Google Ads for lawyers, counted in real enquiries

Ads you can stand behind

Most Google Ads advice is written for shops and trades, where a bold claim in the headline is normal. A law firm cannot write that way. Rule 36 of the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules, as the Law Society of NSW publishes it, says a solicitor's advertising must not be false, misleading or deceptive, offensive or prohibited by law. It also says a solicitor must not give a false impression of specialist expertise, and that the words accredited specialist belong to solicitors who hold that accreditation.

So the ads we write are plain. They say what the firm does, where its offices are, when it answers and how to get in touch. They do not promise outcomes, rank the firm against others or borrow a word like specialist. Every ad and every landing page goes to you for approval before it runs. You know your obligations better than we do, and the final say is yours.

One ad group per matter and place

A firm that handles criminal law, traffic matters and AVOs should not send all three to its home page. Each kind of matter gets its own ad group, its own ads and its own landing page, so the person who searched for a drink driving lawyer lands on a page about drink driving.

If you have offices in two towns, each office gets its own location targeting and its own page, with the address, the map and the lawyers who work there. That is how we built the site we run for Karnib and Co, with a page for each offence and each office. An Ads account needs the same structure. The search names the problem and the place, and the page should answer both.

Keeping out searches that will never hire you

Legal searches pull in a lot of people who are not looking for a firm. Students search for law courses. Job seekers search for paralegal roles. Some people search for legal aid and are a better fit for it than for a private firm.

We read the search terms report every week and add negative keywords for those searches. Each negative is checked against the work you do before it goes in, so a real client is never blocked. Our post on negative keywords for local service accounts explains the method.

Counting real enquiries

Google Ads will happily report conversions that are not enquiries. Some are actions Google counts on its own, such as taps on a call button inside the ad or requests for directions. On one account we manage, those actions made the conversion total about nine times the real number of enquiries.

We set up the conversions that matter: calls from the ad, taps on the phone number on your site, and contact forms sent. The form asks for a name, a phone number or email, and a short note, nothing more. Everything else stays out of the count, so the account bids toward real people. If your team records which enquiries became matters, we can use that too.

The phone is part of the campaign

Criminal matters do not wait for business hours. Someone charged late on a Friday will call the first firm that answers, and a call that rings out is a click you paid for and lost. Family law and conveyancing enquiries are more often planned, and many can wait until the morning.

We set the ad schedule around when your phone is answered, one practice area at a time. If you run an after hours line, the criminal ads can run overnight. If you do not, they pause, and the contact form takes the enquiry with a clear line about when you will call back.

Your account and your spend

You create the Google Ads account and add your own card. You pay Google directly for every click, and we never hold your payment details. We are added as a manager, and you can remove us whenever you like. Our fee covers managing the account, month to month.

Each month you get a short report with spend, clicks, enquiries and cost per enquiry, plus the changes we made and why. If an ad group is not producing enquiries, we say so and move the budget to one that is.