01
What does Google Ads cost a law firm in the UK?
Between about £3.40 and £12.10 a click for the core terms, with the spread tracking case value rather than search volume. The table below is the commercial core of UK legal search, taken from Ahrefs UK data for October 2026, converted from US dollars. Read it as the price of entry: these are the terms a firm has to compete on if it wants paid search to produce instructions rather than brand impressions.
| Keyword | UK CPC | UK searches/mo | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| no win no fee solicitors | about £12.10 | 8,400 | Dearest click on this list, at high volume |
| personal injury solicitor | about £11.30 | 900 | Narrow queue at a high price |
| medical negligence solicitors | about £10.60 | 3,900 | High volume and high case value |
| conveyancing solicitors | about £7.50 | 9,600 | Volume leader, lower value per case |
| divorce solicitor | about £6.00 | 2,700 | Mid-market family law |
| immigration solicitor | about £3.40 | 1,200 | Cheapest click, highest enquiry volume per pound |
Source: Ahrefs UK data for October 2026. Ahrefs reports CPC in US dollars; we convert at the Bank of England rate for 15 October 2026 ($1.3253 to the pound) and round to the nearest 10p. CPC is the platform estimate for the top of page; actual paid cost varies by quality score, competition, and time of day.
Two things stand out. The first is that volume and price move independently. "Conveyancing solicitors" attracts 9,600 UK searches a month at about £7.50, while "personal injury solicitor" attracts 900 at about £11.30. A conveyancing firm is buying reach; a PI firm is buying a narrow, expensive queue. The second is that "no win no fee solicitors" at about £12.10 and 8,400 searches is the only term on the list combining high volume with high price, which is precisely why it is the hardest auction in UK legal search to win economically.
American firms have it worse. "Google ads for lawyers" carries a $30 CPC in the US, and the underlying case-acquisition terms run higher again. UK figures look almost mild by comparison, though the sting is the same: a firm spending £5,000 a month on personal injury terms at about £11.30 is buying roughly 440 clicks, and 440 clicks is not a large enough sample to absorb much waste before the month's numbers stop making sense.
Immigration sits at the other end at about £3.40, which changes the shape of the account rather than just the price. At that CPC a firm can afford a wider keyword set and can learn from the search terms report quickly, because 1,200 monthly searches at about £3.40 generates volume that reaches statistical usefulness in weeks rather than quarters.
02
How much should a law firm spend on Google Ads?
Enough to buy a month of clicks that tells you something, which in legal search means a four-figure budget from the outset. One anonymised UK firm ClickGuardian protects declares a £10,000 monthly Google Ads budget across its practice areas. Price those clicks at about £11.70, midway between "no win no fee solicitors" and "personal injury solicitor" in the table above, and that is about 855 clicks a month, or roughly 28 a day. Its protection subscription is £79 a month, which is the ratio worth holding in your head for the rest of this page: the budget is 126 times the cost of watching it.
Work the arithmetic forwards from those 855 clicks and the cost per case falls out of it:
The worked example
Clicks
855
£10,000 divided by about £11.70 a click.
Enquiries at 5%
43
About £234 per enquiry, calls and forms combined.
Instructions at 1 in 4
11
Nearly 11 instructed matters from the month's paid traffic.
Cost per case
£936
The number that decides whether the channel works.
Whether £936 is good or ruinous depends entirely on practice area, which is why a single industry benchmark for legal PPC is useless. A personal injury instruction with a five-figure expected fee absorbs £936 comfortably. A £900 fixed-fee conveyancing matter does not, and a conveyancing firm hitting that cost per case has either a targeting problem or a channel that will never pay. Immigration sits in between: a CPC of about £3.40 means the same £10,000 buys about 2,940 clicks, so the enquiry rate can be much lower and the numbers still work.
The 5 per cent enquiry rate and the one-in-four instruction rate above are illustrative rather than promised. Substitute your own. If your reception converts one enquiry in three rather than one in four, the same 43 enquiries produce just over 14 instructions and the cost per case drops to about £700 without a penny of extra ad spend, which is usually a cheaper improvement to buy than more clicks. Our ROI calculator runs the same arithmetic against your own spend and conversion figures.
