What’s a piece of conventional wisdom in your industry that you think is completely wrong? What should companies do instead? And if you could only track three metrics to predict success, which would they be?
The conventional wisdom I would throw out is that rankings are the finish line. Almost every legal marketing agency sells page-one positions, and almost every law firm buys them, as if a number one ranking were the same thing as a signed client. It is not even close.
We learned this the hard way before Legalbuzz existed. Our previous business, Conveyancer Plus, was the UK's first outsourced conveyancing sales team. We handled the enquiries that marketing generated, which meant we saw what happened after the click. When we later analysed 36,463 conveyancing opportunities for our Seven Day Window report, the pattern was brutal: firms that responded the same day won 42.8% of the time, and there was a 17.6x spread in conversion between the fastest and slowest responders. A firm ranking first and replying on Monday loses to a firm on page two that calls back in ten minutes.
So what should firms do instead? Treat search and intake as one system, not two departments. Measure from the search query to the signed instruction, not from the query to the click. Fix response time before buying more traffic, because more traffic into a slow phone just produces more missed clients. And build the trust signals (regulator entries, accreditations, reviews, consistent business details) that both Google and the AI engines now use to decide who gets recommended. Our whole method sits on three words: be seen, be trusted, be chosen. Rankings only cover the first one.
If I could track only three metrics to predict a firm's success:
- Qualified enquiries per month from organic and AI search. Not sessions, not rankings. Enquiries that name the service and the location. This is the number the firm can bank.
- Same-day response rate. The share of enquiries that get a human reply within the working day. Our data says this one metric moves revenue more than any ranking change we can deliver.
- Enquiry-to-instruction conversion rate. If this is below 30%, the problem is not marketing, and we will say so before we sell more of it.
What problem did you set out to solve that others were overlooking? Was there a specific moment that convinced you it needed to be solved? And if you were starting from scratch today with no budget or brand, what would your first three moves be?
The problem we set out to solve is that law firms were being sold marketing by people who had never sold a legal service. Generalist agencies treated a conveyancing firm like a plumber with a nicer logo: more blog posts, more backlinks, a long monthly report full of SEO language, and no honest answer to the only question that matters, which is whether any of it brought in work. Meanwhile, the firms were paying for traffic that leaked out at the phone, the quote form, and the follow-up.
Two moments convinced us. The first came out of Conveyancer Plus, where we were the sales team for firms and handled their enquiries for them. Looking at the response data across 36,463 opportunities, the gap between the firms that replied the same day and the firms that replied when they got round to it was not a few percentage points; it was a 17.6x difference in conversion. Nobody in legal marketing was talking about that, because agencies get paid for the click and the firm gets paid for the instruction.
The second moment was watching AI search change the question itself. When someone asks ChatGPT or a Google AI Overview who the best settlement agreement solicitor in London is, the engine does not show ten blue links. It names two or three firms. Most firms we audited were not in that answer, and they had no idea, because no ranking tool told them. That is when the brief changed from "SEO for law firms" to "make the firm seen, trusted and chosen, wherever a client asks."
If I were starting again today with no budget and no brand, my first three moves would be:
- Publish one piece of original data before publishing anything about myself. The Seven Day Window report did more for our credibility than any service page could, because it is a number nobody else has. Data gets cited by journalists and by AI engines; opinions do not.
- Lead with a free AI visibility audit instead of a sales pitch. Show a firm, in black and white, which questions their competitors are being recommended for, and they are not. The audit does the selling. It is how we open conversations now in both the UK and Australia.
- Get one client to a documented result, then build everything on that case study. One firm, one practice area, one town, numbers the client will put their name to. A second client is far easier to win with one true story than with ten claims.
What’s the toughest trade-off you’ve had to make between quality, speed, and cost? What did you sacrifice, and why was it the right decision?
We sacrifice speed. Never accuracy, and we will spend money to protect it.
The hardest version of that was a batch of employment law content for a settlement agreements firm. The pages were written, the client was keen, and the plan said publish. During our legal review, we found two things that had moved: the tax treatment of payments in lieu of notice was being described using the pre-April 2018 position, and the time limit for bringing a tribunal claim was about to double to six months from 1 October 2026. Either one, published, would have been a page on a regulated solicitor's website giving the public wrong legal information. We held the launch, had the points corrected, and left six FAQ answers deliberately blank until the firm's solicitor had written them himself. It cost us weeks, and it cost us some goodwill in the moment.
It was the right call because in law a wrong page is not a draft; it is a liability. A client who reads it and acts on it has a complaint, the regulator has a question, and the firm's reputation, which is the thing we were hired to grow, takes the hit. No ranking is worth that.
