How Does Schema Markup Help Solicitor Websites Rank?
The individual solicitor is the most underused markup opportunity in this sector. Firms describe the organisation to a machine then stop, when the people are the thing a client is actually choosing between.
What Schema Actually Does
Structured data describes a page to a machine in terms it can use. It says this string is an address, this person holds this qualification, this office belongs to that firm.
What it does not do. Make a page rank.
Markup on a page with nothing to say leaves a well described page with nothing to say. It is a labelling exercise rather than a ranking factor. Stating that first is the only reason the rest of this guide deserves belief.
What it also does not do. Guarantee any particular appearance in results.
Marking something up makes it eligible for certain treatment. Whether that treatment is applied is decided elsewhere. The work is technical enough to sound decisive, which makes it easy to oversell.
What it genuinely earns. Being understood accurately.
A search engine that understands your firm has four solicitors with distinct qualifications working from two offices can treat it that way. For a law firm that is worth more than it is for most businesses, because the credentials are real, which is where block three goes.
What A Firm Can Legitimately Mark Up
Six categories, all of which describe things that are true and checkable. The word legitimately is doing work here, because block seven deals with what firms mark up that is not.
The organisation itself. The firm as a legal services business. Name, address, telephone number, regulatory details, the profiles it maintains elsewhere.
Each office as its own entity. Block five. The largest technical win for a multi office practice.
Practice areas as services. The work the firm offers, described so it connects to the pages actually doing that work. Block four covers where this goes wrong.
The people. The block that earns this page, which almost nobody does.
Published guides as articles. With an author attached, the connection our EEAT guide calls the strongest signal a firm has.
Questions genuinely answered on the page. With the emphasis on genuinely, per block six.
What the six share. Each is a statement of fact somebody could check.
That is the test for anything else a supplier proposes. If an assertion could not be verified, it does not belong in the markup.
Marking Up The People
This is the strongest match in the sector between what structured data can describe and what a client is actually deciding. Almost no firm does it, which is the opportunity.
What a client chooses between. Not firms. People.
Somebody comparing three practices is comparing the person who will handle their matter. That is what they read, what they remember, what a referral gave them a name for.
What can be described. Four things, all factual.
Who they are, as a named person with a job title rather than a role in a list.
What they are qualified in, including admission, which is on a public register per our EEAT guide.
Which practice areas they work in, connected to those service pages rather than stated in isolation.
Which office they belong to, connecting the person to a place per block five.
Why this is unusually strong here. Every element is verifiable. In most sectors describing a named expert asserts something nobody can confirm. Here it describes a person on a register, so the markup and the reality agree.
What it requires first. A page for each solicitor.
Markup describes what exists. A firm with no individual pages has nothing to describe, so this follows the pages rather than substituting for them.
Practice Area And Service Markup
Describing what a firm does is plainly useful. Describing everything a firm could conceivably do dilutes it to nothing, which is the failure mode here.
How it should work. Each service connected to the page doing the work.
A practice area described in markup should point at a real page covering that area, with a named solicitor attached and the cost information where it exists. The markup then reinforces something rather than asserting it alone.
Where firms over-describe. Listing every service the firm is capable of providing.
A practice with genuine depth in four areas, marking up fourteen, has told a machine it is a generalist. That is the same error our EEAT guide identifies in the visible content, repeated in the markup where nobody thinks to look for it.
Dilution costs the signal for the four areas that matter. Ten extra services do not add ten small advantages. They reduce the clarity of the four the firm wants.
The rule. Mark up what the firm wants more of, matched to pages that exist.
If there is no page, there is nothing to describe. If the firm does not want the work, describing it invites enquiries it will decline.
Multi Office Firms
A practice with three offices frequently appears in search as one business at one address. The cause is almost always that the site describes the firm rather than the offices.
The decision, rather than the code. Each office is its own entity.
What each has to carry distinctly. Four things.
Its own address, being the actual premises rather than the head office repeated.
Its own opening hours, which frequently differ.
Its own telephone number, where the office has one.
The people who sit there, connecting block three to a location.
Why firms get this wrong. The site was built around the firm as one thing.
One contact page listing three addresses gives a search engine one business with an ambiguous location. Three office pages, each describing one office, give it three.
The connection that completes it. Each office entity matched to the business profile for that office.
The markup and the profile should describe the same premises with the same details. Where they disagree, the disagreement is the problem rather than either one individually. The profile side of this sits in our Google Business Profile guides.
Questions On The Page
Marking up questions is the most likely of these to change how a result looks. It is also the one with a rule attached that firms break without noticing.
The rule. The questions must genuinely be on the page, visible to a person reading it.
What it can produce. Questions appearing beneath a result, giving the firm more of the space.