As a starting budget, take your target number of instructions a month, divide by your instruction rate to get enquiries, divide by your enquiry rate to get clicks, and multiply by the CPC for your practice area from the table above. A family law firm wanting four new divorce matters a month, converting one enquiry in four at a 5 per cent enquiry rate on clicks at about £6.00, needs 320 clicks and therefore about £1,920 a month. Anything materially below that is not a campaign, it is a sample too small to learn from.
03
Why do law firm Google Ads campaigns leak money?
Four leaks account for most of the waste in legal accounts, in roughly this order of frequency. The first three are self-inflicted and free to fix. The fourth is not self-inflicted and is the only one that persists after the account is well built.
1. Broad match pulling wrong-intent queries
Broad match on "personal injury solicitor" at about £11.30 a click will happily buy you "personal injury solicitor jobs", "personal injury solicitor salary uk", and "how to become a personal injury solicitor". Every one of those is a student or a jobseeker, and every one costs the same as a claimant. On a 440 click month, twenty such clicks is about £226 spent on recruitment enquiries you cannot bill. Phrase and exact match cost more per click and less per case.
2. Negative keyword hygiene
Legal search attracts three populations who will never instruct: jobseekers, students, and people looking for free advice. A list of 100 negatives covering the recruitment cluster (jobs, salary, training contract), the education cluster (what is, meaning, LLB, dissertation), and the free-advice cluster (free, legal aid, citizens advice, template letter) is an afternoon's work. Firms that skip it pay about £10.60 a click to serve ads to people researching medical negligence for a university essay.
3. Geographic slop
Google's default location setting is "Presence or interest", which serves your ads to somebody in Glasgow reading about divorce in Bristol. For a firm taking instructions in one region this is money spent on people who cannot become clients. Switching every campaign to "Presence" takes about two minutes. The second half of the fix is the radius: a 30 mile circle drawn around a city-centre office routinely reaches millions of people, most of whom sit outside the catchment your fee earners actually work.
4. Invalid and non-genuine clicks
The first three leaks close permanently once fixed. This one does not, because it is driven from outside the account. Across the accounts ClickGuardian tracks, about 29 per cent of paid clicks are invalid: bots, scrapers, click farms, and repeat clickers who were never going to instruct anybody. Legal is a natural target because the click price is high, and the economics of fraud follow the money exactly as you would expect.
Put a conservative number on it and the case makes itself. Take the £10,000 monthly budget from earlier and assume only 12 per cent of clicks are invalid, well under what we see across tracked accounts. That is £1,200 a month binned, £14,400 a year, against a protection subscription under £100 a month. The decision does not need the higher figure to be true; it only needs the lower one.
Dedicated click fraud protection scores each visitor in real time and pushes the worst offenders into your campaign exclusion lists before the next click lands. The practice-area detail sits on our pages for law firms and solicitors and, where the click prices are steepest, personal injury practices.
A note on competitors clicking your ads
Ask any managing partner about legal PPC and this comes up within a minute. It is worth being precise about what can and cannot be said. Local legal markets are close to zero-sum: there are a fixed number of claimants in a catchment in any given month, the top-of-page auction has a handful of slots, and at about £11.30 to £12.10 a click a rival's daily budget can be exhausted for the price of a modest lunch. The incentive plainly exists, and so does the risk to you.
What we are not going to do is tell you we have measured it. We have not run that analysis, and a firm making a spending decision deserves the distinction between a documented finding and a structural incentive. What is measured is the invalid click rate across tracked accounts, which does not attribute intent to anybody. Treat competitor clicking as a risk your account should be resilient against rather than a diagnosis of what is happening in yours.
04
Should you run it in-house or hire an agency?
For most firms under 30 fee earners, hire an agency, and the reason is staffing rather than skill. A firm that size rarely has a marketing manager. What it has is a practice manager or a partner who picked up the Google Ads login because somebody had to, and who is being asked to maintain a negative keyword list between client matters. A £10,000 monthly account needs perhaps four hours of genuine attention a month. Those four hours never come out of a fee earner's week at a sensible price, because an hour of partner time costs more than the agency retainer does per hour.
