Law firms are failing to maximise their exposure to online consumers by improving their rankings with search engines, a report has shown.

A study of by consultants Greenlight showed that 1.2m searches were performed in February for legal-related keywords, with 450,000 searches for ‘solicitor’.

More than half of all the legal searches involved the same five words: ‘solicitor’, ‘solicitors’, ‘attorney’, ‘divorce’ and ‘barristers’. Websites that achieved visibility for these terms were the first to come up in Google and other search engine results, the study found.

The research showed that searches for ‘solicitor’ have increased markedly every month since September 2009. Other popular keywords or phrases were ‘lawyer’, ‘wills’, ‘legal aid’, ‘conveyancing’, ‘find a solicitor’, ‘legal advice’, ‘injury lawyers’ and ‘no win, no fee’.

The most visible websites for legal searches were wikipedia.org, which reached 693,344 people in February, followed by the lawsociety.org.uk, which reached 595,035.

The top 10 websites included five solicitors’ directories, two direct legal service providers, two information sites and a careers website. The highest ranked individual law firm was national firm Irwin Mitchell, which was the 12th most visible website for legal searches.

The Greenlight report indicated that many law firms’ sites were failing to be picked up by search engines. For 132,000 of the legal searches performed during February, only 10 websites were listed in the search results. The consultancy said this suggested ‘massive gains [are] to be made within the online market’ by individual law firms.

In the field of family law, the word ‘divorce’ was searched for 33,100 times in February, according to the research. After wikipedia, the second most popular website was divorceaid.co.uk.

In the ‘finance’ category, there were 18,100 searches for ‘wills’ in February, and 14,800 for conveyancing. Of the top 20 websites, seven were finance law specialists, of which five offered conveyancing and two were websites for making wills.

In personal injury, ‘injury lawyers’ accounted for 12,100 searches. The most successful website was Claims4Free, which achieved very high visibility by succeeding in ranking at position one for 20 different keywords, including the term ‘no win no fee solicitors’.

In business law, national firm Russell Jones & Walker’s website rjw.co.uk was the most visible. The term ‘employment solicitors’ was the most searched for, with 2,900 searches. However, overall visibility for the top-20 sites was relatively low, indicating that there is considerable scope for business law firms to increase their access to online consumers.

The report noted that the legal sector is ‘notoriously competitive’, with many sites containing rich legal content. It said there was scope for firms that do not have a strong internet presence to improve this by focusing their content around the most popular keywords.