firm that only needs the fee and service pages does not need the rest of this sequence.
The order is not interchangeable. Analytics installed in week seven cannot say what week one looked like, and a firm that skips the baseline spends the next year arguing about whether anything changed.
How much should a law firm spend on marketing?
In the first ninety days, less than in any quarter after it, because most of what happens is building rather than buying.
That is what a percentage-of-turnover rule gets wrong for a firm at zero: the first quarter is a fixed build, no media spend, and nothing yet worth advertising. Our published prices for it are £2,400 for the Firm Site, £4,200 for Firm Site+, £6,900 for the Authority Build, and £890 for the Price Transparency Pack on its own. Retainers are £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month with no minimum term, and £700 comes off the build when it is taken with six months of retainer.
The useful comparison is against what the same visibility costs to buy outright. Measured 3 August 2026:
| City | Practice area | Searches/mo | Cost per click |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leeds | Residential conveyancing | 1,180 | £13.80 |
| Sheffield | Residential conveyancing | 1,180 | £14.83 |
| Nottingham | Family and divorce | 1,020 | £17.18 |
A hundred Leeds conveyancing clicks is about £1,380 — arithmetic on the measured figure above, not a forecast. A firm can buy roughly a hundred clicks a month for a quarter for about what the build costs once, and own nothing at the end of it. Both are legitimate purchases. They are not the same purchase, and a firm at zero should know which one it is making.
Getting a comparable figure from anybody else is the hard part. Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, 12 published a price at all, 5 of those showed only a range, 8 claimed a guarantee of some kind, and 1 offered work with no minimum term. Three of the 40 a firm researching this in the United Kingdom is likely to land on:
| Supplier | Published a price |
|---|---|
| tealcompliance.com | Yes |
| lawfirmambition.co.uk | No |
| novicell.com | No |
We record whether a price was on the page, never what it was. 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions, and in the one jurisdiction that expects law firms to publish price information, most suppliers selling to those firms will not publish their own.
What gets built first when there is no site worth keeping?
The pages that answer a question somebody is already typing, in that order, and nothing else.
For a firm in England and Wales the first six are unusually easy to choose. The SRA Transparency Rules — in force since 6 December 2018, checked 3 August 2026 — ask for price and service information to be published for specified work types, and "how much does a conveyancing solicitor cost" is also one of the highest-intent searches in the market. The required disclosure and the page that earns instructions are the same document.
The limit is worth stating precisely. We build the pages the rules ask for. We do not judge whether a firm meets its obligations — that belongs to the firm and its COLP, and a supplier claiming otherwise is offering something it is not in a position to give. What we can say is which items are absent from a site as it stands, which is an observation rather than an assessment.
What will ninety days not produce?
Instructions attributable to the work, and anyone saying otherwise is selling.
Movement takes three to four months and cannot be judged fairly before six to nine. The first quarter looks like nothing happening: impressions climb while clicks stay flat, the signature of pages moving from position 30 toward 11, indistinguishable from failure without the underlying data. A firm that abandons the work in month three abandons it at the point it starts working.
Three further things it does not do. It does not fix capacity — a firm whose constraint is fee-earner hours gets a longer waiting list rather than more revenue. It does not fix what happens after the enquiry arrives, which sits inside the firm and is where most of the value leaks. And we do not manage ad spend, so a firm needing matters this quarter needs a paid specialist rather than this.
What this is worth where you are
In London, 2,900 people a month search for immigration, and Google charges around £18.75 for one of those clicks. We hold the same figures for 52 cities.
The free report gives you yours, plus which of the pages the rules ask for are missing from your site, and what 40 suppliers charge.
No call required. Our own prices are on that page.
Where should I read next?
If a merger or a name change is part of the picture, branding a law firm covers what survives one and what the rename costs in search.
On the channels themselves: lawyer internet marketing covers the online set as a whole and digital marketing lawyer covers how the parts fit together. Once the six pages exist, content marketing for law firm covers what to write next, and lawyer marketing tips covers what a firm can change without buying anything.
Frequently asked questions
Where does a law firm with no marketing at all start?
With ownership of the domain and hosting, an analytics property installed on the existing site to give a baseline, and a written decision on the two practice areas the firm wants more of. None of those is a marketing decision, and all three stop the work if they are skipped.
How much should a law firm spend on marketing?
Less in the first ninety days than in any quarter after it, because that quarter is a build rather than media spend. The Firm Site is £2,400 and the Price Transparency Pack £890, both fixed and published, with retainers at £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month and no minimum term.
Which pages should be built first?
Home, the two chosen practice areas, price and service information, the fee earners, and contact. In England and Wales the price and service pages are both an expectation under rules in force since 6 December 2018 and one of the highest-intent searches in the market, which is why they come early rather than last.
Do many legal marketing suppliers publish their prices?
Twelve of the 40 we read in full on 3 August 2026 published a price at all, five of those gave only a range, and one offered work with no minimum term. Of the three named on this page, tealcompliance.com published a price and lawfirmambition.co.uk and novicell.com did not.
What will ninety days not deliver?
Instructions that can be attributed to the work. Movement takes three to four months and fair judgement six to nine, and the first quarter shows rising impressions with flat clicks, which reads exactly like failure. It also does nothing for a firm whose constraint is fee-earner capacity.