Website Guide for Lawyers: Rules, Content, SEO

Start with the advertising rules

On a law firm website project, the first conversation is not about design — it is about professional conduct rules. In Türkiye, the Bar Association’s advertising regulation frames what a lawyer may and may not publish online, and that frame is narrow.

In practice the following are out: fees and pricing, words like “best”, “expert” or “guaranteed result”, case counts or success rates, client testimonials and thank-you messages, comparative claims, and marketing the professional title through search ads.

These constraints look like a disadvantage until you notice your competitors are equally bound. The winner is not the firm that breaks the rules but the one that uses the permitted space best.

The permitted space: information

What the regulation does not restrict, and what works best, is informative content. A prospective client searches for their question before they search for a lawyer: how long reinstatement proceedings take, how marital property is divided, what the conditions are for a rent assessment case.

Each of those questions is a page. Explain the process, give the timeframes, list the required documents, describe the common objections — grounded in legislation and without promising outcomes.

That content does two jobs. You get found in search, and, more importantly, the person who finds you arrives at the first call far better prepared. Informative pages shorten the initial consultation.

Do not leave practice-area pages generic either. Instead of one paragraph under “Family Law”, giving each of eight sub-topics its own page is stronger for both search and trust.

How to build trust without testimonials

Since you cannot use reviews or success stories, trust has to come from elsewhere.

A real biography. Education, bar registration, publications, talks, academic work if any. Short and verifiable.

Real photographs. A law site built on stock imagery undermines its own claim to seriousness on the first screen. Office and portrait photos should be yours, even if they are not studio quality.

A transparent process. How the first meeting works, how long it takes, what to bring. You cannot publish fees, but describing how the process unfolds is permitted and removes the caller’s biggest hesitation.

Accessibility. A tappable phone number on mobile, a form for out-of-hours enquiries, a clear address and map.

Confidentiality and data protection

A law firm’s site collects more sensitive data than an ordinary corporate site. A message from the contact form may describe the sender’s case, which can reach into special-category personal data.

Three things should be standard: a data protection notice, an explicit consent checkbox, and clarity about where form data is stored. Form messages dropping unencrypted into a free mailbox is questionable under both professional secrecy and data protection rules.

On law firm projects we keep submissions in the admin panel and send only a notification by email. The content itself never travels through mail servers.

Technical and measurement

In law, local search decides. Getting into the map pack for “divorce lawyer Kadıköy” brings more work than ranking first on a national term. The Business Profile, the right category and regular updates deserve real attention.

Fast mobile loading matters here too: someone with a legal problem usually calls from a phone, in a hurry.

On measurement, track calls rather than rankings. How many people tapped the phone button this month, how many forms arrived, and which practice-area page they came from. Those three numbers tell you what to write about next month.