Local SEO for solicitors: own the map pack in every town you serve

Why the map pack decides more legal enquiries than your website does

For a high-street practice area, a mobile search for a solicitor returns the map pack before it returns a single organic result. Three firms are shown. Everything else requires the searcher to scroll past them, and most do not.

This is why a firm can have a genuinely better website than its competitors and still lose the enquiry. The competitor is not winning on content. It is winning on being one of the three.

The three positions are decided largely by proximity to the searcher, the completeness and accuracy of the Google Business Profile, and review volume and recency. Only the last two are within your control, which is why they deserve disproportionate attention.

Reviews: the lever most firms leave idle

Review recency is weighted more heavily than total count, and this catches out established firms. A practice with sixty reviews where the newest is two years old typically underperforms one with fourteen from the last twelve months, because recent reviews evidence a currently functioning firm while old ones evidence a firm that used to be good.

Most law firms deliver good work and ask for reviews occasionally, by accident. The fix is systematic and it is mostly about timing: ask at the point the client is happiest, which is usually completion or settlement rather than invoice. That single change in timing typically matters more than anything else in the process.

Two constraints to respect. Incentivised reviews breach Google's policy and create SRA issues, so requests go to every completed matter without inducement. And in sensitive practice areas, particularly family, clients are frequently unwilling to be publicly identified. Making it explicit that first name or initials only is fine will substantially raise your response rate.

Reviews also feed AI visibility, not just the map pack, because Gemini and AI Overviews lean on Google's local signals. So this work pays into both channels at once.

Multi-office firms: one page per office, done properly

Each office needs its own substantive page, and "substantive" is the operative word. Duplicated town pages with the place name swapped are treated as spam and typically get filtered out, and because they are usually interlinked they drag down the pages that would otherwise rank.

A real office page carries that office's team with names and photographs, its address, its opening hours, the practice areas genuinely delivered from there, and local detail only someone working there would know. The test: if the page would read correctly with another town's name substituted, it should not be published.

This constrains how many location pages a firm can honestly justify, and that is the right outcome. Firms consolidating twelve thin town pages into three genuine ones routinely see all three improve.

Citations and consistency, the unglamorous half

Your firm's name, address and phone number need to agree everywhere they appear: the SRA register, Companies House, the Law Society's Find a Solicitor, Chambers, ReviewSolicitors, Google Business Profile and your own site. Contradictions read as unverifiable, and both Google's local algorithm and AI models discount organisations they cannot corroborate.

This is where legacy problems hide. Former trading names after a merger, an old office address that was never removed, a phone number changed two years ago, a practice area listed that the firm no longer offers. None of it is visible from your own website, which is why firms are usually surprised by the audit.

It is maintenance rather than setup. Details drift, directories update from stale sources, and profiles get edited by third parties. Left alone, a clean citation profile quietly undoes itself over a couple of years.

How we track it, since national rankings tell you nothing local

A single national rank position is meaningless for local intent, because the result changes with the searcher's location. A firm can appear first from its own office and be absent three miles away, which is exactly the radius its enquiries come from.

So we track by postcode grid: the same search run from multiple points across your catchment, showing where you appear and where you drop out. That produces a map of your actual visibility rather than a number, and it makes clear whether the constraint is your profile, your reviews, or simply distance.

It also tells you where a second office would genuinely change your reach, which is a more useful input to that decision than instinct.