A law firm's site is a grid: each practice area, for each office, on a page. The grid is generated, so its pages share a template, and the template is where every finding worth fixing sits. A firm with twelve practice areas and four offices has forty-eight pages that were written once and copied, and Google can tell.
The searches are 'practice + place', and they are competitive: every firm in the city wants 'employment solicitor Manchester', and the directories want it more. The page that wins is specific — this office, this team, these outcomes — and most firms' pages are the same paragraph with the town swapped, which is duplicate content that ranks for one town at most.
Measurement on a firm's site has the same shape as any services business: low volume, high value per enquiry, and the discipline to judge a page change by what the page can move — impressions and click-through rate — rather than by the month's enquiries, which move for reasons that have nothing to do with the site.
The findings that recur on this kind of site
- Practice pages that are the same for every officeThe grid rendered from one paragraph. Duplicate content across the pages that are supposed to rank locally, and the highest-value fix on most firms' sites.
- Titles that lead with the firm name'Smith Jones LLP — Employment' where the searcher typed 'employment solicitor'. The specific part should come first and the firm name last.
- Solicitor profiles with no links to what they doA page per person, each a dead end, when each should link the practice pages that person handles and be linked from them.
- Missing LegalService structured dataNo schema for the firm, its offices or its practice areas, on a site where the entity and its locations are the product.
- A news section nobody has updated'Latest news' from three years ago, thin, linked from every page's navigation, telling the crawler and the client the same thing.
What to change first, and what to compare it against
- Rewrite the practice template so each office's page is its ownThe people, the local court, the kind of matters that office sees. That is the fix that removes the largest cause, and it ranks first by impressions on nearly every firm's list.
- Hold half the grid as the controlRewrite two offices' pages, leave two, matched by traffic. A control set built from your own grid. If the rewritten ones rise and the held ones do not, the rewrite did it.
- Judge by impressions and CTR on the practice queriesEnquiries are the goal and the wrong instrument. A month's enquiries at a firm is a small number moved by referrals, season and one large matter; the page's impressions are what a page change moves.
- Ask the assistants the questions a client would'Good employment solicitor in Manchester' to ChatGPT and Perplexity, monthly, same wording. Whether you are named is a number, and who is named instead is worth more than the directory listing.
Questions from people running one
The directories outrank us for everything. Is the site worth working on?
For the head terms, the directories will often win, and a firm's site should not spend its effort there. For 'practice + place + specific matter' searches the directories are generic and a specific page wins. That is where the site earns its enquiries, and it is exactly the page the generated grid fails to provide.
Can we measure anything with so few visits?
Click-through rate and position on the practice queries, yes; enquiries, honestly, no. Expect some fixes to be recorded as landed with no clean verdict where there is nothing comparable to hold as a control. A tool that always produces a verdict on a site this size is producing some of them from noise.
Everything above is the method, usable with any crawler and a Search Console export. Rankelle runs it on a schedule: the crawl, the grouping into causes, the watch for the fix landing, the frozen control set and the verdict four weeks on — including the verdicts that say the work did nothing. One site is free, permanently, because the first verdict takes six weeks to arrive.
Try it on your own site, free
The whole audit of every website you add, no card and no expiry. Pay only when you want the proof.