PPC for law firms: what clicks cost and how to judge them

This guide is for partners and practice managers at small and mid-sized SRA-regulated firms in England and Wales. It's for you if you're deciding whether to pay for Google Ads, or checking what an agency has told you. The click estimates come from DataForSEO, a keyword data service, and Naelar, which wrote this guide, sells PPC management for solicitors.

It covers Google search ads: what a click costs in each practice area, which searches to keep out, and how to set up and judge a first campaign. Meta (Facebook and Instagram) ads show in people's feeds, not in search results, so they aren't covered here. This guide isn't legal advice, and your COLP (compliance officer for legal practice) signs off any ad before it runs.

What does PPC mean for a solicitors firm?

Pay per click (PPC) is advertising where you pay each time someone clicks your ad. For a solicitors firm it mostly means Google Ads search ads, the paid results above and below the normal ones.^[7]

The cost per click is what Google charges when someone clicks your ad. You choose the keywords, the words you bid on, and set a daily budget. Google then runs an auction for each search, deciding when your ad shows and what each click costs.

The keyword isn't always what people typed. The search term is what they actually typed, and it can be wider than you meant. Much of the work in a small account is closing that gap.

What does a click cost in each practice area?

It depends heavily on the type of work: in October 2026 data from DataForSEO, estimated click prices ran from about £4 to about £49. The table shows 12 searches people make when they need a solicitor, from data we downloaded for Google UK.

Two things stand out in the table.

• A click on "personal injury solicitors" is estimated at more than 12 times one on "solicitors near me". The same budget buys very different numbers of visits depending on the work you advertise.
• "Solicitors near me" has by far the most searches and the cheapest clicks. Our reading is that it says nothing about the type of work, so many of those clicks will be for matters you don't handle.

These are auction averages from keyword data. They show what advertisers paid per click on average in that market, not what any firm pays per new client.

Which searches should a solicitors firm keep out?

Keep out searches for work you don't take, and searches from people who aren't looking for a solicitor at all, such as job seekers. A negative keyword is a word that stops your ad showing for searches that contain it.

Legal aid searches are common, and their clicks are estimated to cost less. If your firm doesn't do legal aid work, add "legal aid" as a negative keyword. Then the ad won't reach people you'd have to turn away. If you do, those searches may deserve a campaign of their own.

Searches with "solicitor" in them also come from people training to become one. On 8 October 2026, Google UK's related searches for "ppc for solicitors" were mostly about qualifying (DataForSEO). Two of them were "How to become a solicitor" and "Training contract solicitor". In that search "PPC" also means a training course, which shows how one word can pull in the wrong people.

A starting list of negatives, to add to from your own search terms:

• jobs
• training contract
• salary
• course
• SQE
• "how to become"

No win, no fee searches

"No win no fee solicitors" gets 12,100 searches a month. Only bid on it if your landing page (the page the ad opens) explains the phrase.

The SRA warning notice on marketing to the public is clear on this. "If your marketing material highlights the use of 'no win, no fee' arrangements, it should clearly explain what that means."^[1] So the page should say who pays what if a claim fails under your agreement. Check the wording with your COLP.

First Google Ads campaign: how do you set one up?

Start small and narrow, with tracking in place before the first click. These six steps are the order we'd use.

1. Pick one practice area and one town. Choose a region you can serve well. A small budget spread over five practice areas teaches you nothing, as the budget example below shows.
2. Build one landing page for it. Give the price, the stages and who does the work. Services on the Transparency Rules list, such as residential conveyancing and uncontested probate, need those details on your website anyway. Our SRA Transparency Rules checklist lists them.
3. Track enquiries, then instructions. Track calls and forms as enquiries, then enquiries to instructions. A CRM, the system that holds every enquiry and its stage, is where that happens. Our page on intake and CRM covers the setup.
4. Get your COLP's sign-off. Write the ads and get sign-off before they run. The firm answers for its publicity, as the SRA rules section explains.
5. Add negative keywords on day one. Start with the searches to keep out above, so the first week's budget isn't spent on job seekers.
6. Read the search terms report weekly. Do this every week for the first month. It's the list in Google Ads of what people typed before clicking. Move the budget to the searches that bring enquiries.

