SEO
SEO for law firms
Practice-area pages and the slow content work that compounds over six to twelve months.
Services · Web Design
What does a custom law firm website actually cost in 2026?
$3,500 one-time: five pages designed from a blank Figma canvas, original copy in your firm's voice, WordPress with your choice of editor, AEO architecture from day one, full code and domain ownership. The industry range for the same scope runs $1,500 to $50,000. The number isn't the differentiator — what's in it for that number is.
Why custom matters
"Custom" is the most abused word in legal marketing.
Pull up three personal injury firms in Tampa. Same hero treatment, same drone shot of a downtown skyline tinted gold. Same H1 pattern: "Aggressive. Experienced. Results." Same testimonial carousel scrolling past five generic quotes. Same "Areas of Practice" grid at the second fold. That's what the legal-marketing industry calls "custom design," and Google's helpful-content updates have been quietly demoting it for two years.
Real custom starts with how you actually answer the phone, what you actually say on intake calls, what you actually charge, and what makes the firm down the block a lousy substitute. The site that comes out reads like it was built for that firm in that city, not for any PI firm anywhere with the name swapped in at the end. That's the work. That's what $3,500 buys.
Template vs bespoke
Same five pages. Two completely different builds.
Illustrative, not real firms. Left is the template most "custom" legal sites actually are: a theme with the colors swapped and the same skyline hero every firm in the metro is running. Right is what gets designed from a blank canvas. The page count is identical. What sits inside it isn't.
Stock skyline hero — "Aggressive. Experienced. Results."
- Theme licensed once, resold to 400 firms
- Generic stock copy, no real schema
- Visibly identical to three competitors
- Agency keeps the CMS, hosting, and domain
Designed for your firm, your city, your intake
- Built from a blank Figma canvas
- FAQPage + LegalService schema on every page
- WCAG 2.1 AA, PageSpeed 90+ at launch
- Code, domain, and accounts all yours
What's included
Five pages. Bespoke design. Yours to keep.
Every Launch build includes everything below. No upgrade required for the basics. Pair with SEO, AEO, or Digital PR & Attorney Branding on the Launch + Grow retainer when you're ready to push past the foundation.
01
5-page bespoke design
Home, About, two practice-area pages, Contact. Designed from a blank Figma canvas, not a theme with the colors swapped. One revision round scoped to design changes (the design changes, not "let's start over"). Mobile-first. Real client photos preferred. We'll help brief a local photographer if you don't have any yet. See a finished example built for one vertical: our personal injury page.
02
WordPress, editor of your choice
No proprietary CMS. No platform lock-in. Pick Divi, Elementor, or the WordPress block editor at kickoff. We walk through the trade-offs (editing workflow, plugin dependencies, long-term maintainability) and the choice goes in the scope of work. Any WordPress developer in the world can maintain the result. You can edit it yourself between builds; the visual editors are built for non-developers.
03
AEO architecture from day one
Every page is built answer-first: conversational Q&A blocks on practice-area pages, written so ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can pull a clean answer about who you are, where you practice, and what you charge. FAQPage and LegalService schema sit underneath to keep it machine-readable and consistent. The goal is your firm cited instead of Wikipedia or the firm down the block — and per Google's 2026 guidance, the content is what earns that, not the markup.
04
Code, domain, and accounts all yours
WordPress site, fully exportable. Domain in your registrar. Google Business Profile under your Google account. Hosting under your name on a vendor you choose. If you can't answer "who owns my law firm's website" off the top of your head right now, that's the trap. Most agencies own the CMS, the hosting, and the configuration by default. We don't. Walk away whenever; take everything with you.
How we do it
21 days. No surprises.
The three-week timeline applies to every Launch build. Same schedule, same scope, same ship date. Industry standard for a custom law firm website is 8 to 16 weeks. We don't think that's necessary, and we run the process to prove it.
FirmForte Launch, kickoff to live 21 days · every build
Industry standard for the same scope 8–16 weeks
wk 0wk 4wk 8wk 12wk 16
W1
Discovery
90-minute kickoff. Brand voice doc. Content drafts for every page, written in your tone, bar-rule reviewed against ABA Model Rule 7.1 and your state's variation. Editor choice (Divi, Elementor, or the WordPress block editor) locked into the scope of work.
W2
Design
Full-page designs in Figma. One revision round, scoped to design changes (not "let's start over from a different direction"). Sign-off Friday so week three starts on schedule.
W3
Build & launch
WordPress build with your chosen editor. Schema on every page. PageSpeed past 90 before launch. WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility check. Bar-rule pass on final copy. DNS cutover. 30-minute training session walking through how to make edits yourself.
+
30 days post-launch
30 days of post-launch support included. Bug fixes, minor copy tweaks, anything part of getting the new site stable. After that, ongoing work moves to Launch + Grow or stays on demand at standard hourly rates.
Pricing, top to bottom
$3,500 flat. Here's where that sits in the industry.
FirmForte Launch is $3,500 one-time. No retainer required. If you want ongoing SEO and AEO work after launch, Launch + Grow adds $1,750 a month on top of the build, cancel after month 3. No 12-month minimums. The honest context for where that price lives, based on what competitors publish on their own pricing pages in May 2026:
01
Template builds — $1,500 to $5,000
Pre-built theme with colors and photos swapped. Generic stock copy. No real schema, no entity work, basic SEO at best. Examples: Justia's standard tier, low-end freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork. Visibly identical to every other firm in their portfolio. Fine if the firm has no marketing ambitions and just needs a placeholder.
02
Mid-tier agency — $5,000 to $15,000
Light custom on the homepage, template subpages, basic SEO setup. Timelines run 6 to 12 weeks. Examples: PaperStreet Essentials ($3,000 first-year), PaperStreet Plus ($9,500+), The Modern Firm Simple tier. Solid quality at the price; not "custom" in the sense most lawyers think when they hear "custom."
