PPC for lawyers
Google Ads for law firms is unforgiving: clicks that cost more than dinner for four, competitors bidding on your name, and leads that look fine in the dashboard and never sign. Here is how legal PPC goes wrong, and how we run it instead.
Most legal ad accounts pay for clicks they never wanted
When we audit a professional-services ad account, the first thing we read is not the ads — it is the search terms report: the actual words people typed before costing you money. It is nearly always a shock. Searches for competitors by name. Searches for jobs at law firms. Searches from the wrong state. Free-consultation hunters with no case. Every one of them billed at legal’s click prices.
In one recent audit, 67% of a client’s monthly spend was going to searches for competitor brand names — clicks with almost no chance of becoming a client. In another, the account was paying over $1,100 per recorded conversion, and the conversions themselves turned out to be misfiring form tracking rather than enquiries. Both accounts looked healthy in their dashboards.
Legal PPC is not won with clever ad copy. It is won with what you refuse to pay for, what you measure, and where the click lands. Everything below follows from those three.
- 67%Of one account’s spend going to competitor-name searches — found in the first hour of the audit
- $1,113Cost per recorded conversion in another account — with the conversion tracking itself misfiring
- 112Negative keywords applied to one account in a single pass, pattern-built so they keep filtering new junk searches
- 8×Times that account’s conversion tracking had been changed in a year — making every past “result” unreadable
Figures from our audits of professional-services ad accounts. Client results on the case studies page.
How we run Google Ads for law firms
The same discipline every time, because the leaks are the same every time.
Negatives before keywords
The negative list is built first and built as patterns, not one-off words — jobs, salaries, free, DIY, other states, competitor names unless you deliberately choose that fight. At $50-plus a click, the searches you refuse are worth more than the ones you win.
Tracking you can stake a budget on
Calls and forms both, tested end to end, and then left alone. An account whose tracking changes every month has no memory — nothing can be compared, so nothing can be improved. We fix it once and freeze it.
Landing pages that match the case
A truck-accident click landing on a generic homepage is money burned. Each campaign lands on a page about that case type, with the questions answered and one obvious way to reach you — the page does half the ad’s work.
Local Services Ads, managed as their own channel
The green-check listings above the ads run on reviews, responsiveness and dispute discipline — not bids alone. Firms that treat LSAs as a set-and-forget checkbox leave the cheapest signed cases in legal on the table.
Ads buy time while rankings are built
PPC produces cases this month and stops the moment you stop paying. SEO takes months and then compounds. In legal, where clicks are this expensive, the plan is usually ads aimed narrowly at the highest-value case types now, SEO built steadily underneath, and budget shifted as earned rankings arrive. One system, one report — it is the premise this firm is named after.
SEO for lawyers, explained the same way Or read the plain SEO vs PPC comparison
Firms are paying for search — and doubting it
The legal industry buys more paid search than almost any other profession, and trusts it less. That combination is not an argument against ads — it is evidence of how many accounts run without negatives, honest tracking, or landing pages. Discipline is the whole edge.
of law firms use paid search marketing
CallRail
of those firms doubt the ROI is worth it
CallRail
of gross revenue is the typical law firm marketing budget
MyCase benchmark
A budget that size deserves an account run like the one described on this page — and tracking that can prove what a signed case costs.
Sources: MyCase legal marketing statistics
Legal PPC, answered plainly
Why are our PPC leads bad?
Almost always one of three causes: the account is paying for the wrong searches (no negative discipline), the tracking is counting things that are not enquiries, or the click lands somewhere generic and the caller was never qualified by the page. All three are findable in an afternoon of audit — and none of them is fixed by writing new ads.
How much should a law firm spend on Google Ads?
Enough to buy meaningful data in your market, and not a dollar more until tracking is trustworthy. In practice-area terms that cost $50–$300 a click, a budget that affords only a handful of clicks a day cannot be evaluated. We would rather narrow the targeting to fewer, better searches than spread a budget thin across everything.
Should we bid on competitor names?
Deliberately or not at all. It can work as a chosen strategy with its own ads and landing page. What we keep finding instead is accounts bleeding into competitor searches by accident through loose match types — in one audit, two-thirds of the whole budget. Check yours; it is the single most common leak we find.
Are Local Services Ads better than regular Google Ads for lawyers?
They are different, not better: pay-per-lead instead of pay-per-click, ranked on reviews and responsiveness, capped in volume. Most firms should run LSAs first because the economics are gentler, then add Search ads for the case types LSAs cannot reach. The mistake is treating either as the whole answer.
Who offers both PPC and SEO for lawyers?
We do — the firm is named for it. In legal the two channels overlap on searches worth hundreds of dollars a click, so running them separately means paying twice for the same client. One team, one strategy, one blended cost per signed case.
What firms tell us they had before — and what we do instead
| With us | The usual story |
|---|---|
| Month to month — leave any time | Twelve-month contracts |
| Fees published, and quoted in writing before work starts | “Book a call for pricing” |
| Your analytics, ad account and website — yours from day one | Agency-owned accounts you lose on exit |
| Written findings before any pitch | A pitch before any findings |
| SEO and ads run by one team as one plan | Two vendors bidding against each other |
| Reported in enquiries and cost per signed case | Traffic graphs and jargon |
Three steps to your written review
1 — Tell us your firm
The short form asks for your website, an email for the findings, and a phone number. That is all we need to start.
2 — We review it by hand
Your rankings, your Business Profile, and — if you share access — your ad account. Read by a person, not a scanner.
3 — A written review in two business days
Specific findings in plain language, yours to keep either way. If a call is useful after you have read it, you book it — not the other way round.
Find out where your ad budget is actually going
A free written review of your ad account, your tracking and your rankings — the search terms report included. Back within two business days, yours to keep either way.
Get your free Search ReviewRequest your free Search Review
Four quick fields — and written findings within two business days, yours to keep either way.