The case for in-house is real above roughly 30 fee earners, or wherever a firm already employs somebody whose job title contains the word marketing. At that size the account is usually large enough that a percentage-of-spend retainer costs more than a part-time specialist, and the institutional knowledge of which enquiry types convert is worth keeping inside the building. The middle path, an agency running the account with an internal owner who reads the reports and challenges them, tends to beat both.
If you are going to hire, hire someone who has run legal accounts before. Legal PPC has specific failure modes (the recruitment query problem, the free-advice query problem, call tracking that has to distinguish a genuine enquiry from a misdial) that a generalist learns at your expense. We have compared the UK specialists on a separate page: the best law firm PPC agencies in the UK, with the criteria we used and the questions to ask before signing.
If you are an agency reading this: traffic quality is the part of a legal account you cannot fix with better keyword work, and it is the part clients ask about most. ClickGuardian runs a white-label programme so you can report protected traffic under your own brand across your client book. The details are on our partners page.
05 · Checklist
How do you audit a law firm PPC account?
Ten checks, in order. You can run the lot in an afternoon with nothing but access to the account, and the first three usually find the money.
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Read the search terms report, not the keyword report
Filter the last 90 days by cost, descending. The keyword report tells you what you bid on. The search terms report tells you what you actually paid for. On a legal account the gap is usually where the money went: a firm bidding on "personal injury solicitor" at about £11.30 a click finds it paid for "personal injury solicitor jobs" and "personal injury solicitor salary" too.
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Check the match type on your top five spending keywords
If any of your top spenders is on broad match, that single line is likely your largest source of wasted spend. Move it to phrase or exact and watch the search terms report for a fortnight before deciding whether broad earned its place.
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Count your negative keywords
A legal account with fewer than 100 negatives has not been maintained. Start with the recruitment cluster (jobs, salary, vacancies, training contract, apprenticeship), the free-advice cluster (free, citizens advice, legal aid, pro bono, template), and the education cluster (what is, how to, meaning, definition, LLB).
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Switch location targeting to Presence
Google defaults every campaign to "Presence or interest", which serves your ads to people merely reading about your city. For a firm that can only act for clients in one jurisdiction this is pure waste. Change it to "Presence" on every campaign, and set your exclusions the same way.
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Verify the radius against where you actually take instructions
A 30 mile radius around a Manchester office reaches roughly 4 million people, most of whom will never instruct you. Match the radius to the geography your fee earners actually serve, then look at the location report for towns generating clicks and no enquiries.
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Confirm conversion tracking fires on the right event
Counting page views of a thank-you page is not conversion tracking. A legal account needs, at minimum, form submissions and phone calls tracked separately, with call tracking set to a duration threshold (60 seconds is a common floor) so misdials do not count as enquiries.
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Segment by device and check the mobile call ratio
Legal enquiries skew heavily to phone. If mobile is taking the majority of your clicks and producing a fraction of your calls, either your landing page buries the number or the traffic is not human.
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Add the invalid click columns
In the campaign view, add Invalid Clicks, Invalid Click Rate, and Invalid Interactions Rate. This is what Google already caught and refunded. It is a floor, not a ceiling, but until those columns are visible you have no baseline at all.
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Compare click volume against enquiry volume by hour and day
Genuine legal enquiries cluster in office hours. A campaign taking a steady stream of clicks at 3am from inside your service area, producing nothing, is worth investigating rather than explaining away.
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Price the gap
Take your monthly spend, multiply by the share of clicks you cannot account for, and compare it against what a fix would cost. On a £10,000 budget, a 12 per cent gap is £1,200 a month, which sets a clear ceiling on what any remedy is worth paying for.
Three things you can do without buying anything
If you would rather not run the ten checks yourself, request a free Google Ads audit. You give us read-only access to the account, nothing in it changes, and the report puts a figure on the search terms, location settings, networks and overnight spend that cost the firm money without producing enquiries.
Take the IP addresses your logs or analytics show clicking repeatedly and run them through our free IP reputation checker. It tells you whether an address belongs to a data centre, a known proxy range, or a genuine residential connection, which settles most arguments about whether a click pattern is worth investigating.
If the audit leaves a gap between clicks and enquiries you cannot explain, a free 7 day trial will quantify it against your own traffic rather than an industry average. Plans start at $49 a month.
06 · FAQ