What to Expect When Working With BSD Legal Marketing

We don’t start a new relationship by deciding how many articles we’re going to write or putting every law firm onto the same marketing plan.

Before we recommend anything, we want to understand the firm, where its work currently comes from and, most importantly, what it actually wants to achieve.

Some firms come to us because they need more enquiries generally. Others are already generating plenty of work but want more of a particular type. We also work with firms that want to launch a new department, reduce their reliance on purchased leads or referrals, improve the quality of the enquiries they’re receiving or develop their presence in a new location.

What we recommend depends on the answer.

Ready to transform your legal business?

1. We start by understanding where you are now

Our first conversation is usually about what’s happening within the firm rather than SEO.

We want to understand what areas of law you cover, which ones currently generate work and where those clients are coming from. We’ll also ask what types of matters you actually want more of.

That distinction is important. A family law firm might tell us it wants more family enquiries, for example, but after speaking to them we might find that it specifically wants more privately funded financial remedy and high-value divorce work rather than increasing enquiries across every family law service.

We also want to know how quickly the firm wants to see results.

SEO for law firms can be a very effective long-term source of enquiries, but it takes time to build visibility. If a firm has just recruited two solicitors into a new department and needs to start generating work relatively quickly, waiting several months for organic rankings to develop might not be realistic. In that situation, we might recommend PPC alongside the longer-term SEO work.

That first conversation helps us understand the commercial objective before we start looking at keywords.

2. We discuss the budget

Budget is part of the conversation from the beginning.

We’d rather understand what a firm is comfortable investing before we produce a marketing plan that bears no relation to its available budget.

We also look at the overall marketing spend rather than simply our own fees. If PPC is likely to form part of the strategy, for example, we need to consider the advertising budget alongside the cost of managing the campaign and the wider SEO and content work.

Knowing the budget also helps us prioritise.

Most law firm websites have plenty that could be improved, but trying to tackle everything at once isn’t always sensible or necessary. We’d rather identify the changes that are likely to have the greatest impact and concentrate the budget there first.

3. We audit the website and establish a baseline

Once we understand what the firm wants to achieve, we go away and do the research.

This normally includes keyword and competitor research alongside an audit of the existing website. We’ll look at current search visibility, which pages are already performing, where competitors are appearing, gaps in the firm’s content and any technical issues that could be holding the website back.

Importantly, we also establish a baseline before we start making changes.

We want to know how the website is performing now so that three or six months later we can show what’s actually changed.

Depending on the campaign, that could include current organic traffic, rankings for commercially important searches, performance of priority service pages, enquiries and conversions. Where relevant, we’ll also look at local search visibility and how the firm is appearing in newer AI-generated search results.

It also stops us from changing things unnecessarily. Sometimes we’ll find an existing page is already performing well and needs improving rather than replacing.

4. We build a three-to-six-month plan

We then come back to the client with what we think should happen next.

For example, imagine a law firm tells us it wants to grow its privately funded family department. It particularly wants financial remedy, divorce and complex children work, and because it has recently recruited additional fee earners, it would like to start generating more enquiries fairly quickly.

Our research might show that the firm’s main family page already performs reasonably well, but the more specific service pages are weak. It may have almost no visibility for financial remedy searches in the locations it serves, while several competitors have dedicated pages and supporting content around those subjects.

At the same time, our website audit might identify slow page speeds, poor internal linking and important pages that aren’t being indexed properly.

We wouldn’t respond by simply producing eight generic family law articles.

The first few months might instead involve fixing the technical issues, improving the existing family pages, creating dedicated pages around the work the firm particularly wants, strengthening relevant location pages and publishing supporting content that builds authority around those services.

If the firm needs enquiries sooner, we might also recommend a targeted PPC campaign for selected services while the organic visibility develops.

That’s what we mean when we talk about having a strategy. The work should relate back to what the firm told us it wants to achieve.

5. You get a content plan, but content isn’t the whole strategy

Our plan will usually include a content plan so the client can see what we’re intending to work on and why.

Depending on the campaign, this might include new service pages, location pages, articles, existing page rewrites or other content. We’re increasingly considering both traditional search and visibility within AI-generated search results when deciding what needs to be created or improved.

But we don’t believe SEO means simply publishing more articles.

The initial audit might identify technical SEO changes, site speed problems, indexing issues, internal linking opportunities, weak page structures or problems with the user experience.

We will prioritise those alongside the content rather than continuing to add pages to a website that has more fundamental problems.

6. We want to know what happens to the enquiries

This is probably one of the most important parts of the way we work.

Analytics can tell us that traffic has increased. Search data can tell us that rankings have improved. Neither can necessarily tell us whether the person who completed an enquiry form was somebody the firm actually wanted as a client.

This is why we encourage our clients to tell us what is actually coming through.

We want to know how many enquiries they’re receiving, what people are enquiring about, whether they’re the right types of matters and, where possible, how many are going on to become clients.

