Google Ads management for law firms UK is not general PPC work. Legal keywords are among the most expensive in the entire UK paid search market. In 2026, the average cost per click across all industries was £4.28. Legal services averaged £7.92 per click (WordStream, 2026). Run campaigns without specialist management and you will spend thousands with nothing to show except a high click volume and an empty intake pipeline.

Law firm Google Ads fail for three reasons that repeat without exception: broad match keywords that burn budget on irrelevant searches, landing pages that do not match what the ad promised, and no compliance review against SRA Code of Conduct Chapter 8 requirements for solicitor marketing.

Legal searches have enormous intent variation. "Personal injury solicitor" is a buyer search. "Personal injury claims how long" is a research search. "Solicitor jobs London" is a job seeker. Running broad match captures all three. You pay £8-15 per click to reach people who will never be your client. Negative keyword management is not optional in legal PPC. It is the primary cost control lever.

Landing pages matter more in legal than in almost any sector. A prospective client searching for a solicitor after an accident or a family breakdown is under stress. They need immediate reassurance: your credentials, your process, and a frictionless way to get a call back within hours. A generic firm homepage does not convert that search. A purpose-built page for that practice area, matching the ad's promise, does.

SRA Chapter 8 governs how solicitors advertise and market their services. Ads must not be misleading, must not make comparative claims that cannot be substantiated, and must be clear about pricing where relevant. We build all creative within these requirements from the first draft, not as a post-production edit.

We start with a full search term audit. Every keyword in your existing campaign or target list gets mapped to an intent category: buyer searches, research searches, and irrelevant searches. We build your keyword architecture around buyer searches only, then populate a negative keyword list for everything else.

Each practice area gets its own campaign structure with dedicated ad groups and landing pages. Personal injury does not share budget with conveyancing. Family law does not compete internally with commercial litigation. Separate campaigns mean separate budgets, separate bid strategies, and accurate data on which practice areas deliver cost-effective cases.

Bid strategy is set by case value, not by convention. A clinical negligence case worth £15,000 in fees can support a £60 cost per lead. A road traffic accident case worth £800 cannot. We calibrate target CPA bidding to case type economics, not industry averages.

Firms with properly managed Google Ads campaigns in competitive UK legal markets see cost per qualified lead in the £40-100 range for personal injury and £80-150 for commercial law, depending on location and competition. That is against a case value that typically runs in the thousands. The maths works when campaigns are managed with discipline.

Poorly managed campaigns run at £200-500 per lead. The difference is not the platform. It is the management.