Google Ads for law firms, managed against cost per enquiry

Legal clicks are among the most expensive in UK search. Whether they pay depends on your fees, your conversion rate, and how carefully the account excludes everyone who will never instruct you.

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The diagnosis

Where law firm ad budgets go

The most common fault is one campaign covering every practice area. Conveyancing and personal injury do not share a budget, a cost per click or a buyer, and an account that mixes them lets the cheapest clicks starve the most valuable work.

The second is tracking. If the account counts a click on the phone number or a page view as a conversion, smart bidding learns to buy more of those, not more instructions. Rebuilding tracking around real enquiries, including calls over a set length, usually does more than any bid change.

The third is who you pay for. Students, job seekers, people wanting free advice and people looking for the court service all search with legal keywords. A maintained negative keyword list is where most of the saving in a law firm account is found.

The number everything else depends on is your ceiling: the most the firm can afford to pay for an enquiry.

Scope

What is included

Search intent

What the account should be buying

Illustrative examples rather than keyword data. The last line matters as much as the others.

  • divorce solicitor [your town]
  • no win no fee solicitor for an accident at work
  • fixed fee conveyancing quote
  • probate solicitor cost
  • employment solicitor for unfair dismissal
  • And what it should not: free legal advice, solicitor apprenticeships, law degree courses

What happens next

What happens after you get in touch

  1. Step 01

    Audit

    Your site, your rankings, your ad account and your analytics, and a written account of what is wrong. You get the report whether or not you hire me.

  2. Step 02

    Agree the target

    One number we are both working to, usually cost per enquiry or enquiries per month. Not sessions, not impressions, not rankings on their own.

  3. Step 03

    Do the work

    Technical fixes first, because content on a broken site does nothing. Then the pages and campaigns that go after the searches worth having.

  4. Step 04

    Report monthly

    What moved, why it moved, what happens next, and an honest note on anything that cannot be measured.

Straight answers

Common questions

What budget does a law firm need for Google Ads?
Enough to gather useful data within a month or two, and that depends heavily on the practice area: personal injury or conveyancing in a city costs far more per click than wills in a market town. I will tell you after the audit whether your budget can learn anything, rather than take it and hope.
Is Google Ads viable for personal injury?
It is the most expensive market in UK legal search, so viability depends entirely on your case values and your conversion rate from enquiry to instruction. I would want to look at both before recommending a budget.
Can our ads mention prices?
Yes. For residential conveyancing, probate and several other services the SRA transparency rules already require prices on your website, so the ad and the landing page should agree. A fixed fee answers the first question most conveyancing buyers have, which makes it worth testing.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
No. That model rewards spending more of your money, which is not an incentive you want. It is a fixed monthly fee.
Who owns the account?
The firm does, always. I work in your account with my own access, and if we stop working together you keep the account, its history and everything it has learned.
How quickly will we see enquiries?
Usually within the first fortnight. Getting the cost per enquiry down to where it should be takes longer, because it depends on gathering enough conversion data to optimise against.

The longer read

The full guide, free

More for solicitors

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