|
00
Index
Contents01Quick overview
02How to read this benchmark
03Search visibility & rankings
04Target keywords being tracked
05Competitive landscape
06AI search visibility
07Technical site health
08Site performance
09Where visitors come from
10Prioritised action plan
11One for the marketing intern
12Your month-one numbers
01
Overview
Quick overviewBurley Law has solid technical foundations and a clear, specialist focus: IP, commercial and employment law for businesses in Birmingham and across the UK. But at month one, its visibility is almost entirely confined to its own name. Outside of branded searches, the firm rarely appears on page one of Google, and it is virtually absent from the AI assistants that a growing share of buyers now ask first. The good news: nearly every gap below is an opportunity rather than a problem. The site is fast on desktop, stable, and already ranks (just outside page one) for valuable commercial terms it could realistically win. This is a healthy, low-risk starting position. Organic keywords
49
Baseline
Terms where the site ranks somewhere in Google. Keywords on page one
2
Watch
Both are the brand name (“burley law”). Est. organic visits / mo
~78
Watch
~94% comes from branded searches. AI share of voice
1.4%
Priority
Surfaces in 1 of 15 buyer prompts. Mobile load time
4.16s
Priority
Target is under 2.5s (desktop is 1.49s). On-page issues flagged
133
Watch
All fixable on-page items across the audit. The headline, in three lines
1. Visibility is branded Almost all search traffic comes from people already searching the firm’s name. 2. Invisible to AI AI assistants recommend competitors, not Burley Law, for the firm’s own services. 3. Foundations are sound Fast, stable site with fixable on-page debt and winnable near-miss rankings.
02
Method
How to read this benchmarkThis is a baseline, not a verdict. Its job is to capture today’s numbers clearly so that next month, and every month after, we can show movement against them. A figure that looks low here simply marks the bottom of the curve we’re about to climb. Two kinds of visibility are measured. SEO is traditional Google search. GEO, generative-engine optimisation, is how often a brand is named by AI assistants when people ask them for recommendations. Both increasingly decide who a prospective client contacts. Data captured 30 June 2026 (location: United Kingdom). Traffic, volume and difficulty figures are third-party estimates and are used for relative comparison, not as exact counts.
03
SEO
Search visibility & rankingsThe site ranks for 49 keywords in Google. The shape of those rankings tells the story: a thin top, then a heavy cluster on pages four through ten, terms the firm is “known for” but not yet found for. Pos 1–32
Pos 4–100
Pos 11–205
Pos 21–303
Pos 31–5022
Pos 51–10017
Only 2 keywords reach page one, and both are the firm’s own name. No non-branded term currently ranks on page one. Branded vs. non-brandedOf the ~78 estimated monthly organic visits, around 73 come from just two searches: “burley law” and “burley legal.” Strip out the brand and the firm is, in practice, not yet discoverable for the services it sells. That is the single biggest growth lever in this report. Striking distance: the quick winsThese terms already rank on pages two and three. With focused on-page work they are the most realistic candidates to reach page one first.
“Subject access request,” “commercial law firms in birmingham” and “agency contract” are the most commercially useful of these, real prospects, just out of reach. Topic strengths to build onA handful of subjects already cluster several ranking pages, natural foundations to deepen into authority topics. Subject Access Requests 6 keywords (cost, fee, charge, exemptions): the strongest non-brand topic, ranking 17–57. Collective redundancy TULRCA s.188, consultation process: high-value employment terms, several at 320–390/mo. Agency & app terms Agency contracts and mobile-app terms already sit near page one. Birmingham careers Work-experience & internship terms, useful for talent and local authority.
04
Strategy
Target keywords being trackedBeyond what the site ranks for today, 105 target keywords are being tracked month-on-month. They group into six clear themes, the map of where the firm wants to be found. Their positions are recorded from this month forward as the baseline for progress. Trademark & IP registration ≈40trademark registration uk · uk trademark search · trademark attorney uk · register a brand in uk Employment law: Birmingham ≈18employment lawyers birmingham · employment solicitor birmingham · no win no fee · employment barrister Mental health & employment ≈12mental health employment law · workplace mental health policy · employer duty of care IP, patents & copyright ≈12ip law · patent lawyer uk · copyright lawyer uk · who owns intellectual property Working time & tax year ≈134 day working week · working week uk · when does the tax year start · working hours in a year Tribunals, costs & careers ≈10tribunal costs · how much does an employment lawyer cost · work experience legal · complaints law Today most of these non-branded targets rank beyond page one (consistent with section 03). Closing that gap is the core of the SEO programme.
05
Market
Competitive landscapeThe firms ranking for the same terms fall into two camps: a like-for-like specialist (Landau Law, by far the closest), and national giants operating at a different scale entirely. The realistic peer to benchmark against is the specialist tier; the giants set the long-term horizon.
Closest competitor Landau Law 59 shared keywords and a 5,611-term gap, the most direct benchmark. Biggest content gap 16,649 keywords Terms Irwin Mitchell ranks for that Burley Law does not. Authority gap Backlinks Competitors carry 5k–1.5M backlinks; link-building is a long-term priority. This set is drawn from the firms competing for the same terms today. If there are particular local competitors Burley Law wants to measure up against, just share them with us and we’ll add them into the mix from next month.
