SEO for professional services firms
Rankings are a means to an end. The work below is aimed at the searches that produce enquiries, and reported against that.
Get your free auditThe problem
Why most professional services sites underperform in search
Three things account for most of it. The site is slow or badly structured, so search engines struggle with pages that would otherwise rank. The content is written about the firm rather than about the problem the client has at the moment they search. And nobody has ever mapped the practice areas or service lines to the way people actually phrase things.
None of that is fixed by publishing more blog posts. It is fixed by working through the site in order: technical first, structure second, content third.
Scope
What is included
Technical audit and fixes
Crawl, index coverage, site structure, internal linking, Core Web Vitals, schema. The work that has to happen before anything else pays off.
Local search
Google Business Profile, location pages where you have real premises, and consistent name, address and phone data. One genuine page per office, not a page per town you would like to serve.
Content built on search intent
Pages that answer the question being asked, structured so the answer is extractable. This is also what gets a page quoted in an AI Overview.
Author credentials
For legal and financial content, who wrote it matters to how it is assessed. Named authors with real qualifications, not an anonymous house byline.
Digital PR and links
Coverage in your own trade press rather than generic guest posts. A mention in a legal or accountancy title is worth more than ten marketing blogs.
Monthly reporting
Enquiries, cost per enquiry, and where the traffic that produced them came from. Rankings included, but not as the headline.
Straight answers
Common questions
- How long before I see anything?
- Technical fixes can show within weeks. Meaningful movement on competitive terms usually takes three to six months, and longer in crowded markets like conveyancing. If a firm has never done any SEO, the early gains are often faster because the basics are missing.
- What does it cost?
- It depends on the size of the site, how much technical work is needed, and how competitive your practice areas are. I will give you a fixed monthly figure after the audit, not before, because quoting without looking is guesswork.
- Do I have to sign a long contract?
- No. SEO takes time to work, so I will tell you honestly how long I think it needs, but you are not locked in while you find out.
- Will you write the content?
- Yes, though the best results come when a fee earner reviews it. Their expertise is the thing that makes the page credible, and it takes them less time than you would think.
- How does this interact with AI search?
- The same structural work serves both. Clear headings, a direct answer near the top of each section, consistent business information across the web, and content that is genuinely useful. There is no separate technical trick, whatever you are being sold.
- Do you work with firms outside South Yorkshire?
- Yes. I am based in Doncaster, which helps for local work in South Yorkshire, but the sector expertise is not geographically limited and most clients are not local.
Other services
Free audit
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