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PPC for law firms, bought by the matter, not the practice area

Paid search is the fastest way for a practice to appear in front of somebody with a live problem, and it is also the fastest way to buy a great many clicks from people who were never going to instruct anybody. The whole discipline is deciding which matters are worth bidding on and qualifying hard before the enquiry reaches a fee earner.

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    Why a specialist

    Law firm PPC is not generalist PPC

    Paid search for a practice is a small, expensive auction. The searches worth buying are the ones where somebody has a live matter and is ready to speak to a lawyer today, and there are not many of them, so the account is built by matter type rather than by practice area and every campaign points at a page that answers that specific problem. It is one of the disciplines on our PPC offer, run for the practices in our legal work.

    The thing a general brief misses here is qualification. A client searching about an employment problem may be describing a mainland matter, a free zone matter or a DIFC one, and a firm that handles only some of those is paying for all of them unless the landing page and the enquiry form sort it out first. Getting that right is worth more than any amount of bid tuning.

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    How the work runs

    Buy the matter, qualify it early, count what opened

    We start by agreeing which matters are actually worth buying, because in a practice with several departments the answer is rarely all of them, and a narrow, well qualified account beats a broad one in this sector every time. Then the structure follows the matter types, with a landing page per problem, tight geography around each office and negatives maintained as a weekly job rather than a quarterly one.

    Measurement is connected before the spend goes live, including call tracking, because an enquiry taken on the phone is otherwise invisible. We report on enquiries a fee earner could act on and matters opened rather than on cost per lead. Talk to our team about which of your matter types paid search should be carrying.

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    Questions

    Law firm PPC, answered

    What does law firm PPC actually cover?

    Paid search for a practice, built by matter type rather than by practice area, pointed at landing pages that answer the specific problem a client has described, and managed to enquiries a fee earner can act on rather than to clicks. Paid social sits alongside it and does a different job.

    For most firms the account is small and narrow by design. A handful of matter types carry almost all of the value, and widening it usually buys volume nobody can use.

    Which matter types are worth bidding on?

    The ones where a client has a live problem, is ready to speak to somebody now and the matter is valuable enough to justify an expensive click, which in practice tends to mean employment, contract disputes, property and certain family matters. It differs by firm and we would rather work it out than assume it.

    Corporate and advisory work rarely arrives this way. Those are relationship and reputation problems, and paid search is the wrong tool for them.

    How do you stop us paying for the wrong jurisdiction?

    On the landing page and in the enquiry form rather than in the keyword list, because a client describing an employment problem has no way of signalling whether it sits on the mainland, in a free zone or in the DIFC before they click. So the page asks the question plainly and routes accordingly.

    That is also good client service, since somebody told early that you are not the right firm tends to remember it. Negatives and audience exclusions do the rest of the filtering.

    Should we bid on our own firm name?

    Usually only defensively, because brand searches mostly collect people who already had your details and were going to find you anyway, so the money is better spent on the problem searches where no firm is named at all. The exception is when a competitor or a directory is bidding on you.

    Then it stops being a vanity line and becomes a defence. We check for that before recommending either way.

    How do you measure it when a matter takes months to open?

    By agreeing at the start what counts as a genuine enquiry, how it is tracked and who is responsible for what happens after the form arrives, then reporting on enquiries a fee earner could act on and matters eventually opened. Call tracking is part of that setup rather than an extra.

    Where attribution cannot honestly be closed we say so rather than present an assisted number as a direct one. A long cycle rewards honest measurement.

    Is paid search worth it when organic volumes are this small?

    Often yes, and for the opposite reason to most sectors, because when the total demand is modest the competition for it is modest too and a well qualified account can hold the handful of searches that actually matter. The economics come from what one matter is worth, not from volume.

    It also works faster than anything else available, which makes it useful while the content and authority work builds. We would rather say that than sell it as a permanent engine.

    Do you handle the calls as well?

    We connect the tracking and tell you what we can see, which usually surfaces something uncomfortable, because a great many legal enquiries arrive by phone and a large share of them are never answered or returned within the day. Fixing that is the cheapest improvement available to most firms.

    The handling itself stays with you. What we will do is make it visible, because an unanswered call is indistinguishable from a campaign that did not work.

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    Talk to a law firm PPC specialist

    Tell us which matter types you want more of, which offices you run and what a new matter is typically worth to you. We will come back with where your spend is going today, which problems you are absent from and what the first ninety days would cover. Our Dubai office is at Meydan Grandstand in Nad Al Sheba, on +971 4 251 8056.