For a practice area page answering what somebody actually asks before instructing, that is worth having. It is not guaranteed, per block one.
Why marking up absent questions is pointless. The markup is checked against the page.
Describing content a visitor cannot see does not produce the result. It produces a mismatch, so the effort earns nothing at all.
Why it is also a risk. Because it is a false statement about the page.
The markup asserts that this page answers this question. Where it does not, the firm has published something untrue about its own website. In a regulated profession that is a worse position than in most sectors, which block seven takes further.
What to do instead. Write the answers, then describe them.
The questions worth answering are the ones asked before anybody instructs. Those belong on the page whether or not anything is marked up, so the markup follows the writing rather than replacing it.
What Must Never Be Marked Up
Structured data is an assertion about reality. Everything in it is a statement the firm is making. Six things must never appear in it. The list is not negotiable.
A rating nobody gave. Invented, estimated or carried over from a previous site.
An aggregate score collected from nowhere. A number with no reviews behind it. Also reviews gathered elsewhere and presented as the firm's own.
A success rate. In any form, for any practice area.
An outcome. Results achieved, cases won, matters resolved favourably.
A compensation figure. Amounts recovered, whether as a total, an average or an example.
A price that is not the real price. A rounded figure, an aspirational one or a number that has not been reviewed since the site was built.
Why this is worse here than elsewhere. Because of what the firm is.
A false assertion in structured data is a serious problem on any website. On the website of a regulated professional practice, it is a statement the firm has published about itself that is not true, in a machine readable form, permanently.
Our own position. We do not implement any of the six, for any firm, in any circumstances.
The pages we build in this cluster carry no rating, outcome or price markup at all. This is general information rather than legal or compliance advice.
What It Does And Does Not Change
Worth setting the expectation precisely, because this is where most disappointment with structured data comes from.
What it does. Two things, both real.
It helps a machine understand the page accurately. Which people exist, which offices exist, which work belongs to whom.
It can affect how a result is displayed. Questions beneath a listing, a firm shown with its details assembled correctly.
What it does not do. Compensate for a page nobody wants.
Markup on a thin practice area page produces a well described thin page. The description was never the problem.
Where the disappointment comes from. Expecting the second thing to follow from the first.
Understanding a page accurately does not make it the best answer. If three firms cover the same area and yours has least to say, describing yours precisely leaves it third with better labelling.
The right way to think about it. Structured data removes ambiguity rather than adding merit.
It is worth doing because ambiguity costs a firm real visibility, particularly across multiple offices and people. It is not worth doing instead of having something to say.
How We Implement It
The pages first, then the markup. Per block three. Individual solicitor pages, office pages and practice area pages have to exist before anything can describe them.
One consistent description of the organisation. Defined once, applied identically everywhere, per block ten.
Each office as its own entity, matched to its business profile.
Each solicitor described properly, connected to their practice areas and their office.
Then the two connections firms miss. The transparency information and the people.
The transparency content. Where a firm publishes price and service information, the markup should point at the real page carrying it rather than restating figures separately.
Two sources for the same price is a problem waiting to happen, which our compliance guide deals with in full.
The people connection. Every guide attributed in markup to the solicitor who wrote it, with their page describing them properly.
What we treat this as. Not a technical afterthought.
It is the machine readable version of the argument in our EEAT guide, so it is built alongside the people and transparency work rather than added at the end by somebody who has not read either.
Common Mistakes
Four errors account for most of the broken structured data we find on firm websites. Three are carelessness. One is a decision somebody made.
The same organisation described inconsistently on every page. The most common by a wide margin.
A slightly different name here, an old address there, a telephone number that changed two years ago. Each page asserts something marginally different about the same firm, so none of it is reliable.
Invented ratings. Per block seven, usually inherited rather than chosen.
A previous supplier added them, nobody reviewed it. The firm has been publishing an untrue statement about itself ever since without knowing.
Markup contradicting the visible page. Prices in the markup differing from prices on the page, services listed that the page does not mention, questions described that are not there.
Where the two disagree, the visible page is what a person sees. The markup is then wrong twice over.
Copying another firm's markup wholesale. The decision somebody made.
It happens more than it should, because markup is public and copying it is trivial. The result is a firm asserting another practice's details, occasionally including their regulatory information, which is a considerably more serious problem than a technical error.
Clients choose people,
not firms.
Most firms describe the organisation to a machine then stop. The individual solicitor is the strongest match in this sector between what markup can describe and what a client is actually deciding. Almost nobody does it.
What is included every month:
£350 per month, one target area. No setup fee, nothing billed separately.
Ten guides.
One sector.
This guide covers structured data. The rest of the series covers the whole picture, credentials and trust, the compliance argument, comparison websites and five practice areas.
