PAID SEARCH
Paid Search Managed to Cost per Matter, Not Cost per Click.
Legal clicks are among the most expensive on Google. That is survivable. Paying for the wrong ones is not, and most law firm ad accounts are full of them.
Every hour, people in your city search for exactly what your firm does and hire whoever answers well. Paid search buys your way into those moments today, while SEO earns them permanently. Run to cost per matter, it is the most controllable acquisition channel a firm can own. Run to clicks, it is a donation to Google.
We run it the first way, and everything about the setup follows from that: which searches we buy, which we exclude, where the click lands, and what gets reported to you at the end of the month.
What the work actually is
- Campaigns built on hiring intent keywords, practice area by practice area, with the exclusion list doing as much work as the keywords.
- Local Service Ads tested wherever your market supports them, because paying per lead beats paying per click.
- Landing pages matched to the search, with the enquiry path above the fold and a phone number that gets answered.
- Ad copy written inside the professional rules and passed through a lawyer’s review before it spends anything.
- Tracking from click to enquiry to matter, so decisions run on the number that matters.
How we run it
- Scope the economics: what an enquiry is worth by practice area and what the market charges per click.
- Build campaigns, exclusions and landing pages, then launch on the agreed budget.
- Iterate weekly: search terms, ads, pages, bids.
- Report cost per enquiry and cost per matter, and reweight or retire campaigns on the numbers.
The honest part
Some practice areas in some cities do not support profitable paid search, and no amount of optimisation changes the arithmetic. When that is the case we say it in the strategy call, not after months of retainer, and we point the budget at the quadrant that will earn it.
QUESTIONS FIRMS ASK US
Straight Answers.
How much should a law firm spend on Google Ads?
Enough to gather real data in your market, and not a dollar into campaigns that cannot reach a workable cost per enquiry. The honest answer is scoped per practice area, because a click in a competitive compensation market and a click in suburban conveyancing are different economies. We put numbers to it in the strategy call.
How fast does paid search produce enquiries?
It is the fastest channel we run: campaigns can be live within weeks of the plan being approved, and data arrives immediately. Judgement still takes a cycle or two of iteration, which is where most accounts are abandoned right before they improve.
What are Local Service Ads and should we use them?
A Google format that sits above the normal ads for many local service searches and bills per lead rather than per click. Availability in Australia varies by practice area and location, so we check what your market supports and test it first where it exists, because the intent is high and the billing model is honest.
What stops our budget being wasted on junk clicks?
The exclusion list, mostly. Free, salary, course, template, DIY, other states, other practice areas: the negative keywords are where legal ad accounts quietly become profitable. That, and landing page discipline, so the click lands on a page about exactly what was searched.
What happens if the campaigns are not profitable?
We tell you, show you the numbers, and either fix the specific leak or recommend switching the campaign off and moving budget to a channel that earns it. Continuing to spend on arithmetic that does not work is how agencies keep retainers and lose clients.
One quadrant of a larger engine.
Google Ads works hardest when the other channels a client checks are working with it. See how the quadrants fit together, or bring us the whole problem.