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Legal services UK Engagement completed May 2026

Thornbury & Wells: publishing again after a two-year compliance freeze.

A Manchester family and conveyancing law firm that stopped publishing content for two years over compliance concerns, and watched rankings fade accordingly.

Last updated: July 2026
+128%
Organic enquiries, 6 months
19
Practice-area pages rebuilt
#1-5
Rankings for 24 local legal terms
1
Compliance review round per page
Client overview

Thornbury & Wells is a mid-size law firm handling family law and residential conveyancing across Greater Manchester. Two years without new content, driven by an overly cautious compliance process, had let competitors overtake them for nearly every practice-area search term.

Challenges
A compliance review process so slow that publishing had effectively stopped
Practice-area pages written years ago with outdated legal guidance
No local SEO presence beyond a single head-office listing
Competitors publishing regularly and capturing the rankings Thornbury & Wells once held
SEO audit & technical issues found
Stale practice-area pages

Several pages still referenced legal guidance and fee structures years out of date.

Single-location limitation

Two satellite offices had no dedicated local presence despite handling real client volume.

Compliance bottleneck

Every draft required three rounds of partner sign-off with no standard review checklist.

Missing LegalService schema

No structured data despite clear eligibility for enhanced local legal search results.

Implementation & timeline
Week 1-2Content audit and a compliance-friendly review checklist built jointly with the partners.
Week 3-819 practice-area pages rewritten and cleared through the new streamlined review process.
Week 9-10Local pages built for both satellite offices with LegalService schema added.
Week 11-24Monthly publishing cadence established and maintained going forward.
Traffic growth
Baseline
+22%
+61%
+94%
+128%
Month 1Month 6
Keyword & ranking growth
Divorce solicitor [city]#31 → #3
Conveyancing solicitor near me#46 → #5
Family law firm [city]Unranked → #2
Residential conveyancing quote#28 → #1
Before / after
BEFORE
AFTER

"Our compliance process had quietly killed our content pipeline for two years. Samar built us a review checklist the partners actually trust, and we're publishing monthly again with rankings to show for it."

Managing Partner, Thornbury & Wells Legal
FAQ
01How do you speed up legal content review without cutting corners?

By building a checklist that flags the specific compliance risks partners actually care about, so review time goes to real issues, not rereading the whole page.

02Do you have legal writing experience?

I write SEO-optimized structure and briefs; qualified solicitors on your team review and finalize the legal substance.

03Can this work for other regulated professions, like accounting or medicine?

Yes, the same compliance-first review process applies to any regulated industry with a similar approval bottleneck.

04How do you handle multiple office locations for a professional services firm?

Each location gets its own page with local schema and location-specific proof points, similar to the multi-location approach used for other service businesses.

05What if our compliance team still wants three rounds of review?

That's workable too, the goal is a faster, clearer process, not skipping review altogether.

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Written by Samar Hayat

Technical & local SEO consultant, 5+ years working with UK, US, and Canadian clients. More about Samar →