Expertise visibility: let prospects see what you are good at

What it is

A prospect who needs a construction lien lawyer, a geotechnical consultant or a CPA who understands farm succession rarely starts with your firm's name. They start with their problem. If your website describes "litigation" in one paragraph and your partners' profiles list twenty interests each, you have hidden your strongest work behind generic labels.

This engagement does three things:

1. Practice-area architecture. One page per real specialty, structured around the questions clients ask: when do I need this, what does the process look like, what should I prepare.
2. Search presence. Business profiles, consistent firm details, location pages where you genuinely have offices, and the technical basics that let search engines read your site.
3. Professional profiles. Partner and staff bios that are specific, current and consistent with your directory listings.

The regulator comes first

Law societies, engineering regulators and CPA bodies each publish their own rules on how members may describe themselves, use designations, make comparisons or cite past results. Those rules differ between professions and provinces, and they change. We don't summarise them for you; we point you to the source, and every page goes through your own compliance review before it goes live. The areas page links each province's law society, engineering regulator and CPA body.

Who it is for

• Firms with a clear specialty that prospects can't see from the outside.
• Practices entering a new city or region and needing to be found there.
• Firms whose referrals check the website before calling, and sometimes don't call.

If you are still deciding what to specialise in, start with practice growth strategy instead.

What is included

• A visibility audit: how the firm appears for its key specialties in search, maps and directories.
• A practice-area plan: which pages to create, merge or retire.
• Page briefs for each specialty, with the client questions each page should answer.
• An editing pass on drafts written by your professionals.
• Fixes to business profiles and firm details across the web.
• Monthly reporting on enquiries by page and search visibility for agreed terms.

Profiles deserve as much care as pages

Prospects often read a partner's profile before the practice-area page. A strong profile states the kinds of clients and situations the professional handles, in plain language, and links to the relevant practice-area pages. It avoids long lists of interests that dilute the message, and it is checked against your regulator's rules on designations and descriptions of expertise.

Timeline

The audit and plan come first, followed by page production at the pace your professionals can write or approve drafts. That pace, not ours, usually sets the schedule, so we plan around realistic partner hours. The proposal sets out the sequence for your firm.

How results are measured

We track a short list:

• Enquiries attributed to each practice-area page.
• Search visibility for the specialties you chose, compared with the starting audit.
• Calls and emails from business profiles.
• The share of new clients who mention finding the firm online.

The last one matters most and is easiest to lose: ask every new client how they found you and record it at intake. Our guide to planning practice-area pages explains how to set that up.

Mistakes to avoid

• Writing for peers. Prospects don't need case citations or design codes; they need to know whether you handle their situation.
• One page for everything. "Corporate and commercial" is a department, not a search.
• Publishing before review. Every page needs compliance sign-off against your regulator's rules.
• Inconsistent details. Different phone numbers or firm names across directories confuse search engines and clients alike.

Visibility only pays if enquiries are handled well, so most firms pair this with client intake and conversion. See the full list on the services page.