The useful lesson is that the trade-off is often false if you design the process properly. For the same firm, we built an automated Redundancy Hub: it monitors UK redundancy announcements and publishes an employer-specific settlement agreement page within hours, from a template the solicitor approved once. By September it had 20 live pages, and not one needed a correction. Speed was safe there because the legal content was fixed and only the facts changed. Where the law itself is in the copy, a human lawyer signs it off every time, and we build that cost into every package rather than pretend it is optional.
From your experience, what’s the biggest reason projects fail? What happens when companies avoid that mistake? Have you uncovered any surprising patterns in your client data over the years?
The biggest reason a law firm marketing project fails is that nobody inside the firm owns it. The agency can write, build, and promote, but a regulated firm has to approve. When sign-off sits with a partner who is also running a caseload, pages wait six weeks for a yes, a fee earner never confirms a local claim, and the plan quietly turns into a backlog of drafts. Six months in, the firm has paid for a campaign that mostly exists in a shared drive.
The second reason is the one nobody looks for: a technical fault that has been quietly throttling the site for months. One client came to us with a sitemap that had been frozen at 160 URLs by a previous supplier while the live site had grown to 186. Googlebot had never been told that 26 pages existed. Nothing in a monthly ranking report would ever have shown that. We replaced the frozen file with a live feed and watched Google crawl pages it had never seen.
When firms avoid those two mistakes, the difference is compounding. A firm that gives us a named approver and a 48-hour turnaround gets pages live in days, which means it banks ranking history, citations, and enquiries for every month the slower firm spends in review. Because search rewards time in the index, that lead is very hard for a competitor to close later.
A few patterns from our client data that surprised us:
- Response time beats rank. Across 36,463 conveyancing opportunities, same-day responders won 42.8% of the time, and the spread between fastest and slowest was 17.6x. We now check a firm's intake before we touch its SEO.
- Google Business Profile beats location pages in small towns. One firm had 17 town pages that were not ranking anywhere, while its profile sat at number one in the local pack for solicitor searches in its home town. For most market towns, the profile is the location page; we fund it first and consolidate thin town pages into a single area hub.
- People ask different questions than firms answer. We analysed 473 real UK employment law discussions on Reddit before writing a settlement agreement FAQ. The firm wanted to explain what a settlement agreement is. The public wanted to know whether they could negotiate, how long they had to sign, and whether they could tell their colleagues. Those are the questions AI engines pull answers from.
- Most firms are still invisible on price. When we indexed 3,477 SRA-regulated conveyancing firms for our directory, we could find and verify published fees for roughly one in five, even though transparency rules require them. The firms that publish clear fixed fees get the enquiry; the others get the comparison shopper's second call, if that.
What kind of results do clients typically see within the first year? And what separates your highest-performing clients from everyone else?
Year one follows the same shape for almost every firm, because our method is a monthly cycle rather than a project: analyse, fix, build content, build buzz, report, then do it again. The first 90 days are mostly repair. We find the faults that stop a site from being read and recommended; we fix indexation, we rebuild the trust signals, and we usually rewrite every title and description on the site; for one conveyancing client that was 57 pages in month one, alongside 30 service and location pages built or rebuilt. Rankings on the firm's own name and its home town tend to firm up here, and the Google Business Profile starts doing real work.
Months three to six are when the first content silo lands and page-one positions start appearing for money terms: a conveyancing firm's fixed-fee and first-time-buyer pages, an employment firm's settlement agreement pages for its city. This is also when the firm starts being named in AI answers for the questions those pages cover. Months six to twelve are where the enquiry numbers move, because the pages have aged, the links have landed, and the firm's name is showing up in more places than its competitors'.
The numbers can already be dramatic by the six-month mark. Our clearest example is J Scott Legal, a conveyancing firm in Maidenhead: six months of this work produced 413% more monthly enquiries, 150 search terms in top positions and 687 AI mentions a month. The full breakdown is published at legalbuzz.co/case-study/jscott-legal.
What separates our highest-performing clients is not budget. It is four habits:
- They answer the same day. Or they let us fix intake first. The firms that do this convert the same traffic at multiples of the firms that do not, which is the whole point of the Seven Day Window data.
- They have one named approver with a 48-hour turnaround. Usually a partner or a practice manager with the authority to say yes. Everything compounds from there.
- They publish their fees. Fixed fees, an instant quote tool, a named solicitor on every matter. It feels exposed, and it wins the enquiry.
- They measure instructions, not rankings. Our best client set instruction targets with us rather than ranking targets, and agreed that once the firm hits them, our remit expands into the sales conversion itself. That is a growth partnership, which is what we are, not an SEO retainer.
Can you walk us through one of your most challenging client transformations? What was the problem, what changed, and what outcomes did the client achieve?
