Legal SEO services: three phases across twelve months
Legal SEO services are usually sold as a monthly figure, but the order of the work decides more than the figure does. There are 3 phases across twelve months, each of which has to be finished before the next is worth starting, and each ending in a decision about whether to continue.
Last updated: 5 August 2026
Why does the order matter more than the budget?
Because most of this work has a dependency, and work done before its dependency has to be done again.
A firm that spends £14,400 over a year — twelve months of the middle retainer, which is arithmetic on the published £1,200 figure rather than a forecast — can end that year with a site that answers the questions its clients ask, or with a set of pages that were written before anyone established which questions those were. The invoice is identical. The difference is entirely in what was done in which month.
That is an unusual claim in this market, so it is worth being concrete about the mechanism. Three specific dependencies run through the whole programme:
- A page cannot be measured against a baseline that was never recorded. If nobody wrote down where the site started, month nine has nothing to compare with.
- A page written for the wrong search has to be rewritten, not adjusted, because the search a page targets determines its structure rather than its wording.
- Depth only compounds on something that already exists. Twenty supporting pages around an area of work the firm has not established a position in produce twenty pages nobody reaches.
| Phase | Months | What it produces |
|---|---|---|
| One | 1–2 | The base, the structure decisions, and the recorded starting point |
| Two | 2–5 | The pages people search for before instructing, one area of work at a time |
| Three | 6–12 | Depth on whichever area moved, fee earners, and the material that gets cited |
What is done first, and why is it first?
The things that cannot be changed later without redoing everything built on top of them.
Two months, and almost none of it is visible to a reader. The technical base comes first — how the site renders on a phone, how fast it loads, whether the pages can be read by a crawler at all — because every page published afterwards inherits those conditions. Fixing them in month eight means the pages published in months three to seven were all published into a problem.
The structure decisions come with it, and they are the expensive ones to reverse: what the URL for an area of work will be, whether office pages sit under the offices or under the areas of work, how the internal links run. Changing a URL after a page has begun to establish itself means starting that page again.
The third item is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that decides whether any of this can be judged. Before anything is published, the current position for the searches that matter is recorded, dated, and given to the firm. Not a summary of it. The figures themselves, so that in month nine the comparison is against a record rather than a memory.
What is done second?
The pages a person reads before choosing a solicitor, released one area of work at a time rather than all at once.
Months two to five, and the sequencing inside this phase is the part suppliers usually get wrong. The tempting approach is to publish everything the firm needs in a single release. It is faster, it looks like more value for the month's fee, and it makes the result impossible to read: when thirty pages go live together and something moves, nothing tells you which of the thirty did it.
Releasing one area of work at a time costs a few weeks and buys attribution. By the end of the phase the firm knows which of its areas of work responds, which is the single most useful thing to know before deciding what phase three should contain.
The order within the phase is the firm's, not ours. It runs on what the firm wants more of, not on what has the most search volume, and those are frequently different. In Manchester, residential conveyancing runs 1,760 searches a month at around £18.57 a click, while family and divorce runs 1,200 at £25.88 — measured 3 August 2026. A firm that wants family work does not start with conveyancing because conveyancing is larger.
What is done third?
Depth where something moved, and the material that gets quoted rather than clicked.
Months six to twelve. By this point the firm has evidence about one or two areas of work, and phase three puts everything behind them: the supporting questions that surround the main page, the named fee-earner pages that turn a firm into people, and the longer material that answer engines lift from.
That last part is not decorative. Across the keyword set we measured on 3 August 2026, 863 of 1,235 keywords carry an AI Overview, and 39 of 54 of the money searches do. A page that buries its answer gets summarised without attribution, so the writing standard in phase three is different from phase two: shorter answers, higher up, in the reader's own words.
A damaging admission belongs here. Even done in this order, we cannot tell a firm which page produced which instruction. Search data shows what was found and clicked. What happened after a person picked up the telephone is recorded inside the firm or nowhere, and a supplier claiming to attribute matters to pages is describing something they cannot see.
When should a firm stop rather than continue?
At the end of any phase, and there is a specific question at each one.
| End of | The question | What "no" means |
|---|---|---|
| Month 2 | Has the base work been done and the starting point recorded and handed over? | Stop. Nothing after this is measurable |
| Month 5 | Is at least one area of work showing movement in the recorded data? | Continue only if the firm can name why not |
| Month 9 | Are the enquiries arriving the kind the firm wants? | Stop, or change area of work. Volume is not the goal |
No minimum term applies here for exactly this reason. A firm that reaches one of those gates and decides to stop should be able to, and of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, one offered work with no minimum term.
What does twelve months cost?
| What | Price |
|---|---|
| Price Transparency Pack | £890, delivered in 10 working days |
| Firm Site | £2,400 |
| Firm Site+ | £4,200 |
| Authority Build | £6,900 |
| Retainer | £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month, no minimum term |
Take £700 off a build when it is taken with six months of retainer, so a £2,400 Firm Site on that basis is £1,700. Twelve months of the middle retainer is £14,400. Both figures are arithmetic on the published prices, not a forecast of anything.
Of the 40 suppliers read on 3 August 2026, twelve published a price at all and five of those showed a range rather than a figure. Never per enquiry, per lead or per matter: LASPO 2012 section 56 prohibits referral fees in prescribed legal business including personal injury, and it binds the firm paying as well as the party being paid.
What this is worth where you are
In London, 2,900 people a month search for immigration help, 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 the site has to be rebuilt before any of this starts: solicitor website design.
If the firm needs instructions before month six: law firm ppc agency covers the faster channel.
If the decision is still which supplier: law firm seo companies.
By area of work: personal injury law firm marketing. For the wider picture: law firm marketing summit.
Frequently asked questions
What is done first in a legal SEO engagement?
The technical base, the structure decisions that are expensive to reverse, and the recorded starting point. Two months, almost none of it visible to a reader, and everything published afterwards inherits it.
Should we start with the area of work that has the most searches?
No, start with the work the firm wants more of. In Manchester, conveyancing runs 1,760 searches a month at around £18.57 a click and family runs 1,200 at £25.88, measured 3 August 2026. Volume is not the same as the work you want.
What happens in months six to twelve?
Depth behind whichever area of work moved: the supporting questions around the main page, named fee-earner pages, and the longer material answer engines quote from. Across the keyword set measured on 3 August 2026, 863 of 1,235 keywords carry an AI Overview.
When should we stop?
At the end of month two if the base and the baseline were not delivered, at month five if no area of work is moving and nobody can say why, and at month nine if the enquiries arriving are not the kind the firm wants. There is no minimum term to serve out.
What does a year cost?
Twelve months of the middle retainer is £14,400, and a £2,400 Firm Site taken with six months of retainer is £1,700 after the £700 reduction. Both are arithmetic on published prices rather than forecasts, and nothing is charged per enquiry or per matter.