06
GEO
AI search visibilityIncreasingly, buyers ask an AI assistant, “who’s the best trademark solicitor for a small business?”, rather than scrolling Google. We put 15 representative buyer questions to AI assistants and recorded which firms they named. Burley Law was named in just one of the 15, and only the explicitly branded question (“Burley Law vs other UK IP firms”), where it ranked first. For every non-branded question a real prospect would ask, the firm did not appear. Its share of voice is 1.4%. Landau Law23.3%
Stephensons Solicitors23.3%
UK IPO16.7%
Harper James16.7%
Cavendish Employment Law13.3%
Duncan Lewis Solicitors13.3%
Burley Law6.7%
Burley Law’s 6.7% visibility comes almost entirely from the single branded prompt. On the non-branded questions that win new clients, the specialist competitors own the answer. Why it matters
GEO is effectively greenfield for Burley Law. A 1.4% baseline is low, but the prompts tested map exactly onto the firm’s services, so there is a direct, ownable route to being recommended. This is the clearest month-one opportunity in the report.
07
Technical
Technical site healthThe crawl found no structural emergencies, but a clear list of on-page items that, fixed, would help Google understand and rank the content. The two high-impact quick wins are unblocking the /legal/ page and consolidating six duplicate pages.
08
Speed
Site performanceOn desktop the site is excellent, and it’s stable and responsive everywhere. The single red flag is mobile load time at 4.16s against a 2.5s target, and mobile is where most legal searches now happen. Desktop
Load time1.49s Great
Interactivity156ms Great
Visual stability0.03 Great
Mobile
Load time4.16s Poor
Interactivity61ms Great
Visual stability0.02 Great
Mobile load is usually driven by uncompressed images and render-blocking scripts, a contained, well-understood fix.
09
Audience
Where your visitors come fromAlongside search position, Google Analytics shows who is actually landing on the site. This is a volume-and-source view rather than a ranking one, and it covers the whole of June, so read it separately from the single-day SEO and GEO baseline. Google Analytics · 1–30 June 2026. Active users 814People who visited during June 2026. From the UK 145The target market, around 18% of all users. Via AI assistants 1New users referred by an AI assistant all month. Singapore434
United Kingdom145
United States123
Germany23
China21
Poland11
India8
Other (26 countries)49
Singapore leads by a wide margin. For a Birmingham firm that usually points to bot or non-prospect traffic rather than real buyers, so the audience that matters is closer to the 145 UK users. Direct639
Organic Search141
Referral4
Organic Social3
AI Assistant1
New users by channel. Direct dominates at roughly 81%, organic search is a distant second, and AI assistants brought a single visitor, echoing the branded and GEO findings earlier in the report. Desktop730
Mobile73
Tablet1
Desktop is about 91% of visitors, mobile just 9%. Read against the performance section: the mobile load-time fix still matters for Google’s mobile-first indexing and future prospects, but today’s on-site audience is mostly on desktop. The mobile visitors who do arrive stay engaged far longer, around 29 seconds against 9 on desktop. What the audience tells us
Mostly people who already know the firm Direct visits make up about 81% of new users, with organic search well behind and AI assistants at a single visit. It mirrors the branded-visibility and GEO gaps set out earlier. Read the country mix with caution Singapore outnumbers the UK and US combined, which for this firm almost certainly means automated traffic rather than prospects. Worth filtering out so the numbers reflect real people.
10
Plan
Prioritised action planSequenced by impact. Now protects and cleans the foundations; Next grows visibility; Later builds the long-term moat. Now · 0–30 days
Next · 1–3 months
Later · 3–6 months
11
Delivery
One for the marketing internThis is a self-contained bundle of work that can run as a standalone project in parallel with the monthly retainer tasks, rather than competing with them for time. It suits a marketing intern working with light supervision: the brief is clear, the work needs no design or developer input, and the results show up quickly in rankings and click-through.
Low risk
No design or dev
Measurable
Real skills to learn
What the intern owns1. Digital-PR support
Mine the existing “We Think” thought-leadership for pitchable angles and run the outreach that earns links and brand mentions over time. Why it fits: research- and relationship-led with no technical dependency, and it feeds directly into the long-term authority goal in section 10. 2. Backlinks & directories
Get Burley Law listed consistently across legal directories, the Law Society’s “Find a Solicitor,” the local chamber of commerce and Google Business Profile, then chase down mentions of the firm that don’t yet link back. Why it fits: methodical, repetitive legwork with no technical dependency, and it steadily closes the authority gap on the specialist competitors in section 05. 3. GEO FAQ content
Draft clear question-and-answer content that answers the 15 buyer prompts from section 06 in plain English, for a fee-earner to review before it goes live. Why it fits: AI assistants favour clean Q&A formatting, so this maps straight onto the firm’s biggest GEO gap, and it needs a brief and a reviewer rather than any design work. 4. On-site SEO with Squirrly
Work through a shortlist of key pages we identify together, using Squirrly SEO to optimise each one for its target keyword against the plugin’s on-page guidance. How we’ll set it up: a short Squirrly training session first so the intern is confident with it, then they work down the agreed page list one at a time. The PR play, in five steps
Guardrails. The intern will handle the research and first drafts, but nothing will be published without review. Rhea will oversee the marketing side, with Liz and Des checking the legal detail as subject experts. Outreach targets will also be signed off before anything is sent.
12
Appendix
Your month-one numbersThe figures to measure every following month against. 
Prepared for Burley Law · Baseline captured 30 June 2026. Estimates are for relative tracking, not exact counts. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Confidential client report
Month One Baseline
SEO & GEO
Visibility Benchmark
burleylaw.co.uk
Prepared for
Burley Law
Prepared by
Essence: Branding, Design & Tech
Reporting period
Month 1 baseline
Date
30 June 2026
Release
v1.2