If your website is out of date, you may as well not have one.
That sounds blunt. It’s meant to. In the legal market, your website is often the first place a potential client or lateral hire goes to form an opinion of your firm. If what they find is stale, vague, or hard to navigate, they’ll draw their own conclusions, and they won’t be flattering.
A strong online presence isn’t a nice-to-have. Firms and sets that treat their website as a one-time project are handing an advantage to competitors who don’t.
Your website is never finished
This is the mistake most firms and sets make. They invest in a new site, celebrate the launch, and then quietly forget about it. Two years later, the same partners are listed in the same practice areas with the same matter highlights from 2024.
A website needs to reflect your firm as it actually is: new members, new matters, recent news, updated expertise. If a client is doing due diligence on you and your most recent update is 18 months old, that tells them something. Not something good.
One area firms consistently overlook is the profiles of junior associates. There’s a common assumption that only partner profiles matter; that researchers and clients go straight to the top and work down. In directories terms, that assumption is costly. Researchers actively cross-reference submission content against individual profiles to verify claims, check consistency and assess the depth of a team. Bench strength is a formal ranking metric, and a team full of thin, generic associate profiles sends a signal you don’t want to send. If your partners’ profiles are polished and your associates’ read like placeholder text, researchers will notice. A strong submission can be undermined by a weak bench. Making sure every fee earner has a profile that accurately reflects their experience and expertise (no matter how limited) isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a core part of your directories strategy.
The firms with the best websites are the ones that treat it like a live document. For example, consistently updating news and insights sections with commentary on current deals, regulatory changes and market shifts. The result is a site that signals activity, expertise and relevance every time someone visits. Smaller firms can and should do the same. It doesn’t require a content team, it requires a habit.
Layout isn’t just aesthetics
Content audit quick win: audit your ten most-visited pages right now and check when each was last updated. If any are more than 12 months old, flag them for immediate review.
Think of your website like walking into a supermarket. Sainsbury’s and Waitrose sell largely the same products, but the experience of shopping in each is completely different. Sainsbury’s is packed and somewhat chaotic: offers competing for your attention from every direction, five broken self-service checkouts, and a queue for the Argos counter snaking into the cereal aisle. Waitrose feels calm and easy to navigate, with wide aisles, clear signage, and a layout that seems to anticipate what you’re looking for rather than promoting what it wants to sell. The difference isn’t accidental. It’s a deliberate choice about how the experience makes you feel, and what that feeling says about the brand.
The same principle applies online. Google’s homepage is almost entirely empty: a logo, a search bar, and nothing else competing for your attention. Yahoo’s is a wall of content, headlines, adverts and links, all clamouring for the same eyeball at the same time. Google won the market despite Yahoo’s early dominance, and a significant part of that story is what happens when you design around the user rather than around everything you want to say.
Your website works the same way. How your content is laid out determines how long visitors stay, whether they find what they’re looking for, and whether they leave with a good impression of your firm. Poor layout increases bounce rates. A good layout keeps people reading and, eventually, gets them to pick up the phone (or click the mouse).
Look at how Magic Circle firms structure their practice area pages: clear headers, concise descriptions, and prominent contact prompts throughout. Compare that to firms where the partner contact details are buried three clicks from the homepage. That gap in UX isn’t just frustrating, it costs instructions. An audit looks at this honestly. Not just whether the site looks nice, but whether it actually works.
Content audit quick win: ask someone outside your firm to find a specific partner’s contact details on your website, without telling them where to look. Time them. If it takes more than 30 seconds, your layout has a problem worth fixing. Contact details, practice area descriptions and key matter highlights should all be reachable within two clicks from the homepage.
Ranking on Google matters as much as ranking in Chambers
SEO (search engine optimisation) and the newer discipline of AEO (answer engine optimisation, which covers how AI tools like ChatGPT surface information) determine whether your firm appears when someone goes looking. Most firms underinvest in both.
The stakes here are rising. When a GC searches for “sanctions advice for financial services firms” or asks ChatGPT for a shortlist of employment law specialists in London, the firms that appear are the ones with content structured to answer those specific questions. We can name two large firms that invest heavily in this: their insights pages are written with search intent in mind, not just for existing clients who already know who they are.
The fixes for most firms are more straightforward than they think: headers and page titles that reflect real search terms, meta descriptions that actually describe the page, internal links that help search engines understand your site’s structure. None of this requires starting from scratch. It requires knowing where the gaps are. A content audit finds them.
Content audit quick win: Google your own firm as if you were a potential client who’s never heard of you. Search for the type of work you do and the city you’re based in — “restructuring lawyers London” or “planning barristers Manchester”, for example. If you’re not on the first page, your SEO needs attention. Then check whether your practice area page headers match the language clients actually use, or whether they’re written for internal audiences.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure
Traffic, time on page, bounce rates, conversion rates. These numbers tell you what’s working and what isn’t, but only if you’re looking at them. Most firms aren’t.
The value of analytics isn’t abstract. When a global behemoth relaunched its website several years ago, the process was informed by data on how visitors were actually using the old site: which pages they landed on, where they dropped off, what they searched for internally. The result was a site structured around user behaviour rather than internal assumptions about what clients want to see. The difference was measurable.
That kind of data-led approach is available to any firm willing to look at its numbers. Analytics take the guesswork out of your content decisions. Instead of assuming a page is performing well because it exists, you can see whether anyone is reading it, how long they stay, and whether they do anything afterwards.
If your firm has never sat down with its website analytics, the content audit is the place to start. The numbers are usually surprising, and the opportunities they reveal are almost always worth acting on.
Quick win: if your firm uses Google Analytics (or something similar), pull the data for your top 20 pages and look at two numbers: average time on page and bounce rate. A very low time on page means people are leaving almost immediately and the content isn’t landing. A very high bounce rate means visitors aren’t looking at any further pages on your site. Either pattern points to a page worth fixing. If you don’t have analytics set up at all, that’s the first thing to address.
What a content audit actually does
It tells you, clearly and quickly, where your website is losing you work. Not in theory, in practice: the pages that need updating, the structural changes that would improve UX, the SEO gaps costing you visibility, the content that’s informative but not converting.
The opportunity is never more content. It’s better content, in the right places, doing the right job. Of course, knowing your website has a problem and knowing how to fix it are two different things. Acting on it effectively requires knowing what good looks like across the legal market, not just on your own site. That’s where ELE comes in. We work with firms and chambers every day on exactly these issues: outdated profiles, underperforming practice area pages, copy that informs but doesn’t convert. Our legal website content writers know what directory researchers look for, what clients respond to, and what separates a website that generates instructions from one that just takes up space online. If your website isn’t working as hard as it should be, get in touch.
