For partners, practice managers and marketing leads at UK solicitors’ firms who want Google Ads to bring in new instructions: how people look for a solicitor, what changes when the account belongs to an SRA-regulated firm, how I would structure the campaigns, and the mistakes that use up a legal budget fastest.
How people look for a solicitor on Google
Legal searches start with something happening in a person’s life, and that trigger shapes how they search and how quickly they decide.
- Something urgent. A relative has been arrested, an employer has called a disciplinary hearing, a partner has started divorce proceedings. People search on a phone, often outside office hours, and ring the first firm that looks able to help today.
- Planned and price-checked. Buying a house, making a will, dealing with an estate. These clients compare quotes, often against online conveyancers and comparison panels, and the published fee carries a lot of weight.
- Considered over weeks. A business dispute, a contested will, a settlement agreement. The client reads around, checks the firm and the individual solicitor, and may take a while to instruct. A single matter can be worth a good deal in fees.
- Your name. A recommendation from a friend, an accountant or an estate agent, followed by a search for the firm before picking up the phone.
Few firms want more of every kind of work. The account should follow the practice areas where you have capacity and where a new matter is worth what it costs to win online.
What changes in Google Ads for a law firm
A campaign for each practice area
I build campaigns around areas of law, not around “solicitors” in general. Family, employment, conveyancing and wills and probate each get their own campaign, budget and location settings, so you can see what a new family enquiry costs next to a conveyancing quote request. Each one starts as a Google search campaign, because someone who types “settlement agreement solicitor” has already told you what they need.
Keywords and the searches to keep out
Legal terms draw in a lot of people who will never instruct a firm: law students, people hunting for paralegal and training contract vacancies, people after free advice, legal aid searches when you do not do legal aid work, and do-it-yourself searches for divorce forms or will templates. I start with phrase and exact match on the terms that show someone wants to hire a solicitor, put a negative keyword list in place before launch, and go through the search terms every week. Broad match comes later, if at all, once the account knows what a real instruction looks like.
Geography and opening hours
Some legal work is local and some is not. A high street firm’s family and private client work usually comes from a few miles around each office, while employment, immigration and online conveyancing can be offered across England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legal systems, so I exclude them unless you can act there. Urgent work, criminal defence above all, only runs call ads while someone can answer. A call that reaches voicemail at eleven at night is a paid click handed to the next firm on the page.
The rules your ads have to meet
Google’s ad review checks its own policies, not the SRA’s, so making sure an ad meets the professional rules falls to the firm and to whoever runs the account. Three sets of rules matter most.
- The SRA Codes of Conduct. Publicity, including anything said about charges, must be accurate and not misleading. Words such as “specialist”, “leading” or “expert” need to be supportable, and a fee in an ad must be one clients are genuinely quoted.
- The SRA Transparency Rules. For residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, unfair and wrongful dismissal claims, immigration other than asylum, summary motoring offences, debt recovery up to £100,000 and business premises licensing, your website must already publish price and service information. The page an ad points to should carry it, and any “from” figure in the ad should match it. The site also needs your complaints procedure and the SRA digital badge.
- The CAP Code. The ASA applies it to solicitors’ advertising like anyone else’s. “No win, no fee” causes the most trouble: if a success fee or other deductions can come out of the client’s compensation, the ad must not give the impression they keep all of it.
Personal injury carries one more rule. Section 56 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 bans paying or receiving referral fees for personal injury work. Running your own ads is advertising, but buying claims case by case from a lead generator can fall inside the ban. Whoever manages your ads should be paid for managing them, not per claim passed to you, and your COLP should confirm the arrangement before anything starts.
Landing pages
Each campaign should send people to a page about that area of law, never the home page. A visitor wants to know who will handle the matter, roughly what it will cost, how long it usually takes and how to begin. Named solicitors and their roles, the price information, the regulatory details, and a short enquiry form beside a visible phone number cover most of that. If your site cannot provide it, I build landing pages for paid campaigns and check them against the same rules as the ads.
Tracking instructions, not enquiries
Plenty of legal enquiries are people the firm cannot help: the wrong area of law, the wrong part of the country, no budget, or a claim that is out of time. Counting every form and call as a success teaches Google’s bidding to find more of them. I set up call tracking alongside form tracking and test both before launch. Once the firm records which enquiries became instructions, I send that outcome back to Google through enhanced conversions for leads or an offline import, so the bidding learns from clients rather than from contact attempts.
Confidentiality matters at this step. An enquiry about a criminal charge, a divorce or an injury can reveal special category or criminal offence data under UK GDPR. I send Google only what the bidding needs (a click identifier or a hashed contact detail, the outcome and a value) and nothing about the nature of the matter, and I agree the set-up with whoever handles data protection at the firm. Tracking also waits for each visitor’s cookie choice, as it should on any UK site.
A typical account structure
| Campaign | What it covers | How I run it |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | Searches for the firm and its solicitors | Small budget, so directories and comparison sites bidding on your name do not take the top slot unopposed |
| Family | Divorce, separation, child arrangements, financial settlements | Local radius, divorce and children matters in separate ad groups |
| Employment | Settlement agreements, dismissal, discrimination | Employee and employer searches split, because the advice and fees differ |
| Conveyancing | Buying, selling and remortgaging | Prices on the landing page, quote requests tracked as the main action |
| Wills and probate | Wills, lasting powers of attorney, estate administration | Fixed fees prominent, calls weighted heavily because many clients prefer to ring |
| Urgent matters | Police station attendance, injunctions | Hours tied to who is on call, calls as the only conversion |
A smaller firm rarely needs all six at once. I usually start with brand plus the one or two areas with the most capacity and the clearest fee value, then add others once tracking produces reliable numbers. I would hold off on Performance Max until the account has months of clean instruction data, because it picks its own placements and matching, which makes it harder to keep away from job seekers and inside SRA rules.
Mistakes common in law firm accounts
- “Solicitors near me” as the whole plan. Generic terms bring every kind of enquiry, and the budget goes on matters the firm does not handle.
- No exclusions for jobs and free advice. Ads showing for “trainee solicitor salary”, “free legal advice” and “legal aid” when none of those is what you offer.
- Ads sent to the home page. The visitor searched for a settlement agreement and lands on a list of eleven practice areas.
- A price in the ad that the page does not repeat. The client sees a different number on arrival, and the publicity is no longer accurate.
- Every enquiry counted as a conversion. The bidding learns to find people who fill in forms, including those the firm turns away.
- Call ads running to an empty office. Lunchtimes, evenings and weekends with nobody answering and the budget still spending.
Where Google Ads fits with the rest of your marketing
Paid search brings enquiries while it runs and stops when the budget does. The search terms report shows the exact questions clients ask, which feeds the practice-area pages that earn organic visits. My page on digital marketing for law firms and professional services covers how search, reviews and paid ads work together for a firm. Work people think about for months, such as wills and lasting powers of attorney, can also suit Facebook and Instagram ads for law firms, which reach people before they search.
Next step
Tell me which practice areas you want to grow, roughly what a new matter in each is worth in fees, and whether you already run Google Ads. If you do, I will look through the account and tell you where the budget is going and what I would change first. Ongoing work runs as monthly PPC management, reported on instructions rather than clicks. Book a call about your firm to get started.