Your next client is searching for a problem, not a firm

At ten o’clock on a Tuesday night, a finance director types a question into a search bar: can a landlord cancel a commercial lease for late payment? She does not type the name of a law firm. She does not yet know she needs one.

Whoever answers that question clearly in the next thirty seconds has the first claim on her trust. That is what search engine optimisation, or SEO, is for. When a client goes looking for an answer you have, yours should be the one they find.

Two searches, two jobs

Professional firms often dismiss search on the grounds that their work comes from referrals. It largely does. But watch what a referred client does next. They take the name they were given and search for it. What comes back either confirms what their contact told them or quietly undermines it: a thin profile, an article from 2019, a competitor ranking above you for your own speciality.

That is the first job of SEO. It makes sure the firm stands up to being checked.

The second job is harder and more valuable. It is being found by people who have never heard of you, because they searched for a problem and not a provider.

These are the clients no referral network reaches: the founder with no lawyer yet, the family business that has outgrown its accountant, the foreign company entering the market cold.

Clients do not search in your vocabulary The most common reason expert firms are invisible in search is that they describe their work in their own terms. The firm’s page is headed “Dismissal for misconduct”. The business owner types “can I fire someone for a Facebook post”. Both are about the same thing. Only one of them matches what was asked.

Seen this way, SEO is a discipline of listening. Keyword research, stripped of its jargon, is a record of what real people ask, in their own words, and how often. Few firms have better market research available to them, and most never look at it. It also enforces a habit that improves everything else a firm writes: start from the client’s question, and answer it plainly before adding the qualifications.

Advice is held to a higher standard Search engines treat a page about lease cancellation differently from a page about lasagne. Google’s guidelines for the people who assess its results set a higher bar for what it calls “Your Money or Your Life” topics. These include legal and financial matters, where bad information can do real harm. On those topics the guidelines look for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust.

That ought to be good news for professional firms, because it rewards the one thing they have that cannot be mass-produced: people who have done the work. In practice many firms throw the advantage away. They publish unsigned “insights” with no author, no date and no sign that a qualified person stands behind them. A named partner with credentials, a track record and a date of last review is exactly the signal those guidelines describe. An anonymous news post is not. Fewer clicks, higher stakes

The ground is also shifting. More searches now end on the results page, because an AI-generated summary has already answered the question. A Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults’ browsing in March 2025 found that people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits to a results page with an AI summary, against 15% without one. Only about 1% clicked a source link inside the summary itself.

Firms are feeling it. An analysis of 14 leading accountancy and consulting firms by the search agency Exposure Ninja, using Semrush data from June 2026, found that the number of search terms each firm ranked for had fallen by an average of 27%, and that every firm in the sample had lost ground.

It would be easy to conclude that SEO is finished. The opposite follows. A summary has to be drawn from somewhere, and the pages it draws on are the clear, specific, well-attributed ones that good SEO produces. The prize has moved from winning the click to being the source. And the readers who do still click through tend to be further along: they have read the summary and want the person behind it.

What good looks like

The technical basics matter. A site should load quickly, work on a phone and be logically organised. But those are hygiene. What separates firms is editorial, and it comes down to five habits.

Answer one real question per page. A page that tries to cover all of employment law ranks for nothing. A page that answers “how much notice must I give a senior employee” can own that question. Put a name on it. Show who wrote the piece, what qualifies them and when it was last checked.

Go deep on what you want to be known for. Ten connected pieces on one specialism do more than fifty scattered across everything the firm can do. Depth is how readers and search engines alike recognise a specialist.

Keep it current. The law moves. An article that was right in 2021 and is wrong today is worse than no article, both for the reader and for the firm’s risk.

Measure enquiries, not rankings. First position for a phrase nobody types is vanity. Ask which pages people read before they got in touch, and write more like those.

The asset that keeps working

An advertisement stops working the day the budget stops. A good answer to a real question keeps being found, month after month, for as long as it stays true. Very little else in a marketing budget can compound like that.

The finance director has already typed her question. Somebody is going to answer it.