Law Firms We Work With
Where Law Firm Campaigns Break
Legal is the most expensive category in search, and three mistakes account for most of the money burned in it.
Every inquiry counts the same. A slip-and-fall with no damages and a commercial dispute worth six figures both arrive as one form fill, so a campaign optimized on inquiry volume steers the firm toward the cases it least wants.
The firm competes where it cannot win. The head terms in most practice areas belong to national advertisers and directories with budgets no regional firm can match, and the winnable searches sit one level down where nobody is bidding.
The intake never gets measured. Marketing is judged on inquiries and the firm is run on signed cases, and in most firms nobody has ever connected the two.
How We Run a Law Firm Campaign
Start From Case Value, Not Case Volume
The campaign is built backwards from what each matter type is worth and which ones the firm actually wants more of. That decides the keyword set before any research happens, which is the opposite of how most legal SEO is scoped.
Go One Level Below the Head Term
“Personal injury lawyer” belongs to whoever spends most. The searches that produce signed cases name the situation instead: the specific injury, the specific charge, the specific dispute, usually attached to a county or a city. Those pages are winnable and they arrive pre-qualified.
Answer the Question Asked Before a Lawyer Is Wanted
Most people ask whether they even have a case months before they search for representation. Content that answers that honestly reaches a prospect while the competition is still bidding on the term they will search later.
Connect the Campaign to Signed Cases
Call tracking and intake attribution go in early, so reporting shows matters signed by practice area rather than forms submitted. Every claim on the site is written to hold up against the advertising rules in the firm’s jurisdiction.
Get Recommended When Someone Asks an Assistant
People now describe their situation to ChatGPT before they call anyone, and the models answer from bar directories, review platforms, published commentary and case coverage. The GEO work finds which firms get named for those situations today and builds the corroboration that changes it.
Most legal marketing is sold on inquiry volume in a category where inquiry volume is close to meaningless.
SEO Services scopes the campaign from matter value, targets the situation-level searches rather than the head terms a regional firm cannot buy, and reports signed cases by practice area. Search is the whole business here, with Google and AI run as one campaign against one number: matters signed.
Law Firm Results
Three legal campaigns, measured in signed matters and case inquiries rather than clicks. The first two are organic.
A firm dependent on referrals needed a direct channel it controlled. Content built across every case type it wanted now delivers roughly 35 inquiries a month through the firm’s own intake form, and has produced close to 800 in total.
Read the case study →The firm was invisible on the high-value IP matters it most wanted to take. Content and SEO took those case-type pages to page one and to #1, and the week after a slow stretch the firm signed five new clients off them.
Read the case study →Criminal defense clicks are expensive and most of them are not defendants. While the organic pages were being built, narrowing the ad account to the charges the firm wanted turned $1,765 of spend into $14,800 of signed case value in a month.
Read the case study →The Practice Areas We Build Campaigns For
Personal injury, where the case types differ enormously in value and the content has to sort them
Criminal defense, where the search happens in a few hours and speed of contact decides it
Intellectual property, sold to businesses on expertise rather than urgency
Business and commercial litigation, where the buyer is a general counsel or an owner
Family law, where the search is private and the wording is careful
Employment and labor, on both the plaintiff and the management side
What Is Included in a Law Firm Campaign
Matter-value mapping before any keyword research is done
Practice area and situation pages, plus the county and city grid beneath them
Attorney bios built as ranking assets rather than as staff listings
Intake attribution reporting signed matters by practice area
Five senior people on your account, each with five to ten years in search behind them
Reporting on signed cases, with targets at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months
Key Things to Know About Legal Search
Clicks on the broad practice area terms run past $200 in some markets because national advertisers and lead resellers bid them up. The situation-level searches beneath them cost a fraction, convert far better, and in most markets nobody has written a page for them.
Volume metrics mislead badly in a category where matters range from a few thousand dollars to seven figures. The only defensible measure is signed cases by type, which means the intake data and the marketing data have to be joined before anything else is judged.
State bar advertising rules govern what a firm may say about results, specialization and testimonials, and they differ by jurisdiction. Copy that would be fine for any other business can put a firm in front of a disciplinary committee.
Someone describing their situation to a model is at the start of the process, and the answer they get shapes what they search next. The firms named in those answers are the ones with published commentary, consistent directory information and visible third-party coverage.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the investment, and what does it return?
Quoted on the first call, once we have seen the practice areas and the market. What we can publish: a personal injury firm taking close to 800 case inquiries through its own intake form, and an IP firm reaching #1 on the case types it most wanted. Matter value in your practice areas decides the rest.
How long before this produces signed cases?
Criminal and urgent matters move fastest, often inside two to three months. Personal injury and commercial work take longer because the pages need authority behind them, usually four to six months, with the largest gains between six and twelve.
We already buy leads. Why change?
A purchased lead has been sold to several firms and arrives cold. A prospect who read the firm’s own page on their exact situation and then called has already chosen, and that difference shows up in the signing rate rather than in the inquiry count.
We tried a legal marketing agency before and got unqualified calls. What is different?
Unqualified calls come from broad terms. The campaign targets the situation rather than the category, and the content states plainly what the firm does and does not take, so the sorting happens before the phone rings rather than during intake.
Will the content comply with our state bar rules?
Yes. Advertising rules are checked for the firm’s jurisdiction before anything is published, and results language, specialization claims and testimonials are written to the standard that applies there. The firm always has final approval.
Would you represent a firm we compete with?
Not in the same practice area and jurisdiction. Where two firms would chase the same matters, we work with the first and decline the second.
This is the wrong engagement for a firm that needs matters signed this quarter, for one selecting on fee, or for one whose practice area in that jurisdiction is already spoken for.
Book a demo
We will go through which case types are winnable in your market, what the intake data would need to show to prove it, and what each quarter should produce. Live dashboards from legal campaigns running right now are on the screen during it. If your practice areas are too competitive for the budget available, we will tell you on the call.
Book a demo →Or start with a free AI Visibility Report
See exactly how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity answer when a buyer asks them to recommend a company like yours. 40 to 50 real queries, four models, three runs each, walked through with you in 20 minutes.
Get the free report →