The Budget Framework Solicitors Use Before Signing an SEO Contract

SEO pricing is not arbitrary. Every number an agency quotes maps back to the hours and specialist input required to move your firm up Google's rankings in a specific market. Understanding what drives cost helps you evaluate quotes accurately—and spot the ones that are too good to be true.

Practice Area Competitiveness

This is the single biggest variable. A family law solicitor in a mid-sized city competes with dozens of local firms and a handful of national brands. A personal injury firm competes with the same, plus heavily funded legal marketing operations that have been building domain authority for a decade. The more competitive the search landscape, the more content, links, and technical work are required to earn top positions—and that takes more hours and more budget.

Geographic Market

London, Manchester, Birmingham, and other high-density legal markets carry a cost premium because competition for Google's first page is intense. Regional markets and smaller towns tend to be more achievable with a leaner budget—though national firms operating from those locations still face national-level competition for non-local queries.

Firm Size and Scope

A single-office solicitor with one practice area needs a different scope than a multi-site firm serving five disciplines. More service pages, more geographic targets, more keyword clusters—each adds to the monthly workload and cost.

Starting Point

A firm with an 8-year-old site, broken technical infrastructure, and no backlinks requires a different initial investment than one with a clean technical foundation and some existing authority. Expect a higher-cost first 3–6 months if your site needs significant groundwork before ranking becomes possible.

The honest framing: SEO cost reflects the amount of competitive work required to claim first-page positions in your specific market. If a quote seems low, ask specifically what it includes—and what it doesn't.

These ranges reflect what credible agencies charge for substantive work. They are not guarantees of outcome—results depend on market, starting authority, and execution quality. Treat these as orientation benchmarks, not fixed rates.

£800–£1,500/month — Foundation Tier

Typically suited to single-practice-area solicitors in lower-competition regional markets. At this level, expect a focused scope: technical site health, one or two content pieces per month, basic local SEO, and Google Business Profile optimisation. Link building at this tier is limited. Realistic for firms that are not chasing high-volume personal injury or clinical negligence terms.

£1,500–£3,000/month — Growth Tier

The most common range for established solicitors with genuine growth ambitions. This budget supports consistent content production, active link acquisition, local and organic strategy in parallel, and more granular tracking and reporting. Firms targeting two or more practice areas, or competing in mid-size city markets, typically sit here.

£3,000–£5,000+/month — Competitive Tier

Required for solicitors competing in high-value, high-competition practice areas or major city markets. At this level, agencies run content at scale, pursue digital PR and editorial link placements, optimise across multiple office locations, and invest in conversion rate improvement alongside traffic growth. Multi-site firms or those targeting national rankings should expect to operate in this band.

One-Off Projects

Technical audits typically run £500–£2,000 depending on site complexity. Website migration support, site architecture redesigns, and content gap analyses are often scoped separately. These are worth budgeting for at the start of any engagement—they lay the groundwork that makes ongoing work more efficient.

Important: Prices below £500/month almost always involve templated content or low-quality links. For regulated firms, that carries reputational and compliance risk. This is educational guidance, not a binding price list—every engagement should be scoped individually.

Not all legal SEO is equally competitive. The practice areas that attract the highest client lifetime value also attract the most aggressive SEO spend from competing firms—which raises the bar for everyone in that space.

High-Competition Areas (Higher Budget Required)

• Personal injury — national brands, aggressive link building, and high domain authority incumbents make this one of the most competitive verticals in UK legal SEO.
• Clinical negligence — similar dynamics to PI; long-tail keyword strategies and strong content authority are essential.
• Employment law — high search volume for both claimant and respondent-side queries; competitive across major cities.
• Conveyancing — volume-driven market with significant digital marketing investment from comparison platforms and national firms.

Moderate-Competition Areas

• Family law / divorce — competitive but geographic targeting narrows the field meaningfully for local firms.
• Wills and probate — growing search volume; less dominated by national players than PI or conveyancing.
• Commercial litigation — B2B-oriented queries with different keyword patterns; often underserved from an SEO perspective.

Lower-Competition Areas

• Niche regulatory or advisory work — lower search volumes but also lower competition; quality content can perform well with a leaner budget.
• Immigration (non-asylum) — localised competition varies significantly by city.

The strategic implication: if your firm spans multiple practice areas, a tiered approach—leading investment toward highest-value, highest-opportunity terms—typically outperforms spreading budget evenly across all disciplines.

Most solicitors arrive at the pricing conversation with one or more of the following concerns. Each is worth addressing directly.

'Can't we start small and scale up?'

In principle, yes. In practice, SEO below a certain investment threshold often produces no meaningful movement—because the work required to compete is not done at half-speed, it simply isn't done. Starting at too low a budget can mean 12 months of spend with nothing to show. A better framing: identify the minimum scope that can realistically move the needle in your specific market, then budget to that floor.

'Our last agency didn't deliver'

This is common, and usually traces back to one of three causes: scope was too thin, the timeline expectation was unrealistic, or the agency was not genuinely experienced in legal SEO. The answer is not to spend less—it's to evaluate agencies more carefully. Ask for specific examples in legal verticals, ask how they measure success, and ask what happens in months one through six before rankings move.

'We get referrals—why do we need SEO?'

Referral networks are valuable. They're also difficult to scale and invisible to clients who don't have a connection to your firm. SEO captures the client who searches "employment solicitor Manchester" because a colleague recommended getting legal advice—but not a specific firm. That's a qualified prospect your referral network cannot reach. Both channels serve different acquisition paths.

'PPC is faster—should we just do that?'

Pay-per-click delivers faster visibility but stops the moment budget stops. SEO builds cumulative authority that compounds over time. Many firms run both—PPC for immediate pipeline, SEO for long-term cost-per-acquisition reduction. The comparison between the two is worth a dedicated read; the core point is that they are not directly substitutable.

The most useful question is not 'what does SEO cost?' It is 'what is a new client worth to this firm, and how many would we need to acquire through organic search to justify this investment?'

Start with your own numbers:

• What is the average fee earned from a new client instruction in your primary practice area?
• What is the realistic lifetime value if that client returns or refers others?
• How many new instructions per year would make a £2,000/month SEO retainer worthwhile?

For most solicitors working in areas like conveyancing, family law, or employment, a single additional instruction per month at average fee rates covers a mid-tier retainer. For personal injury or clinical negligence, where case values are significantly higher, the arithmetic is even more favourable—if rankings are achieved.

The critical caveat: SEO takes time. In our experience working with professional services firms, meaningful organic traffic gains typically begin to appear between months four and six, with stronger compounding effects from month nine onward. Firms that evaluate SEO on a three-month horizon consistently underestimate it. Budget should be understood as a 12-month commitment to see genuine return—not a subscription that pays dividends immediately.

For a more detailed breakdown of how to calculate ROI from solicitor SEO and what metrics to track month-by-month, see our solicitors SEO resource hub, which includes an ROI analysis framework built specifically for law firms.

If you want to explore what a realistic scope looks like for your firm's market and practice areas, see pricing for solicitor SEO services and we can give you a grounded picture of what investment makes sense before you commit to anything.