J Scott & Co Solicitors in Maidenhead is the one I would point to, because it is the clearest example of a good firm being held back by things it could not see.
The Problem
J Scott is a well-established high street firm: SRA regulated, Conveyancing Quality Scheme accredited, senior solicitors handling matters personally. On paper it should have owned its town. In practice, the website was working against it. A previous supplier had left the sitemap frozen at 160 URLs while the live site had grown to 186, so Google had never been told that 26 pages existed. Pages that did not exist were returning a 200 status instead of a 404, which teaches Google the site is unreliable. And because the site relied on prerendering to be readable, a large share of pages were being served to crawlers as empty shells. None of this showed in a ranking report. It showed as a firm with a great reputation and a quiet phone.
What Changed
We rebuilt the site and now manage it end to end. We replaced the frozen sitemap with a live feed, fixed the soft 404s, and got the pages prerendered so Google could actually read them. Then we did what the method always does. We put the firm's fees on the page, with an instant conveyancing quote and published wills and probate pricing, so that the firm is the one giving the straight answer. We built the trust wall: regulator, accreditation, lender panels, reviews, consistent business details everywhere the firm is listed. We built reverse-silo content for conveyancing, wills and probate and settlement agreements, each page owning a distinct question rather than repeating the one above it. And we built the buzz locally, with relationship links from the kinds of businesses a Maidenhead buyer already trusts.
What the client achieved
Google began crawling pages it had never seen within days of the sitemap fix. Six months in, the firm had 413% more monthly enquiries, 150 search terms in top positions and was being named in AI answers 687 times a month. It went from one practice area carrying the business to three service lines with their own pipelines, and has grown from a single high street office into a multi-office practice. The owner's conversations with us moved from rankings to capacity: how many instructions a month the firm can handle, and what happens to the sales process once it gets there. That is the transformation we are proudest of, because it changed what the firm is, not just where it ranks.
What does your quality control process look like? Is there anything you would never compromise on, even if a client requested it? And how do you manage scope creep while maintaining a strong relationship?
Quality control in legal marketing is really compliance control, so our process is built around that.
Every page we write for a firm passes through three gates before it goes live. The first is our own UK legal compliance guardrails: the SRA and CLC transparency rules, the Advertising Standards Authority rules on claims, and a banned-phrase list that strips out words like "best", "guaranteed" and "leading" unless the firm can evidence them. The second is a fact check against primary sources, because legal facts move: in 2026 alone we corrected the probate court fee to £526 after it rose in July, updated the Office of the Public Guardian fee to £92, and rewrote tribunal time limits ahead of the change to six months. The third gate is a solicitor at the firm signing the page off. Not reviewing it in passing. Signing it off, with their name attached. If a page makes a local claim, such as being near a particular court or serving a particular estate, a fee earner confirms it before publication.
Our reporting has its own rule: we report seven-day ranking averages rather than single-day snapshots, because a snapshot lets you pick the good day, and we would rather a client trust the number. Nothing goes to a client without a second person at Legalbuzz signing it off, and we audit our own contractors against the plan every month. We have ended a contract for zero delivery on a priority account before, and we would do it again.
There are things we will not do, however nicely a client asks. We will not publish a legal claim a solicitor has not approved. We will not quote fees we cannot verify or that the firm cannot honour. We will not buy or fake reviews, and we will not buy links from networks that will get the firm penalised. We will not publish AI-generated legal content without a human lawyer having read it, and we tell clients plainly where AI was used in production. In this sector, a shortcut is not a shortcut; it is a complaint waiting for a date.
On scope creep, the answer is that our method is a fixed monthly cycle with a fixed deliverable list, and every practice area is a priced module. When a conveyancing client wants to add wills and probate, or settlement agreements, that is a new module at a stated monthly price, not an extra squeezed into the existing retainer. We say yes with a number. That protects the relationship better than a quiet no or a quiet under-delivery, because the client always knows what they are getting, and the team always knows what they owe.
What does your ideal client look like in terms of mindset, readiness, and goals? On the other hand, are there any clients you would choose not to work with, and why?
Our ideal client is an owner-led law firm in the UK or Australia with one to three practice areas and a town or city it wants to own. Conveyancing, wills and probate, family, employment, immigration: the practice areas that real people search for when something has happened in their life. Size matters less than shape. A three-solicitor firm in a market town with the right habits will outgrow a 30-solicitor firm that treats marketing as something that happens to it.
