What should a law firm pay for web design and SEO?

Run the numbers for your firm

Three buttons: the kind of work you are buying, the pressure in your market, and whether you practice solo, in a growing firm, or across more than one office. Each tap redraws the band on the spot. Nothing is submitted or stored, and no email is asked for.

Prefer a full page? Open the What Should You Pay? tool here.

What each button is actually asking a firm

Three taps, and every one of them means something particular for a firm.

• What you need. A new website, SEO and local SEO, AI search work, or the whole package. The website button is the easy reach, because the site is the visible problem. Then the real project turns out to be the practice area pages: twenty of them in a dropdown with none of them written is a content build, not a design job.
• How competitive your market is. Of the three, this is the button that swings the number hardest, and for a firm competition is not a population count. It is how many firms already publish real pages for the matters you take, in the counties where those matters are heard.
• How big your business is. For a firm, multi-location usually means a second office in another county. That is fair: a second courthouse means a second set of county and court pages, a second profile, and reporting that separates them.

Two absences matter. No practice area input, so an estate planning solo and an injury firm in the same city get the same band. And no button for Google Ads, which runs expensive in legal and sits outside this band entirely. The arithmetic behind the band is laid out on the general pricing tool page.

Reading the band before you sign anything

There is no score here and no grade on your firm, only a band. A band earns its keep by sitting next to something real, so put it beside the proposal a vendor has already sent you.

The healthy case is a proposal that lands in or near the band and says plainly what it includes. Scope for a firm is a count: how many practice area pages get written and by whom, whether bios and bar admissions are handled, which counties get pages, and who reads the copy before it publishes.

Well under the band is rarely a discount. What tends to sit down there is a template, an automated monthly package, or a legal directory placement that can route the same intake call to several firms in your county. Well over the band is not wrong on its face, but it owes you an explanation.

The red flag list under the result never changes with your answers, but two of its lines land harder on a firm. Owning your domain, site, and Google Business Profile matters more when the brand is a partner's surname. And a vendor comfortable guaranteeing rankings is the same one who will drop a superlative into your practice area copy without asking, and the responsibility for what that page says stays with the firm.

Both the AI visibility checker for law firms and the report card for law firms work on the site you already have.

Two hypothetical runs

Two made up firms, run through the buttons so you can see the shape of the output. No client here, and no quote.

Say a solo estate planning attorney in a mid-size city wants a real site. She taps a new website, mid-size city, solo. The tool shows $5,000 to $12,500 one-time. The low end is a clean, fast site with a handful of well written pages. The top end is what happens once wills, trusts, probate, powers of attorney, and guardianship each get a page worth reading. Her real number tracks how many of those pages get written, not design taste.

Imagine a family law firm with a second office in the next county. They tap SEO / Local SEO, mid-size city, multi-location. The tool shows $3,400 to $7,800 per month. The multi-location answer is doing most of that, and here it is honest: two courthouses means two sets of county and court pages, two profiles, two review streams, and reporting that keeps them apart. Answer that third question as a single office and the band comes down.

Neither band says anything about what that money returns. A pricing tool cannot know, and this one does not guess.

What good looks like for a firm online

None of these numbers mean much until you know what a firm should be getting for the money.

• Pages that answer the question in the first paragraph. People with legal problems search a situation, not a service name, often at an hour when nobody is answering, sometimes on a phone they share with the person the matter concerns.
• The facts written as sentences. States you are licensed in, courts you are admitted to, what you take and what you refer out, how you charge, and whether the first conversation costs anything. Near the top of the page, not footer icons.
• Jurisdiction instead of drive time. A location page should be built on venue, meaning the county and the courthouse where the matter would actually be heard, rather than on a town name dropped into a template.
• Legibility to AI assistants. A legal question often goes to an AI assistant before it goes to a firm, and the follow up is who nearby handles this. Google now sells ads in and around AI answers, so budget does reach that surface. What no budget decides is which firm the organic answer itself names. That is settled by what your pages state plainly, which is the job of AI search work.

The longer argument, including what bar advertising rules change, sits on the law firm marketing page and under websites for law firms.