PPC Marketing for Law Firms
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PPC can be one of the quickest ways for a law firm to get in front of people who are actively looking for legal help. Unlike some forms of digital marketing, where you are trying to create demand or build awareness, search advertising allows you to reach someone who may already have decided that they need a solicitor.
That is also what makes PPC marketing for law firms so competitive. Legal keywords can be expensive, particularly in areas such as personal injury, family law, employment, conveyancing and commercial litigation. If a campaign is poorly targeted, it does not take long to spend a significant budget on clicks that never turn into instructions.
At BSD Legal Marketing, we approach law firm PPC from a slightly different perspective. Before worrying about clicks, impressions or even cost per lead, we want to understand what work the firm actually wants to generate. From there, we can look at who the ideal clients are, what they are likely to search for and what needs to happen between clicking an advert and making an enquiry.
The aim is to generate more of the right enquiries, rather than simply getting more people onto your website.
What is PPC for law firms?
PPC for law firms is a form of paid digital advertising where the advertiser generally pays when somebody clicks on an advert. Google Ads is the platform most firms will be familiar with, allowing businesses to advertise against searches relating to their products or services.
For a law firm, that could mean appearing when somebody searches for “employment solicitor Manchester”, “divorce solicitor near me” or “shareholder dispute solicitor”.
These searches can have considerable commercial value because the person is actively looking for legal services. In some cases, they may be ready to speak to a solicitor immediately.
This is one of the main differences between pay per click advertising and broader forms of advertising. Rather than putting your name in front of a large audience and hoping that some of them require a solicitor, PPC can target people based on what they are searching for at that particular moment.
However, appearing at the top of Google does not guarantee that someone will become a client. Successful PPC advertising for law firms needs to consider the whole journey, including the search, the advert, the page they arrive on and how easy it is to make contact.
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Before we choose keywords, we want to know what work you want
It is tempting to start a PPC campaign by opening a keyword tool and looking for phrases with the highest search volumes. We prefer to start with the law firm.
If you tell us you want more family law enquiries, for example, we would want to know what that actually means. Do you want divorce work, financial remedy cases, private children matters or high-net-worth separations? Are there certain locations you want to target? Is there work you don’t want? What is an average new matter worth to the firm?
The same applies across other practice areas. A personal injury firm might specifically want employers’ liability and public liability claims while avoiding road traffic accident enquiries. A commercial litigation team may be looking for substantial shareholder disputes and contractual claims rather than every person searching for general information about a business disagreement.
This information should influence the entire campaign, from keyword research and budgets to advert copy and landing pages.
If an agency doesn’t understand what a good enquiry looks like for your firm, it is difficult for it to build a campaign designed to generate them.
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Keyword research needs to consider intent, not just volume
Good keyword research for legal PPC is as much about understanding the person behind the search as it is about looking at numbers.
A search for “employment law” could come from a student, an employee researching their rights, an employer or somebody simply looking for general information. A search for “employment solicitor for settlement agreement Manchester” tells us considerably more about what that person wants.
This is why high intent searches can be particularly valuable.
It does not mean that every keyword has to include “solicitor” or “lawyer”. Depending on the service, people may search for their problem rather than the professional they need. Someone involved in a shareholder dispute, for example, may search for “business partner trying to force me out” long before they search for a commercial litigation solicitor.
Effective PPC for law firms involves identifying these different searches and deciding which are commercially relevant enough to pay for.
We also continue this research after the campaign launches. The actual search-term data can show us how people are finding the adverts, often revealing both valuable opportunities and searches that we would rather not pay for.
Negative keywords are just as important
One of the quickest ways to waste a PPC budget is to focus entirely on the searches you want and ignore the searches you don’t.
Negative keywords allow us to prevent adverts from appearing for irrelevant or unsuitable searches. Depending on the law firm and the campaign, these could include phrases relating to jobs, legal qualifications, templates, free advice or legal aid.
The right exclusions vary considerably between firms. A search containing “legal aid” might be completely irrelevant to one family practice and highly relevant to another, which is why copying a generic negative keyword list into every legal campaign is not something we would recommend.
We regularly review the search terms that have triggered adverts and refine the negative keyword lists accordingly. This helps reduce wasted ad spending and concentrates more of the budget on people who could realistically become clients.
Law firm PPC campaigns need proper structure
A firm offering six different legal services should not have all of them thrown into one campaign with generic advertisements. The closer we can align the person’s search with the advert they see and the page they reach, the better the experience is likely to be.
