Home / Google Ads for law firms
Google Ads for law firms, run by seniors — measured to the pound.
Legal clicks are among the most expensive in UK search: £10 to £35 each is normal for competitive practice areas (live UK keyword pricing, pulled 2026). At those prices a loose account burns four figures a month on searchers who will never instruct you. We cut the waste and measure every pound back to an enquiry.
Law firm retainers from £1,200/month · no contracts past month three
At £2,800 a month in clicks, a typical ~£35 lead buys about 80. Get the same 80 at £20 and roughly £1,200 a month comes free — more than the fee. Worked in full on the pricing page (LocaliQ 2026 framing).
No call required · read-only access · in writing within 48 hours
At £25 a click, sloppy accounts get punished
Most sectors can carry a bit of Google Ads waste and survive it. Law cannot. When one click costs what other industries pay for ten, the same mistakes cost ten times as much. And in law firm PPC, the mistakes are nearly always the same six:
- Broad match left to roam. Your budget bids on "free legal advice" and "legal aid" while you sell privately funded work.
- Job hunters and students. "Solicitor jobs", "training contract", "how to become a family lawyer" — real clicks, real money, zero matters.
- Practice areas you do not handle. A conveyancing search that lands on a litigation firm still gets charged full price.
- DIY researchers. Template hunters and "write my own will" searchers who were never going to instruct anyone.
- Every click sent to the homepage. The searcher hunts for their practice area, gives up, and the bounce drags Quality Score down and your cost per click up.
- Calls nobody counts. Most legal enquiries arrive by phone; if calls are not tracked, the account optimises towards the wrong searches.
Do the maths at legal prices. Forty wasted clicks at £25 is £1,000 gone, and an unpoliced broad-match campaign can get through forty wasted clicks in days, not months. That is why the first thing we produce is the 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit: your live account, read-only access, findings in writing within 48 hours.
Context: LocaliQ's 2026 cross-industry search averages put cost per lead near £50 at an 8.18% conversion rate. With clicks at £10–£35, a law firm has less room for error than almost any other advertiser.
What we run for law firms
PPC for solicitors is not a different discipline. It is the same discipline with the tolerances tightened. Three things carry the account:
Practice-area campaign structure
One campaign per practice area you actually want more of, tight match types, and negative keyword lists reviewed weekly. Budget is weighted towards your highest-value matters, and you approve the practice areas we bid on before anything goes live.
A page per practice area
Someone searching "employment solicitor" lands on your employment page, not your homepage. Message-matched landing pages lift conversion rates and Quality Score — which cuts what you pay for every click at exactly the prices where that matters most.
Intake tracking, calls included
Most legal enquiries phone rather than fill in a form. We track calls and form fills back to the keyword that produced them, so budget follows enquiries that become matters. Measured to the pound, reported in writing every month.
Run by seniors, start to finish. Your account is handled by one of three senior marketers. No juniors, no hand-offs, no account manager between you and the person doing the work.
William Thomas · David Peters · Amalie LinesThree senior marketers. Every account is one of ours.
Expensive clicks deserve fast pages. A slow page wastes a £25 click as surely as a bad keyword does.
The numbers behind the method
One thing said plainly: these results come from automotive and industrial accounts, not law firms. We publish what we can evidence, and only that. What transfers is the method — tight match types, ruthless search-term policing, one page per service, every call counted. The more a click costs, the more that discipline is worth.
Cost per lead, vehicle remapping specialist, taken over from a previous agency. 16.44% CVR.
Live account data, 14 days, anonymised.Cost per lead, specialist automotive network. 468 leads in 30 days.
Live account data, 30 days, anonymised.Work booked through the account for a steel fabrication firm.
Client-reported.Across all three desks: £191K of managed spend, 10.6K conversions, £17.95 cost per conversion at a 16–17% conversion rate in an average month (live account data, anonymised). For comparison, LocaliQ's 2026 cross-industry search averages sit near £50 per lead at 8.18%.
