With lawyers’ marketing pitches seemingly everywhere — from billboards and radio ads to television commercials and beyond — even most casual observers recognize that competition is high in the legal industry. And online, where potential clients frequently turn to search engines as their first step in finding legal representation, the fight to stand out among rivals is especially brutal. With an effective paid search strategy in place, your law firm can capture the attention of the right clients online at the right time, and win their business.
“Paid search is unique in that targeted users already exhibit the intent to find a lawyer by searching on Google, so they are already in the market,” says Caitlynn Goheen, paid search legal account lead. “Once a user has searched for a lawyer, it is less about the person and more about their eligibility for the specific case category. When employing paid search, we can be very strategic about our keyword sets to ensure we are driving users to the website who are actively looking for lawyers — not higher-funnel searches where people may just be inquiring about legal information, without the intent to hire a lawyer.”
In this article, we’ll cover the following important topics to help your law firm optimize its paid search strategy to better reach and attract high-value legal clients:
- Top benefits of paid search for law firms
- Understanding high-value clients — and how to attract them with paid search
- Strategies for optimizing your legal firm’s paid search campaigns
- Measuring success: Beyond ROAS for law firms
Top Benefits of Paid Search for Law Firms
Paid search campaigns, like the ones designed using Google Ads as part of a digital-first marketing strategy, offer law firms the unique opportunity to connect with prospective clients at the exact moment they’re actively searching for legal services — and are often intent on procuring them. In addition, this powerful digital marketing tactic can enable your law firm to tap into a range of other key advantages:
Gain Immediate Visibility
Once you launch a campaign, paid search can put your firm at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) nearly right away, quickly exposing your business to clients who need the specific type(s) of legal help you offer.
Customize Your Campaigns
Paid search allows you to target by geographic location, time of day, audience intent and more, making it easier to reach the specific type of clients you’re looking for.
Level the Playing Field
Small law firms in particular should use paid search, as it enables them to compete directly with larger firms by setting budgets that work for them, targeting niche markets and leveraging hyper-local campaigns to connect with high-intent clients. “Any size law firm would benefit greatly from an active paid search program,” says Goheen. “We can adjust our location targeting and keyword sets to align with any firm’s budget.”
How To Attract High-Value Clients With Paid Search
Using paid search for law firms allows your practice to specifically target high-value clients. These clients can deliver an outsized financial impact for your firm, often through complex cases, long-term retainers or substantial settlements. They typically seek specialized expertise, expect a high level of service and are willing to make substantial investments to secure quality legal representation.
In most cases, high-value clients are problem-solvers who are seeking not just any lawyer … but the right lawyer. Using paid search, you can align your firm’s expertise with the intent of such prospective high-value clients, while establishing trust and positioning your practice as the best choice. To achieve this, employ messaging in your paid search campaigns that showcases your firm’s legal experience, specialties, thought leadership and results. High-value clients often come from specific industries, locations, professions or socioeconomic brackets — and when employed strategically, paid search enables your firm to target each of these audience characteristics in its campaigns.
Strategies for Optimizing Your Legal Firm’s Paid Search Campaigns
Optimizing a paid search campaign requires a combination of thoughtful strategy and ongoing refinement — especially in the areas of keyword choices, copy creation, landing page design and bidding tactics. Here’s more on each of these key ways to maximize your law firm’s paid search results and attract more high-value clients:
Employ a Strong Keyword Strategy
Keywords are the foundation of any successful paid search campaign, especially when targeting high-value clients. These clients often search with specific needs in mind, so your strategy should focus on terms that reflect their intent and legal priorities.
- Focus on long-tail keywords: Phrases like “personal injury lawyer for truck accidents” capture specific intent and attract clients with high-value needs.
- Use negative keywords: Filtering out irrelevant or low-value searches (e.g., “free legal advice”) prevents wasted clicks and helps allocate your firm’s marketing budget toward qualified leads.
“Strategically choose your case category and keyword sets,” says Goheen. “We find that mass torts and multidistrict litigation (MDLs) tend to see the highest lead to case conversion rate, as there are strict guidelines for eligibility with high search volume. We also tailor our keywords to the specific legal issues, client locations and intent.”
Craft Compelling Ad Copy
Your ad copy plays a big role in establishing your credibility and encouraging action. For high-value clients, the messaging should emphasize your expertise and ability to handle complex legal matters.
- Tailor your messaging: Highlight your specialization, experience and trustworthiness. For example, “Decades of Experience in Corporate Law” is likely to resonate with high-value clients who prioritize specialization and results.
- Incorporate clear and compelling CTAs: Use action-oriented phrases like “Book Your Free Consultation Today” or “Speak to an Expert Attorney Now” in your calls-to-action (CTAs) to encourage immediate action and emphasize premium service.
“Craft unique and compelling ad copy that spotlights the unique selling points of your firm, like experience and specialization, while also highlighting the human component of your law firm,” says Goheen. “This makes your ads stand out against the competition (particularly the lead-gen service companies) in the search results.”
Design Effective Landing Pages
A strong landing page reinforces the promises made in your ad and guides potential clients toward engagement.
- Provide cohesive content: Match your landing page content with the messaging in your ads. For example, an ad for “construction accident lawyers” should lead to a page focused on that specific service.
- Highlight trust signals: Reviews, client testimonials and case results can reassure prospective clients of your expertise.
“Optimize your landing pages to include important elements like relevant keywords, eligibility requirements, value props of the firm and clear calls to action,” says Goheen.
Implement Smart Bidding Strategies
Strategic bidding helps you focus your budget on the most valuable opportunities to attract high-value clients.
- Leverage automated bidding tools: Use tools to optimize bids for specific cost-per-acquisition (CPA) targets, saving time and improving efficiency.
- Refine bids strategically: Adjust bids based on factors like location, time of day and device type to focus on high-performing audience segments.
Measuring Success: Beyond ROAS for Law Firms
While return on ad spend (ROAS) is a common metric for measuring the success of paid search campaigns in many industries, it’s not always the best way to define success for law firms. Instead, campaign success is more accurately measured by metrics that directly impact the firm’s bottom line.
“We largely do not define success for law firms by ROAS,” says Goheen. “Instead, we focus more on total cases opened, cost per case and lead-to-case conversion rate to ensure our campaigns are not only driving quality leads but also leading to cases for the law firm (which ultimately impacts the bottom line). We use the law firm’s lead-to-case conversion rate as a starting point for judging performance. If we can increase the caseload and maintain or improve your lead-to-case conversion rate, that is a success.”
Why isn’t ROAS ideal for measuring the success of legal marketing campaigns? On its own, the metric doesn’t account for the nuances of legal marketing, such as client lifetime value (CLV) or the complexity of converting leads into cases. For a law firm, rather than simply calculating ad spend returns, it’s important to increase the number of your quality cases — and maintaining or improving your lead-to-case conversion rate is a more reliable measure of success.
“Implementing robust conversion tracking is critical to evaluate campaign performance,” says Goheen. “We see the largest success with firms that can connect their CRM to import case data back into Google Ads. We are then able to optimize toward those key actions like opening a case.”
Power More Paid Search Success for Your Legal Firm — With Brandon’s Help
With a law-school graduate and Certified Brand Strategist leading the C-Suite, Brandon understands the many marketing challenges law firms face — and our team of legal marketing experts is adept at overcoming them. Whatever your legal specialty may be, if your law firm is looking to grow its client base, our ad agency that specializes in legal-industry marketing has the experience and know-how to make it happen.
Contact us today to learn all the ways we can elevate your firm’s marketing efforts.
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