Legal is one of the most expensive click markets there is, which changes the arithmetic of hiring an agency. In a cheap market a mediocre campaign wastes a modest budget. In legal, where a single competitive click can cost more than a month of hosting, a mediocre campaign burns a five figure test before anyone has learned anything. That is why the questions worth asking a paid search agency here are not about creativity. They are about which queries get bought, how a call is qualified, what happens to the leads after they arrive, and whether the ads and landing pages satisfy the professional conduct rules your state bar applies to lawyer advertising. This page covers all four.
Which clicks are worth buying, and which quietly drain the budget
Intent in legal search is unusually stratified. Someone typing a phrase that names their situation and their city is close to calling somebody. Someone typing a phrase that asks what a term means is reading, and may be a student, a journalist or an opposing party. Both sit in the same keyword tool with similar volumes, and the second group is where most wasted legal budget goes. A competent agency starts by separating those groups, buys the narrow commercial terms first, and adds a long negative keyword list before launch rather than after the first invoice. Ask any candidate to show you the negative list they would start with, and the query report from an existing legal account with client details removed. A campaign whose search terms report is full of definitional and do it yourself queries is not being managed, it is being hosted.
What the ads and pages may say, under the conduct rules
Lawyer advertising is regulated speech, and the constraints apply to a search ad, a landing page and a call script alike. The ABA model framework, adopted in state specific forms, prohibits false or misleading communications about a lawyer or the lawyer's services, and state rules build on that: North Carolina's Rule 7.1, for example, states that a lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer's services, and Rule 7.2 sets out the specific requirements for advertising, including that a communication must include the name and contact information of at least one lawyer or law firm responsible for its content. Rules vary by state on comparative claims, specialisation language, past results and required disclaimers. Ask an agency which state rules govern your ads and who reviews copy against them before it goes live. If the answer is that the firm reviews everything, that is fine, but it needs to be scheduled, because unreviewed copy sitting in an ad queue is where the risk lives.
What it costs, and how the agency is paid
Two numbers decide whether legal paid search works: the cost per qualified case, and the share of enquiries your intake actually converts. Agency pricing comes in three shapes. A flat monthly management fee is the most predictable and the easiest to compare. A percentage of media spend is common and creates a mild incentive to recommend more spend, which is manageable if you set the budget yourself. Pay per lead or pay per case shifts risk to the agency and prices that risk into the unit cost, and it requires a written definition of what counts as a lead before the first month, because that definition is where these arrangements go wrong. Whichever shape you choose, insist that the ad account is owned by the firm rather than the agency, so the campaign history stays with you when the relationship ends.
Intake is where most legal PPC campaigns actually fail
An expensive click that reaches a voicemail is a donation. In practice the largest single improvement available to most firms buying paid search has nothing to do with the ads: it is answering the phone during the hours the ads run, calling back inside minutes rather than days, and recording the outcome of every enquiry so the campaign can be optimised against signed cases rather than form fills. Ask an agency whether they will feed case outcomes back into the bidding, and what they need from your case management system to do it. Most firms buying paid search are also buying organic search from someone, and the two work best when the same intake data judges both, so agree the definition of a qualified enquiry once and apply it to every channel.
Questions people ask about ppc for lawyers
Is paid search or SEO the better first investment for a firm?
Paid search buys immediate, controllable volume at a known cost and stops the day you stop paying. Organic search is slower, compounds, and survives a budget freeze. Firms that need cases this quarter start with paid; firms building a practice over years need organic eventually regardless. The common mistake is running paid indefinitely as a substitute for building anything durable, which leaves the firm renting its entire pipeline.
Should we bid on our own firm name?
Usually yes, because competitors may be bidding on it and the click is cheap. The counterargument is that you would have received most of those visitors from the organic result anyway, so some of that spend is buying traffic you already had. Run it as a test: pause brand bidding for a fortnight and watch total branded arrivals rather than paid arrivals alone.
What is a realistic minimum monthly budget?
Enough to accumulate a meaningful number of clicks per campaign per month, which in an expensive practice area means a substantially larger budget than in a cheap one. Rather than a fixed figure, work backwards: take the cost per click in your area and city, decide how many enquiries you need to judge the test, and apply a conservative conversion assumption. If that arithmetic produces a number you cannot spend for three consecutive months, paid search is not yet the right channel.
How quickly should we expect results?
Ads can serve within a day, but a fair read on whether the campaign works takes roughly a quarter, because you need enough signed matters, not enough clicks, to judge it. Expect the first month to be expensive and untidy while negative keywords and bids settle. Judge month one on process (were negatives added, was tracking correct, were calls answered) and month three on cost per case.