This doesn’t need to create another complicated administrative task. We can work with clients to keep a relatively simple record of information such as:

Date | Type of enquiry | Source, if known | Suitable? | Instructed? | Matter type/value where appropriate

Over time, that information can be extremely useful.

We might discover that one page attracts relatively little traffic but consistently produces good-quality instructions. Another might attract considerably more visitors and enquiries but very few of them are suitable.

If we only looked at traffic, we’d potentially make the wrong marketing decision.

7. We also look at conversion problems

If a client tells us they’re receiving plenty of suitable enquiries but very few are becoming matters, that’s something we want to know too.

The immediate answer isn’t necessarily to generate even more leads.

There could be an issue elsewhere in the journey. How quickly are new enquiries being contacted? Is the enquiry form too complicated? Are potential clients getting the information they need? Is there a particular point at which people tend to disappear?

We can look at the website and enquiry journey to identify possible barriers and make recommendations around conversion.

We also find the client’s feedback particularly valuable here because they are speaking to the enquiries. They can tell us things that Analytics can’t.

Ultimately, we don’t just want to know whether we’ve generated a lead. We want to understand whether we’re helping to generate the right opportunities for the firm.

8. We meet every month

We hold monthly meetings with our clients so that we can discuss what has happened rather than simply sending a report and disappearing for another month.

We will provide an update on the work we have completed and what we’re seeing from the website, including traffic, rankings, enquiries and other relevant performance information, but we also want the client to update us.

They might tell us that a particular department is suddenly at capacity, that enquiries for one service have increased considerably or that they’ve recruited somebody and now want to develop another area of work.

Marketing shouldn’t operate separately from what’s happening within the business.

Those conversations allow us to adjust what we’re doing rather than blindly following a six-month plan that no longer reflects the firm’s priorities.

9. We carry out a 90-day review

At around the three-month point, we take a more detailed look at performance against the baseline we established at the beginning.

Three months isn’t necessarily long enough to achieve every SEO objective, particularly in competitive areas of law. But it is enough time to start looking at what’s changing and whether the campaign is moving in the right direction.

We can compare where the website started with where it is now.

Are priority pages gaining visibility? Have important rankings improved? Is relevant traffic increasing? Are more people reaching the services we’ve been concentrating on? Have enquiry volumes changed? What have we learned about the quality of those enquiries?

We can also look at what’s performed better or worse than expected.

That information then feeds into the next stage of the strategy.

Rather than automatically repeating the first three months of activity, we can decide what deserves more attention, what needs changing and whether there are new opportunities we should be pursuing.

10. The plan can change

We generally plan our work over three to six months because SEO and content need consistency, but the plan isn’t set in stone.

If something works particularly well, we may want to build on it. If something isn’t producing the results we expected, we want to understand why.

And if the client’s priorities change, the marketing may need to change with them.

A department might reach capacity sooner than expected. A firm might recruit a new solicitor and suddenly want to develop another practice area. We might discover through enquiry data that a service we hadn’t originally prioritised is generating particularly valuable work.

That’s why the ongoing relationship is important. The more we understand about what’s actually happening within the firm, the better decisions we can make about where its marketing budget should go next.

What does the process look like?

In simple terms, working with BSD generally follows this process:

Discovery → Website Audit & Baseline → Research → 3–6 Month Strategy → Implementation → Monthly Reviews → 90-Day Performance Review → Next Priorities

The exact work within that process will be different for every firm.

One client might need a substantial content and SEO programme. Another might need PPC immediately alongside longer-term SEO. Another may already have excellent content but need technical work and better conversion from its existing traffic.

We don’t expect law firms to come to us knowing which of those things they need.

What results can this approach produce?

A recent example is our work with Clerk & Counsel.

When we started working on the project, it was a completely new legal business without an existing website or established source of organic traffic. Because we were involved from the beginning, we were able to think about the work it wanted to generate before deciding how the website should be structured.

We built the website around those searches and followed the launch with an ongoing SEO and content strategy. Social media was used alongside this to reach a completely different audience and help Clerk & Counsel develop its panel of barristers.

Within a few months of launching in June 2026, the website had grown to more than 2,000 visitors in a month and was generating around five to six enquiries per day, without using paid advertising.

This is not to say every campaign will produce the same results or follow the same timescale. It does demonstrate why we prefer to start with what the business is trying to achieve and build the marketing around it.

Working with BSD Legal Marketing

You don’t need to come to us knowing whether you need SEO, PPC, 20 articles, a new website or a particular number of location pages. It’s our job to work that out.

We start with much simpler questions:

What work are you getting now?

What work do you want more of?

How quickly do you want it?

And what budget do we have to work with?

We then research the market, look at what your competitors are doing, audit the website and establish where you’re starting from.

From there, we develop a plan for the next three to six months, implement it and monitor what actually happens. And we don’t just want to see the graph going up.

We want to know whether the phone is ringing, what people are asking for and whether those enquiries are turning into the type of clients your firm actually wants.

That’s ultimately how we decide whether the marketing is working.