For example, if a personal injury firm wants accident at work and public liability claims, we may separate those services within its PPC campaigns. Someone searching specifically for an accident at work solicitor can then see advertising relating to workplace injuries rather than a generic “Personal Injury Lawyers” advert.
The same principle applies to larger firms with multiple departments. Family, employment, property and commercial litigation clients have very different legal problems and should not be treated as one audience simply because they all require a solicitor.
This structure also makes campaign data more useful. We can see which services are using the budget, which are producing enquiries and where changes need to be made.
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Your advert has to compete with other law firms
When somebody searches for a solicitor, they are unlikely to see your firm in isolation. They may see several sponsored results, local listings and organic search results within the same screen.
The advert therefore needs to give them a reason to consider your firm. This doesn’t mean filling every headline with phrases such as “leading”, “expert” or “trusted”. We would rather use the available space to tell someone something useful about the service, location, relevant experience or what they can do next.
Google Ads also provides additional assets, historically known as ad extensions, which can provide extra links and information alongside an advertisement. Used properly, these can make an advert more useful and allow someone to navigate directly to relevant parts of the website.
The objective is not to persuade everybody to click. A click costs money. We would rather attract the people who have a genuine reason to consider instructing the firm.
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What happens after the click matters just as much
This is one of the most important parts of our approach to PPC. You can have excellent targeting, carefully researched keywords and compelling adverts and still have a poor campaign if the website doesn’t turn those visitors into enquiries. A common example is sending every Google Ads visitor to the homepage.
If someone has searched specifically for a settlement agreement solicitor, clicked an advert about settlement agreements and then lands on a homepage promoting family law, conveyancing, employment, commercial property and six other services, we are creating unnecessary work for them.
Relevant landing pages should continue the conversation started by the search and the advert. The visitor should immediately be able to see that the firm handles their particular problem and understand why they should consider getting in touch.
The page should provide enough information to answer the questions that might prevent an enquiry, demonstrate appropriate experience and contain clear calls to action. Depending on the service, that could mean requesting a callback, booking a consultation or simply speaking to a member of the team.
We want to track enquiries, not just clicks
If a law firm spends £3,000 on Google Ads and receives 300 website visitors, knowing that each visitor cost an average of £10 is useful. It doesn’t tell us whether the campaign worked. We need to know what those visitors did next.
Conversion tracking can show which campaigns, advertisements and keywords generated contact form submissions, telephone calls or consultation bookings. This allows decisions to be made using actual enquiry data rather than simply looking at traffic. But even this is only part of the picture.
If, for example, one keyword generates 20 leads at £50 each while another generates ten at £80. It would be easy to assume that the first keyword is performing better.
What if the first 20 enquiries produce no new matters, while four of the ten more expensive enquiries become clients? Suddenly, the £80 leads look considerably more attractive.
This is why we are interested in quality leads and not simply driving the reported cost per conversion as low as possible.
PPC should be judged on return on investment
Legal keywords are sometimes expensive. That does not automatically make them bad keywords.
The real question is whether the cost of acquiring a client makes commercial sense in relation to the value of the matter.
If a £20 click ultimately contributes to a £10,000 instruction, the fact that another keyword costs £5 per click isn’t particularly relevant. Equally, cheap traffic has little value if the people arriving on the website never become clients.
This is why return on investment should sit behind the wider PPC strategy.
Different practice areas can also justify very different acquisition costs. A fixed-fee service worth a few hundred pounds cannot necessarily sustain the same cost per lead as a substantial commercial dispute.
We take these differences into account when developing PPC strategies and allocating budgets.
PPC marketing for law firms with BSD Legal Marketing
At BSD Legal Marketing, our approach to PPC marketing for law firms starts with understanding the firm rather than simply setting up a Google Ads account.
We want to understand which services you want to grow, what a valuable new matter looks like, who your ideal client is and what that person is likely to search before contacting a solicitor.
From there, we can develop and manage the campaign, including keyword research, account structure, negative keywords, advert creation, landing page strategy, conversion tracking and ongoing optimisation.
Most importantly, we want to understand whether the advertising is generating work.
Clicks, impressions and conversion rates all help us make decisions, but they aren’t the ultimate measure of success. If your PPC campaign is working properly, it should be putting your firm in front of the right potential clients and helping turn that visibility into commercially worthwhile enquiries.
If you are considering PPC for law firms, or you are already investing in Google Ads but aren’t convinced that your ad spending is generating the right results, speak to BSD Legal Marketing about developing a campaign around the work your firm actually wants.
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