How to Optimise Your Law Firm PPC Campaigns

PPC can be one of the quickest ways for a law firm to put itself in front of someone actively looking for legal help. It can also become an expensive source of irrelevant enquiries if campaigns are allowed to run without enough attention to search intent, targeting and what happens after somebody clicks an advert.

Legal keywords can have a high cost per click, particularly in competitive practice areas. That makes the quality of the traffic just as important as the volume. Paying for 100 visitors who are unlikely to instruct the firm is rarely preferable to paying for 20 people whose circumstances closely match the work the firm wants to generate.

A good PPC strategy starts with the firm’s commercial priorities and follows the prospective client’s journey from their original search through to an enquiry. Outlined below are some of the areas we consider particularly important when managing PPC marketing for law firms.

1. Decide what work you actually want from PPC

Before looking at keywords or writing ad copy, decide what you want the campaign to generate.

“More family law enquiries” is quite a broad objective. A family team might specifically want privately funded divorce work, complex financial settlements or child arrangement matters in a particular location.

The same applies across other practice areas. A commercial firm may want shareholder dispute instructions rather than general business enquiries. A criminal defence practice might be interested in privately funded representation for particular offences. Those distinctions affect the searches worth paying for.

This is particularly important in legal PPC advertising, where a click can be expensive. A campaign that produces a large number of leads can look successful until the firm establishes that very few involve work it actually wants or can accept.

Before launching a campaign, establish which services are priorities, where clients need to be located, what a suitable enquiry looks like and, where possible, the approximate value of the matters being targeted.

2. Target the way potential clients actually search

Keyword research for pay per click PPC campaigns requires an understanding of the language clients use. Lawyers naturally describe their services using legal terminology. The person who needs those services may use completely different language. For example, someone may search:

“Can my employer sack me without warning?”

before they ever search for:

“unfair dismissal solicitor”.

Someone going through divorce may search for help with “splitting the house and pension” without knowing that the solicitor would describe their matter as a financial remedy. Both technical and everyday language can have a place within a campaign. The important thing is understanding the intent behind the search.

There is also a significant difference between someone researching a legal topic and someone actively trying to find a solicitor. A search for “what is unfair dismissal?” may come from a student, an employee researching their rights or somebody at the beginning of a dispute.

“Unfair dismissal solicitor Manchester” provides a much clearer indication that the person may be considering professional legal advice. Good keyword research looks beyond search volume and considers what the wording tells us about the people searching.

3. Use negative keywords properly

Negative keywords are one of the most useful tools available for improving the quality of a legal PPC campaign. They prevent adverts from appearing for searches that contain particular words or phrases.

A firm targeting privately funded work, for example, may need to consider searches containing terms such as “free”, “legal aid” or “pro bono”, depending on the services it provides.

Other irrelevant searches might relate to jobs, salaries, training, university courses, templates or general research. The appropriate negatives will vary considerably between firms and campaigns. They should therefore be based on the actual work the firm accepts rather than copied from a generic list.

Search term reports are particularly useful here. They show the searches that have triggered adverts and can reveal wording you would never have thought to exclude when setting up the campaign.

Reviewing these regularly allows the campaign to become more focused over time and helps prevent budget being spent on searches unlikely to result in suitable instructions.

4. Keep campaigns tightly structured

Trying to cover every service within one campaign can make it much harder to control budgets, messaging and performance. Where appropriate, separate campaigns and ad groups around specific services and intentions.

A family law campaign, for example, could distinguish between divorce, financial settlements, child arrangements and pre-nuptial agreements.

This allows the keywords, ad copy and destination page to be much more closely aligned.

Someone searching specifically for a financial settlement solicitor can see an advert about financial settlements and arrive on a page dedicated to that service. This continuity is extremely important.

It can improve relevance for the prospective client and can also contribute to Google’s assessment of quality score, which considers factors including expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.

5. Write ad copy around what the client needs

Law firm adverts have limited space, so the wording needs to work hard. Generic phrases such as “expert legal advice” or “experienced solicitors” tell the searcher relatively little, particularly when several competing adverts make similar claims. The strongest ad copy is usually closely connected to the search.

If somebody is looking for a solicitor to review a settlement agreement, the advert can make it clear that the firm provides settlement agreement advice, indicate relevant locations or availability and give the person a clear next step.

Think about what could matter to the person making that particular search. Depending on the service, this could include speed of response, fixed fees, specialist expertise, office location, remote appointments or a particular accreditation.

Claims should, of course, be accurate and appropriate for legal advertising.

A clear call to action can then tell the person what to do next, whether that is requesting a call back, arranging an initial consultation or speaking to the team.

6. Send the click to the right landing page

One of the easiest ways to waste a good click is to send it to the wrong page. Imagine somebody searches for:

“shareholder dispute solicitor Manchester”.

They see a highly relevant advert, click it and arrive on the firm’s general commercial law homepage. They now have to find the relevant service themselves and establish whether the firm actually handles shareholder disputes.

A dedicated landing page can answer those questions immediately. It should reflect the search and advert, explain the service in language the client understands, demonstrate relevant expertise and provide a straightforward route to make contact.

The page should also work properly on mobile devices and load quickly. Someone searching for a solicitor may be comparing several firms, so a slow or confusing website can quickly undermine the money spent getting them there.