Pricing for law firms
From £1,200 a month on top of your media budget, and you can leave after month three. Law retainers start above our standard £950 because legal accounts get more senior hours: the CPCs demand more frequent search-term reviews and a proper page for every practice area.
From £1,200 /month for law firms
- Practice-area campaign structure, built or rebuilt
- Weekly search-term policing and negative keyword lists
- A landing page per practice area, message-matched to the ad
- Call and form tracking wired back to the keyword
- Written monthly reporting, measured to the pound
- No contracts past month three
Worked maths: £5,000 of media at £25 a click buys 200 clicks a month. If a quarter go to searches that could never instruct you, that is £1,250 burned — more than the retainer — before any conversion work has started.
And it compounds: every pound of waste removed is re-spent on searches that can become matters, month after month.
Not sure the account needs a retainer? Start with the audit. If your setup is already tight, we will say so in writing and you have lost nothing.
Your other options, fairly stated
A freelancer, a specialist legal-marketing agency and an in-house hire can all work. Here is where each one genuinely wins, and where we sit.
A good freelancer
Cheaper, and a good one can run the bidding side of the account competently. What is harder to get from one person at £10 to £35 a click is a landing page per practice area and clean call tracking running alongside it — that combination is what keeps the waste down, and it is usually two skill sets, not one. Can be the right call for a single practice area on a modest budget.
A specialist legal-marketing agency
Real familiarity with SRA publicity rules and the difference between a conveyancing search and a litigation one, which is worth something. The trade-off is usually size: a senior name on the proposal, day-to-day work handled further down the chain, and a longer minimum term than three months. At the largest legal marketing budgets that structure earns its keep; below that you are often paying for account layers you do not need.
An in-house paralegal or marketer
Nobody understands your practice areas and capacity better than someone already on staff, and they are there for the client queries the ads generate. But a full-time hire costs a multiple of a retainer, and an account burning £25 a click needs someone policing search terms weekly — a part-time addition to somebody's existing job rarely keeps pace with that.
Where we sit: senior-only work on a fixed retainer from £1,200 a month, with the practice-area pages and call tracking built in, and no contracts past month three. That clause is the honesty mechanism — if the enquiries stop justifying the fee, you leave, so the only way we keep the account is by keeping cost per enquiry down.
Questions law firms ask us
Can you guarantee a number of new client enquiries?
No, and be wary of anyone who will. Solicitors are bound by the SRA's requirement that publicity is accurate and not misleading, and we hold our own claims to the same bar. What we do commit to: audit findings in writing within 48 hours, and monthly reporting that shows your cost per enquiry to the pound.
How do you decide which practice areas to advertise?
You do. We build one campaign per practice area you want more of, weight budget by matter value and capacity, and exclude work you cannot take — whether that is conflicts, capacity or simply areas you do not practise — with negative keyword lists. Nothing goes live without your sign-off, so you never pay for enquiries you cannot act on.
Does call tracking compromise client confidentiality?
No. We measure that a call happened, which advert and keyword produced it, and how long it lasted. Tracking numbers simply forward to your reception, call recording is off by default, and nothing about the content of a matter is stored in the ads account. Your intake process stays exactly as it is.
Will our ads create compliance problems with the SRA?
Every ad is written down and sent for your approval before it runs. No superlatives you cannot evidence, no fee claims your website does not match, no implied guarantees of outcome. Your firm remains responsible for its own publicity, which is exactly why nothing runs without your written sign-off — and if your compliance partner wants changes, we make them.
How quickly will we see results?
The audit arrives in writing within 48 hours of read-only access. Account changes take effect as soon as you approve them, and we report monthly from day one. There are no contracts past month three, so the numbers have to keep earning the retainer — that is the arrangement.
We already run Google Ads. Is the audit still worth it?
That is the strongest case for it. The 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit is built from your live account with read-only access, no call required, findings in writing within 48 hours. If the account is tight, we will tell you so. The findings are yours either way.
Find out what your legal clicks are actually buying
The 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit, built from your live account. Findings in writing within 48 hours, yours either way.
No call required · read-only access · in writing within 48 hours