Your ad's landing page is also where your SRA number and badge show. Our guide to where those items go on a landing page shows the placement.

Google Ads budget: is £10 a day enough for a small firm?

Rarely, unless it all goes into one practice area in one town. Work back from what an instruction is worth to your firm and what a click costs in your practice area.

For how we work out cost per instruction for a firm, see PPC management for solicitors.

What AI tools told us about budgets

On 17 October 2026 we asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview (the AI-written summary above the results) how much a small UK firm should spend on Google Ads. Most of the pages they cited were agency and software sites, and none was a Google help page, an SRA page or GOV.UK. So in our test, the budget advice from AI tools rested mostly on agencies' own pages.

Source for that test: our own prompts, sent through DataForSEO's API (a direct connection for software), a close stand-in for the ChatGPT and Perplexity apps.

What a real account paid

Real accounts can sit far below the keyword estimates. One conveyancing firm spent £2,728.13 on its main search campaign between 1 September and 26 October 2026:

Google shows only some of the searches behind those clicks, so we can't say which ones were cheap. It's one account, so treat it as a reason to test, not a benchmark. Results vary by firm, area and market. Nobody can tell a firm its cost per instruction before an account has run.

The account's other figures are in our conveyancing lead generation case study. For setup, see Google Ads for conveyancing solicitors.

Should a solicitors firm run PPC in-house or hire an agency?

Run it in-house if someone can read the search terms report every week and act on it. Hire an agency if nobody has the time, but keep the ad account in the firm's name.

Before you sign, ask who owns the account, what the monthly fee covers and whether you see every search term and its cost. Ask too how the agency counts an enquiry and an instruction. The firm should be able to remove the agency's access at any time.

Your COLP still signs off the ads, as the SRA rules section explains. For the longer list of questions, read how to choose a legal marketing agency.

What does PPC for solicitors cost per lead and per instruction?

For one conveyancing firm, a Google-counted conversion cost £31.94 and an instruction recorded in its CRM cost £379.74. That was between 1 September and 26 October 2026. Results vary by firm, area and market, so read it as a worked example, not a benchmark.

The firm's CRM records fewer instructions than the firm counts itself, so £379.74 is a ceiling, not the true cost. Of the 107 conversions Google counted, 85 came from phones, so check your landing page on a phone before you spend.

Use the same three steps on your own account. Ask for cost per conversion, cost per enquiry in your CRM, and cost per instruction. If the CRM can't show the last one, that is the first thing to fix.

SRA rules for law firm ads: what do they mean?

Paragraph 8.8 of the SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors says publicity must be "accurate and not misleading".^[3] The SRA's warning notice of 19 December 2024 says this "also includes any marketing material used by third parties that you work with".^[2] So ads an agency writes count as your firm's publicity.

The full section on SRA rules and ads is on our PPC management for solicitors page. If you take personal injury or claims enquiries from outside lead sources, the questions to ask them are in Claims marketing due diligence. Check your ads with your COLP before they run.

How do you know if PPC is working for your firm?

Follow each pound from click to enquiry to instruction. Three numbers tell the story, and only the last one is about new clients.

• Cost per click: what the auction charges.
• Cost per enquiry: what it costs to make the phone ring.
• Cost per instruction: what a new client cost.

Judge the campaign on cost per instruction, and compare it with the fees a new matter brings in.

Speed of reply matters too. Hennessey Digital, a US law firm marketing agency, contacted 1,333 US law firms for a 2025 study, so these are US figures from a vendor.^[4] It found that "Twenty-six percent of law firms don't respond to online leads".^[5] An enquiry nobody answers is a paid click wasted.

If nobody at the firm can answer new enquiries within a working day, fix that before buying clicks. Our page on intake and CRM covers fast replies and follow-up.

PPC or SEO: which should a solicitors firm start with?

PPC brings enquiries while you pay for it, and they stop when the budget does. SEO (search engine optimisation, work to rank in the normal results) builds slowly and keeps working after the work is done. You can run ads for enquiries now and build SEO for later; see local SEO and AI search. For what to do yourself and what to pay for, read SEO for solicitors.