7. Think about conversion before increasing the budget

When a campaign isn’t producing enough enquiries, increasing spend can seem like an obvious solution. Sometimes the problem is elsewhere. Look at what happens between the click and the enquiry.

Does the landing page immediately address the visitor’s problem? Are the solicitors who undertake the work visible? Is there evidence of expertise? Can the person find reviews? Is the telephone number obvious? Is the contact form unnecessarily long?

If 500 relevant visitors reach a page and almost nobody contacts the firm, generating another 500 visitors may simply reproduce the same result at greater cost.

This is why PPC should form part of the wider digital marketing strategy rather than being treated as an isolated advertising channel.

8. Improve Quality Score and relevance

Google’s quality score is a diagnostic measure that can help identify weaknesses in keyword relevance, expected click through rates and landing page experience. A low score can indicate that the keyword, advert and page are poorly aligned.

For example, a broad “family solicitor” keyword paired with generic family law ad copy and a homepage destination may offer a much weaker experience than a tightly focused divorce search connected to a relevant advert and divorce service page.

Quality Score shouldn’t become the sole objective of a campaign, but it can provide useful clues when diagnosing performance. Ultimately, the experience needs to make sense for the prospective client. The search they make, advert they see and page they reach should feel like parts of the same journey.

9. Don’t ignore Bing Ads

Google dominates conversations about paid search, but Bing Ads, now part of Microsoft Advertising, can also be worth considering. The audience and search volumes will differ, so it shouldn’t simply be assumed that a campaign performing well on Google will produce identical results elsewhere.

However, testing additional search engines can help firms understand whether they can generate suitable enquiries at a commercially viable acquisition cost. This can be particularly useful in competitive areas where Google Ads costs are high.

The important point is to assess each channel using the same commercial measures: the quality of enquiries, resulting instructions and cost of acquiring the work.

10. Track the right conversions

You cannot properly optimise PPC campaigns if you don’t know what they generate. Clicks are easy to measure. Enquiries require better tracking.

At a minimum, firms should understand when PPC visitors complete important actions such as submitting an enquiry form, making a qualifying telephone call or booking a consultation. This allows you to compare keywords, adverts, campaigns and landing pages based on the actions that matter.

The next stage is lead quality. If two campaigns each generate 20 enquiries, they might initially look equally successful. If one produces 15 suitable prospects and the other produces two, the commercial picture is completely different.

Where systems allow, feeding information about qualified leads and new clients back into reporting can provide a much better understanding of performance. This turns PPC from a traffic-generation exercise into a measurable lead generation channel.

11. Review search terms and performance regularly

Legal searches change, competitors change their activity and Google’s advertising platform continues to evolve. A PPC campaign shouldn’t be set up and then left untouched for months.

Regular reviews can identify:

• searches wasting budget;
• new negative keywords;
• keywords generating strong enquiries;
• adverts with poor click through rates;
• differences in performance by location, device or time;
• landing pages that aren’t converting; and
• campaigns where the cost per click or cost per enquiry is becoming commercially unsustainable.

This information should feed back into the wider campaign.

The firm itself can also provide valuable insight. Marketing data might show that a campaign generated 30 enquiries, while the fee earner can explain that 20 were unsuitable because of a particular issue that wasn’t apparent from the initial analytics. That feedback can lead to changes in targeting, keywords, messaging or the landing page.

12. Look beyond cost per lead

Cost per lead is useful, but law firms should be careful about using it as the only measure of PPC performance. Legal matters can vary enormously in value.

Paying £150 to generate an enquiry may initially look expensive. If a significant proportion of those enquiries become valuable instructions, the campaign could be commercially successful. Conversely, £30 leads aren’t particularly cheap if almost none can be converted into paying clients.

The firm’s PPC strategy should therefore consider the value of the work being generated as well as the cost of generating the initial enquiry. Over time, firms can begin to identify which services, locations and search terms produce the strongest commercial return and allocate budgets accordingly.

PPC marketing for law firms should focus on the right enquiries

Paid search gives law firms an opportunity to appear prominently on search engine result pages SERPs at the point somebody is actively looking for help. That makes it a potentially powerful form of lead generation, particularly for firms operating in competitive markets.

Performance depends heavily on what happens around the advert. The best marketing strategies connect the firm’s commercial priorities with the searches prospective clients make. Keywords are selected around genuine intent, negative keywords reduce wasted spend, ad copy reflects the client’s problem and each click leads to a relevant page that makes it easy to enquire.

Accurate conversion tracking then provides the information needed to improve the campaign further.

For us, that is the most useful way to approach PPC marketing for law firms. Rather than focusing solely on clicks, impressions or the lowest possible cost per click, we want to understand whether the campaign is putting the firm in front of the right people and generating enquiries that have a realistic prospect of becoming instructions.

Improve Your Law Firm’s PPC Campaigns with BSD Legal Marketing

BSD Legal Marketing specialises in digital marketing for law firms and businesses across the legal sector.

We can help with PPC strategy, keyword research, campaign structure, ad copy, landing pages, conversion tracking and ongoing optimisation, with campaigns developed around the services and clients your firm actually wants to attract.

Contact BSD Legal Marketing to discuss your current PPC advertising and how we can help you generate more relevant legal enquiries from paid search.