Marketing strategy for a law firm: choosing where to compete

A marketing strategy is the list of practice areas you will not compete for. In Leicester, immigration runs at 720 searches a month and £5.55 a click while personal injury runs at 40 and £11.28. Strategy is deciding which of the 7 areas to leave alone.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What does a marketing strategy actually decide?

What the firm stops doing, in writing, with names against it.

Almost every document sold as a law firm marketing strategy is a list of activities to take up. That is a plan, and it decides nothing: any firm can already list more worthwhile activities than it has hours for. The undecided question is which areas of work the firm competes for and which it concedes.

Concession is not withdrawal. A firm can accept instructions in an area, do the work well, and still decide not to spend money or publishing hours being found in it. Firms routinely make only the first of those two decisions.

A damaging admission: this page argues for buying less from us. A firm that concedes four of its seven areas needs a smaller build and fewer pages than one that competes in all seven, and we would rather write that than sell the larger scope and watch it go unread.

The output is one paragraph in the firm's plan: the areas we compete in, the areas we concede, and the date we look again.

How do you tell an area to compete in from one to concede?

Three tests, and an area has to pass all three.

1. Depth. Two fee earners can carry the work, not one. An area resting on a single person cannot absorb an increase in enquiries and will not survive that person leaving.
2. Repeat evidence. The firm already receives instructions in it without advertising — referrals, returning clients, another professional sending work. Search adds to an existing route far more reliably than it creates one.
3. A market you can be a real share of. This is the one the figures answer.

Measured 3 August 2026 across twenty UK cities. Read the bottom rows as a buyer. Leicester employment work is 30 searches a month: whatever the firm does, that market is thirty people. Personal injury is 40 at £11.28, so a whole month bought outright is about £451 — arithmetic on the two columns, and it gives the ceiling rather than the return.

Immigration is the opposite shape. 720 searches at £5.55 is roughly £3,996 to buy a whole month, and a firm with two immigration fee earners and existing referrals into it has a case for competing that no adjective could have made.

An area failing test 1 or test 2 is conceded whatever the figures say. The figures only ever rank the areas that already passed.

Why does the same practice area get a different answer elsewhere?

Because the price of the click is local, and it moves by more than most firms expect.

Same date, same method. Employment work is 30 searches a month in Leicester and 720 in Glasgow. Criminal defence costs £16.23 a click in Leicester and £4.34 in Glasgow, for slightly more demand.

The tests are portable. The order they produce is not, which is why a strategy copied from a firm in another city is worthless.

Where does the firm's existing strength actually come from?

The instruction record, read backwards, not a keyword tool.

Take the last two years of opened matters and sort them by area of work and by how each one arrived. The areas that produce repeat work and professional referrals are the areas with a foundation under them. A tool can tell you what is searched; only the file can tell you what the firm already converts.

Two things usually surprise people. The area partners talk about most is often not the area producing repeat work, and a marginal-looking area often turns out to arrive steadily from a single referrer worth protecting.

What does conceding an area look like in practice?

Four things, and deleting the page is not one of them.

• Keep one honest page saying the firm does the work, who does it, and how to make contact. A referred client still looks the firm up, and a missing page reads as the firm having stopped.
• Stop publishing into it. No new pages, no answered questions, no paid clicks. That is the whole saving, and it is mostly hours rather than money.
• Decide the referral position for work the firm would rather not take. Any arrangement involving a payment must be checked against LASPO 2012 section 56, which prohibits referral fees in prescribed legal business including personal injury and binds both the payer and the payee. That check is the firm's, not a marketing supplier's.
• Write the reversal condition. The area is reconsidered if a second fee earner joins it or the referral route dries up in an area you kept. Without that line, a concession becomes permanent by accident.

The SRA Transparency Rules came into force on 6 December 2018 and expect price and service information for specified work types, checked 3 August 2026. A conceded area may still be one the firm publishes about. Which services fall within scope is a matter for the firm and its own advisers, and it is decided separately from any of the above.

What does this decision not settle?

Three things, and they are the ones people expect a strategy to answer.

It does not say what to publish, in what order, or who writes it. It does not price the work. And it produces nothing this quarter.

Our own prices, for the build that follows: £890 for the Price Transparency Pack over ten working days, £2,400 for the Firm Site, £4,200 for Firm Site+, £6,900 for the Authority Build, retainers at £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month with no minimum term, and £700 off a build taken with six months of retainer. Of 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, twelve published a price and one offered work with no minimum term. We never charge per enquiry, per lead or per matter, and we do not manage ad spend, so the click prices above are Google's rather than ours.

What this is worth where you are

In Leicester, 720 people a month search for an immigration solicitor, and Google charges around £5.55 for one of those clicks, measured 3 August 2026. 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.

Get the report →

Where should I read next?

Once the areas are chosen, the execution questions start here: website design law firm and lawyer firm marketing.

If the constraint is enquiries rather than positioning: lead generation for law firm.

If the answer turns out to be identity rather than selection: law firm branding agency.

If the firm sells to other firms rather than to the public: marketing to solicitors.

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