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PPC for law firms
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Legal clicks are among the more expensive in paid search. So the whole game is spending only on the matters your firm wants and can actually take, and knowing which ad produced each one.
Most law firms that have tried paid search and given up did not lose money on bad ads. They lost it on good ads pointed at the wrong things: a single campaign for the whole firm, clicks from people who wanted free advice, calls arriving on a Saturday with nobody there to answer them, and no way of telling which of the enquiries ever became a paying client. Whether you call it PPC for law firms, pay per click for law firms or ppc for solicitors, it works when it is run the way the firm itself is run, one practice area at a time.
Spend by practice area, never by firm
A firm doing personal injury, conveyancing, family, employment, immigration, wills and probate and commercial work is really seven businesses sharing a name. Each has its own clients, its own search terms, its own fee structure and its own capacity. One campaign for all of them means the budget drifts to whichever area attracts the most clicks, which is rarely the one you most want to grow.
Give every practice area its own campaign and its own budget. That lets you spend hard on the work that pays, hold back on the areas that are already stretched, and pause one team's ads without touching anybody else's.
The cost of a click matters less than the cost of an instructed matter, and only a campaign built per practice area can tell you what that is.
Consumer work and commercial work behave differently
Consumer practice areas carry the search volume. People search for a divorce solicitor, a conveyancing quote or help with a will in large numbers, usually with a place name attached, and they tend to choose quickly. These campaigns run on volume, and the work is in keeping cost per enquiry down and screening out people you cannot help.
Commercial work is quieter. Far fewer people search for a shareholder dispute or a commercial lease review, but a single instruction can be worth many consumer matters. Those campaigns want tightly matched terms, a smaller budget and patience, because the enquiries are rare and each one deserves a senior reply.
One landing page per practice area, built to qualify
Every campaign needs a page that matches what the person searched for. It should say who handles the work, with a name and a photograph, how fees work for that kind of matter, and exactly what happens after the enquiry: who calls back, how quickly, and whether the first conversation is charged. Structure and design for the wider site are covered in our guide to law firm website design; a landing page has one narrower job, which is to turn a paid click into a qualified enquiry.
Qualification is where most of the value sits. A few short questions on the form, such as the type of matter, roughly what has happened, whether proceedings have started and whether there is a deadline, mean a fee earner's first call is triage rather than discovery. In a business that sells hours, an enquiry screened before anybody picks up the phone is worth far more than two that are not.
Negatives, places and hours
Legal searches attract a lot of people who will never instruct you. Add negative keywords from day one for free advice, legal aid if the firm does not offer it, jobs, vacancies, training contracts, salaries, courses and templates, then read the search terms report every week for the first few months. Each practice area turns up its own unwanted searches, and the list only gets good by being maintained.
Set locations to the areas the firm genuinely serves, which for conveyancing or family work may be a handful of towns and for immigration or commercial work may be the whole country. Then schedule the ads to run when somebody can answer. A call that rings out at eight in the evening is a paid click handed to the next firm on the page.
Tracking to the instructed matter, not the click
Most legal enquiries still arrive by phone, so call tracking is not optional. A tracked number on each landing page ties every call to the campaign and search that produced it, and form enquiries carry the same source with them. That source then needs to reach the case management or CRM system when the enquiry is opened, so it stays attached to the matter.
Once the matter is instructed, that outcome can be sent back to Google Ads. From then on the account learns from instructed matters rather than from form fills, and the firm can judge each practice area on what it actually brought in. Without that loop, a campaign that fills the inbox with unsuitable enquiries looks like the best performer you have.
SRA rules, the CAP Code and careful wording
Solicitors' advertising is regulated, and paid search is advertising. Firms regulated by the SRA have to follow its rules on publicity and transparency, including publishing price and service information for certain services, and ads are also covered by the CAP Code, which requires them to be legal, decent, honest and truthful. Some phrases need particular care: "no win no fee" wording, for example, has to be accurate about what a client may still pay.
We are not the firm's compliance adviser, and nothing here is legal guidance. What we do is build the process so that ad copy and landing pages are checked by whoever handles compliance at the firm before they go live, and checked again when the rules or the fees change.
What we would do first
A partner asking about paid search usually wants four things, in their own words: instructed matters in the practice areas the firm wants, ads that pause when fee earners are full, landing pages that qualify people before anybody calls them back, and knowing which ad produced each matter. Behind those sit the rest of the funnel, the site itself and the search it ranks for, and PPC works better when all of it is planned together.
So we start with tracking, because every later decision depends on it. Then one or two practice areas with clear capacity and a good fee per matter, each with its own landing page and negative list, before widening. The organic side is in our guide to SEO for law firms, and for US readers, Google Ads for lawyers is the same job under state bar rules rather than the SRA. How we run the whole engine for a firm is on our page for law firm marketing.
