Marketing for law firms, built around the matters worth winning
A conveyancing instruction and a commercial dispute are both “a new client”. They cost completely different amounts to win and are worth completely different amounts. Marketing that ignores that is guesswork.
Organic impressions for one client in 12 months
Client pages ranking top for their own service names
Based here, working with firms across the UK
Cost per enquiry is the wrong number for a law firm
Most legal marketing is reported on enquiry volume, which is the one figure that tells you least. A firm doing housing disrepair and commercial property work will see the disrepair enquiries look cheap and the commercial ones look expensive, and will quietly shift budget towards the cheaper ones.
That is usually the wrong move. What matters is the cost of winning a matter set against what that matter is worth, and how many of them a fee earner can actually handle. Those numbers vary by an order of magnitude across the work types inside a single firm.
So the first job is almost never advertising. It is working out what each type of work is worth to you, then building the measurement that can tell one from the other.
The same firm needs four different approaches
These behave so differently that treating them as one marketing budget is the most common and most expensive mistake we see.
Conveyancing
High volume, price sensitive, and tied to the housing market. Speed of response decides more instructions than anything on the website, so the work is usually as much about the enquiry handling as the advertising.
Housing disrepair
Volume consumer acquisition, heavily paid and increasingly social rather than search. Tight regulatory constraints on how it can be advertised, and a market where lead quality varies enormously between sources.
Personal injury and clinical negligence
Expensive clicks, long cycles and strong competition from claims companies. Attribution matters more here than anywhere, because the enquiry and the instruction can be months apart.
Commercial and corporate
Low volume, high value, relationship led. Search plays a smaller role and content and reputation a larger one. A handful of the right enquiries a year can justify the whole budget.
If your reporting cannot tell a conveyancing enquiry from a commercial one, it will push you towards the cheapest work in the firm.
Advertising a law firm has rules most agencies do not know
Legal services advertising sits under SRA rules on how firms describe themselves, what can be claimed about outcomes, and how referrals and introducer arrangements work. Claims work brings further regulation on top of that.
None of it makes the marketing impossible. It does mean copy written by somebody who has never read the rules can create a compliance problem, and that generic agency testimonials and outcome claims are frequently not usable as written.
We write with those constraints in mind and expect your compliance lead to review before anything goes live. That is a normal part of the process rather than an obstacle to it.
What the first six months look like
Audit
Where you rank, what you are paying per enquiry, and what the competition holds. You get the findings either way.
Priorities
Which work types are worth chasing, based on what a matter is actually worth to you.
Measurement
Call tracking first. Most enquiries in these sectors arrive by phone and go uncounted.
Scale what pays
Spend follows the work types that convert, not the ones with the cheapest clicks.
What law firms ask
Do you work with solicitors outside the North West?
Yes. We are in Liverpool, but almost none of this work is local. A firm competing for conveyancing in Manchester or disrepair nationally is competing on the same terms wherever the agency sits. Local search matters for high street work, and we cover that on our local SEO page.
Our enquiries come in by phone. How do you measure that?
Call tracking, set up before any spend increases. It assigns numbers dynamically so a call can be traced back to the search and the page that produced it. Without it, the channels that actually generate instructions get no credit. There is more on our attribution page.
Should we be doing SEO or paid search?
For conveyancing and disrepair, usually paid first, because you need volume now and the data tells you which work types convert. For commercial and corporate, usually content and SEO, because the volumes are too low for paid to learn from and the buying cycle is long. Most firms need both, weighted differently by department.
We have been burned by a lead provider. How is this different?
Bought leads are sold to several firms at once and you are competing on response speed with no control over quality. Marketing that generates your own enquiries costs more per enquiry and produces better ones, because the person chose you. We would rather build you the second thing, and we will tell you if your volumes are too low to justify it.
What does it cost?
It depends on the work types, how competitive they are and how much measurement has to be built first. The fee is agreed in writing before work starts and sits separately from any advertising budget on the invoice. Clicks in this sector are among the most expensive in the UK, so the media budget usually matters more than the fee.
Talk to us about your firm
Tell us which departments you want to grow and what a matter is worth. We will tell you what it would take and whether it is worth competing for.
