THE FILE IS LOST AT INTAKE, NOT AT THE AD.

One substantial page per practice area, each written to that specific client's question, rather than a single practice areas page with four paragraphs. A personal injury client, a divorcing parent, a home buyer and an executor are four different people with four different urgencies and four different vocabularies, and a combined page serves none of them well in search or in conversion. Each practice-area page should also state plainly what the firm does not take, which cuts wasted intake time immediately.

Intake, almost always, and it is the less expensive fix. Most firms can name their advertising spend and cannot name their intake conversion rate, which means they are paying to generate calls they then lose to voicemail, an unmonitored form inbox, or a send-us-an-email response. Capturing matter type, opposing party for the conflict check, key dates and jurisdiction, routing it to a named person with visible failure rather than silent loss, and acknowledging the prospective client immediately will usually move more files than an increase in traffic.

Marketing by Alberta lawyers is governed by the Law Society of Alberta's Code of Conduct, which constrains claims about results, comparative superlatives, and any implication of a specialist certification the firm does not hold. In practice that means no best-lawyer-in-Edmonton framing, no promised outcomes, and careful handling of anything resembling a success rate. We build a review step into the engagement, with a designated person at the firm signing off on public-facing copy before publication. We are a marketing firm and not your counsel; firm-specific compliance calls remain yours.

Only with the client's informed written consent, and only in a form that does not disclose confidential information or imply a result the firm can repeat. In practice the safer and often more persuasive approach is to publish process clarity — what happens at each stage, how long it typically takes, what it typically costs — rather than outcome stories, because process content converts well, carries no confidentiality exposure, and is what AI assistants quote.

For most firms it is the better investment, because legal paid search is among the most expensive in the country and the click is not the file. Content that accurately answers the jurisdiction-specific question a prospective client is actually asking — Alberta limitation periods, how accident benefits work, what a desk divorce requires, what probate involves — earns search visibility, earns citation by AI assistants, and reaches the person earlier in the process than an ad does.

By publishing accurate, jurisdiction-specific explanations of the questions people bring to assistants, and by making the firm a clean, consistent, machine-readable entity. People now describe their situation to an assistant before contacting anyone, and the assistant builds its answer from sources that state things plainly. A site of practice-area brochure copy gives it nothing to quote. Very few Canadian firms have done this work, which is why it is currently the largest open opportunity in legal marketing.

Website builds start at $5,000, paid upfront against a scope agreed before work begins, and the firm owns the result outright. The one-time SEO engineering pass is $1,500 to $2,000 and the one-time AEO / AI-visibility pass is $1,500 to $2,000. AI visibility tracking is $200 a month with a three-month minimum. We do not sell marketing retainers.

Clients typically see movement in 14 to 90 days, measured against a baseline captured before the work starts. That is a typical-results statement, not a guarantee — we do not promise files, enquiries or rankings, and for a regulated profession that distinction is not merely cautious language. The fastest-moving item is usually intake conversion, because it is mechanical; organic search for practice-area questions takes longer.