In terms of mindset, the firm wants instructions, not a screenshot of a ranking. It is honest about what its phone does with an enquiry, and either answers the same day already or is willing to let us fix that first. It is prepared to be transparent about fees and to put a named solicitor on the page. In terms of readiness, it has one person who can approve a page within 48 hours and a solicitor who will read what we write. In terms of goals, it can say a number: 40 conveyancing instructions a month, 100 settlement agreements a month, a second office in a named town within two years. We can build a plan to a number. We cannot build one to "more visibility".
We turn work away in a few situations, and we say so early:
- Firms that want guarantees. Anyone promising a law firm a number one ranking is either guessing or planning to do something that will get the firm penalised. We will commit to the work and the reporting, never the position.
- Firms that want us to write around the rules. Fee claims the firm cannot honour, reviews that are not real, "specialist" claims with nothing behind them. We are measured on how many clients instruct a firm, and a regulator's letter undoes that quickly.
- Firms where no lawyer will review the content. If the firm's own solicitors will not read a page about their own practice area, the page should not go live, and we will not put a regulated firm's name on it.
- Firms in a catchment where we already act for a competitor. One firm per practice area per town. Working both sides of a local market means one client has to lose the map pack, so we would rather grow slowly than be in that position, and we tell firms early whether their patch is free.
- Firms that want month three results without month one repairs. If the site has an indexation fault or a broken quote form, that gets fixed first. A firm that wants to skip that stage is asking us to pour traffic into a bucket with a hole in it, and we would rather not take the money.
What capability are you investing in today that clients aren’t asking for yet but soon will be? And if AI automates a large portion of your industry, what human element will remain indispensable?
The capability clients are not asking for yet is measuring and managing how AI engines describe and recommend a firm. Most firms still ask us about Google rankings. In 18 months, they will be asking why ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode name three competitors and not them, and why one of those answers says they do family law when they stopped doing it in 2019. We already run AI visibility audits that show a firm, prompt by prompt, where it is cited, where it is absent, and where it is described inaccurately, and we are building the monthly monitoring and correction of that into the standard package. The trust wall we build for a firm, with 45 separate signals across regulator registers, accreditations, directories and reviews, exists largely because those are the sources the AI engines read.
The second investment is original data. Our Seven Day Window research on 36,463 conveyancing opportunities and our directory of 3,477 SRA-regulated conveyancing firms are assets that journalists cite, and AI engines pull from, which puts our clients inside the conversation rather than hoping to be found. The third is compliant automation. The Redundancy Hub we built for an employment client publishes an employer-specific page within hours of a redundancy announcement, from a template a solicitor approved once. We think every practice area has a version of that, and we are building them, with disclosure built in so a client always knows where AI was used.
If AI automates most of this industry, three human things remain indispensable. The first is accountability. AI can write a page about conveyancing; it cannot be struck off. Someone has to put their name to every claim on a regulated firm's website and answer for it, and that will be a lawyer and the agency that advised them. The second is judgement. Knowing that a tribunal time limit changes on 1 October, that a page that is technically accurate is still misleading, that a particular town will never reward a location page but will reward the Business Profile. The engines do not know which of their outputs are wrong. The third is the relationship. The estate agent who links to the firm because they know the partner, the local journalist who takes the call, and above all the client who rings the firm and gets a human who sounds like they care. Our data says that last one is worth more than any ranking we can build, and no model is going to answer the phone with empathy at 5.45 on a Friday.
How has your presence on Goodfirms influenced the way potential clients discover or evaluate your company? And what has your overall experience with Goodfirms been like?
Goodfirms matters to us for the same reason we tell every client to build their own trust wall: the people who hire us check. A managing partner or practice manager considering LegalBuzz has usually already paid one agency that did not work out, so they are not going to take our word for anything. They look for a third-party listing with verified reviews and a clear description of what we do and who we do it for. Being found on Goodfirms, with our focus on law firms and our method stated plainly, means that when a prospect arrives from our own website or an outbound conversation, they can validate what we have said somewhere we do not control. That changes the first call from "prove it" to "how would this work for us".
It also shapes how we are discovered. Firms searching Goodfirms for a legal marketing or SEO partner are comparing specialists, and the profile lets us make the case we make everywhere: we are not a generalist agency, we are measured on how many clients instruct the firm, and we have the client reviews to show it. For a business whose entire pitch is "be seen, be trusted, be chosen", being listed, verified, and reviewed on a platform like Goodfirms is us taking our own advice.
The experience itself has been straightforward. The listing and verification process is clear, the team is responsive, and the review process is rigorous enough that the reviews carry weight with the kind of buyer we want. Being named a Market Influencer on the Goodfirms Leaders Matrix for UK SEO agencies this year, on a 5.0 rating from verified client reviews, is exactly the kind of third-party evidence we tell clients to earn, so we take it seriously ourselves. We would recommend it to any specialist agency that has real client results and is willing to have them checked.