03
Premium agency — $15,000 to $50,000+
Full custom design and dev, dedicated account team, longer timelines, deeper SEO scope. Examples: PaperStreet Custom ($15,000 to $25,000), PaperStreet Enterprise ($40,000+), Scorpion, Justia Premium. Most of the gap above $15,000 is project management overhead and account-team layers, not design quality.
04
FirmForte Launch — $3,500 flat
Real custom design from a blank Figma canvas. AEO architecture on every page. Code, domain, and accounts stay yours. 21-day delivery, fixed. Same scope and design quality you'd get from a mid-tier $10K to $15K build, priced at the level a flat team running a tight process can sustainably ship.
The honest read: at the top end you're paying for billable account-team hours and 12-to-16-week timelines. At the bottom end you're paying for a theme with your colors. The middle is wide open, and that's where Launch sits. Full pricing across all four FirmForte tiers (Audit + Fix, Launch, Launch + Grow, Multi-Attorney) lives on the pricing page.
Common questions
About law firm website design.
If your question isn't here, drop it in the audit form below. We answer everything within a business day.
Industry pricing runs $1,500 to $50,000-plus for nominally the same scope. Template builds (Justia standard, Fiverr or Upwork freelancers) are $1,500 to $5,000. Mid-tier agency builds with a custom homepage and template subpages are $5,000 to $15,000 (PaperStreet Essentials starts around $3,000 first-year, PaperStreet Plus starts at $9,500). Premium custom agency builds (PaperStreet Custom and Enterprise, Scorpion, Justia Premium) run $15,000 to $50,000-plus. FirmForte's Launch tier is $3,500 flat for a five-page custom build with AEO architecture, 21-day delivery, code and domain stay yours. The gap above $15,000 is mostly account-team overhead and longer timelines, not design quality.
Most legal-vertical agencies quote 8 to 16 weeks for a custom build. PaperStreet's Essentials tier ships in about 2 weeks; their Custom tier takes 12 weeks or longer. The Modern Firm doesn't publish a timeline at all. FirmForte's Launch tier is 21 days from kickoff to live, on every build. Same schedule, same scope, same ship date. If we miss the date, you don't pay for the slip.
Custom, from a blank Figma canvas. The hero, the section layouts, the type system, the spacing, all designed for your firm specifically. WordPress is the underlying platform and you pick the editor on top (Divi, Elementor, or the WordPress block editor), but the design that ships on top of it is yours, not a theme. The honest test: if you can find a second law firm site that looks substantively like yours, we did something wrong.
That's AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and yes, every FirmForte build includes the architecture from day one. The part that does the work is the content: conversational, answer-first Q&A blocks on practice-area pages that state plainly who you are, where you practice, and what you charge. FAQPage and LegalService schema sit underneath to keep it machine-readable. Google's 2026 guidance is clear the markup isn't required to get cited, so we treat it as hygiene rather than the lever. Ranking in Google is a six-to-twelve-month compound. AI citations show up faster, usually inside ninety days for firms with a clean entity footprint and no competitor already dominating the query.
Every Launch build ships with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility (keyboard navigation, alt text, focus rings, sufficient color contrast). All copy gets a bar-rule pass before launch against ABA Model Rule 7.1 and state-specific variations where relevant (NY 7.1, CA 7.1, FL 4-7.13, TX 7.04). If you're in a state with unusual rules or you have a designated bar compliance reviewer, tell us at kickoff and we'll route final copy through them before approval.
It's what we build on, yes. WordPress runs about 43% of the web and has the deepest pool of plugins and developers of any CMS. If you have a hard reason to be on Webflow, Squarespace, or a fully custom stack, we're probably not the right fit for that project. A fully custom build with no WordPress underneath costs three to five times as much and ties you to whichever agency built it. That's the trap we're explicitly avoiding.
All three are on the table. The choice is yours, walked through at kickoff and locked into the scope of work. Divi is the most flexible visual editor with the deepest design controls. Elementor has the largest community and the broadest plugin marketplace. The WordPress block editor is the lightest, fastest, and the closest to native WordPress. We talk through editing workflow, plugin dependencies, and long-term maintainability before you decide. None of them lock you in. Any future WordPress developer can maintain the result.
Yes. The 30-minute training session at launch covers the most common edits: text, images, blog posts, adding new pages, swapping out photos. Whichever editor we built with (Divi, Elementor, or the block editor) is built for non-developers. Most clients run the site themselves after the first month and only come back to us for redesigns or new practice-area pages.
Most law firm sites have 30 pages because somebody got paid by the page. Five is what you actually need for launch: home, about, two anchor practice areas, contact. We add more practice-area pages on Launch + Grow and Multi-Attorney as part of the retainer, and we'll generally recommend you add them in a structured cadence rather than all at once. A blast of 25 thin pages at launch is one of the fastest ways to trip Google's helpful-content filters in 2026.
Related services
What pairs with web design.
A launch site is the floor. These are what carry the work upward after it ships.
AEO
AEO for law firms
Get cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Built into every site at launch.
Digital PR
Digital PR & attorney branding
Authority work AI engines cite. Earned placements, ghostwritten bylines, Person schema across the site.
Free website & AEO audit
A second pair of eyes on your current site.
Send us the URL. Within 48 hours, we'll come back with a 6-page report covering what's converting, what's leaking, and where your firm shows up (or doesn't) in AI search.
- Homepage + top 3 practice-area pages reviewed
- AI citation check across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini
- Schema markup & page speed audit
- Top 3 highest-impact fixes, ranked by ROI
- Competitor citation comparison
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