How to Run Google Ads for a Law Firm

Google Ads for lawyers is the most expensive keyword auction on the internet, and the platform is designed to spend your budget whether or not it makes you money. “Personal injury attorney” clicks routinely clear $100, and a single high-intent case is worth thousands — which is exactly why every firm in your city is bidding and why the default settings will drain a $3,000 budget in a week with nothing to show. This is not the channel to “try casually.” Run it tight or do not run it. Here is how to run it tight.

Start with Local Services Ads, not Search

Before you touch a single Search campaign, set up Local Services Ads (LSAs). These are the pay-per-lead listings with the green “Google Screened” checkmark that sit above every text ad and even the map pack. For law firms, Google requires a background check and license and insurance verification to earn the badge, which is annoying for a week and then a moat, because most of your competitors never bothered.

The economics are fundamentally better than Search. You pay per lead (a call or message), not per click, so you are not charged for tire-kickers who click and bounce. Lead prices vary by practice area and market but often land $30 to $100 for a valid lead, and — critically — you can dispute and get credited for leads that are clearly out of your area or practice. It is the closest thing to a rigged-in-your-favor channel in legal marketing. Set it up first and let it run while you build Search.

The negative keyword list is where you save your budget

On the Search side, the fastest way to waste money is to bid on a broad legal term and let Google match it to everything adjacent. Someone searching “free legal aid,” “pro bono lawyer,” “law school near me,” “attorney salary,” or “how to sue someone myself” is not your client, but Google will happily charge you $60 to $90 to show them your ad. A serious negative keyword list blocks these before they cost you.

Build this list before launch and keep adding to it weekly by reading the search terms report — the actual queries that triggered your ad. In legal, the negative list is often longer than the keyword list, and it is where the profit hides.

Match the keyword to how ready they are to hire

Not all legal searches are equal. “Car accident lawyer near me” is someone with a case, ready now — expensive and worth it. “Do I have a personal injury case” is earlier, cheaper, and needs a landing page that educates before it asks for the call. “What is the statute of limitations” is mostly research. Bid hard on the bottom-of-funnel terms where someone is ready to hire, and either skip or bid low on the research terms.

Your ad copy has to match the intent and clear your state bar’s advertising rules — no promising outcomes, no “best lawyer” superlatives you cannot substantiate, and include your firm name. The strategy layer that connects this to your broader search presence is in how to advertise a law firm on Google, and the page they land on matters as much as the ad — see how to make a website for a law firm.

Track cost-per-case, not cost-per-click

The only number that matters is what it costs to sign a client, and you get there by chaining the math. Say your clicks average $120, and 1 in 12 clicks becomes a phone call, and 1 in 4 calls becomes a consult, and 1 in 2 consults signs. That is 96 clicks to sign one client, or about $11,500 per signed case. For a personal injury case worth $8,000+ in fees, that may still lose money — which is why LSAs and tighter targeting matter so much.

This is also the honest case for hiring help. The difference between a campaign that costs $11,500 per case and one that costs $2,500 is entirely in the negatives, the match types, the landing page, and the bid discipline — invisible skill that only shows up in the cost-per-case number months later.

Run both once you can afford it: LSAs for the cheapest, highest-trust leads, and Search to capture the volume LSAs miss. Start with LSAs alone if your budget is under about $2,000 a month.

Getting the plumbing right is the part that decides everything

You can win the auction and still lose the client if the click lands on a slow, generic page. Two things you can do for free this week: point every ad at a dedicated landing page for that one practice area (not your homepage), and make sure the phone number is a tap-to-call button in the top inch of the phone screen. A stressed searcher will not scroll to find how to reach you.

But the campaign, the landing page, and the tracking are one system, and doing any piece badly wastes the money you spent on the others — a badly built campaign literally trains Google to send you worse leads over time. This is the work we do. To hand the whole system — ads, landing page, and call tracking — to people who run it for a living, see how we run Google Ads and Local Services Ads. If you also need the site those ads point to built to convert, get a free video walkthrough. And if you are earlier and still shaping the firm and its numbers, start at expntl.com.

Should you run Google Ads yourself, or hand it off?

You can learn the match types, the negative list, and the call tracking, and a disciplined solo who reads the search terms report every week can run a tight account. The real question is whether the cases you lose while you learn cost more than paying someone who already runs legal accounts to a known cost-per-case. We wrote an honest breakdown of when doing it yourself still pays and when it quietly stops: 7 signs your firm needs a Google Ads agency. When you would rather it were handled, request a free proposal.