A click on "divorce solicitor london" costs £35.90, one on "employment solicitor london" £16.50, one on "will writing solicitor" £6.78 (DataForSEO, Google Ads UK, September 2026). With a 5% conversion rate, one enquiry every twenty clicks, a first consultation on a London divorce costs around £720, one for a will around £135. The practice area sets the bill far more than the town.
Google Ads for law firms works when the campaign buys "practice area plus town" searches within a defined radius, sends the click to a page about that practice area with the phone number in view, and counts the call or the form as the conversion, not the visit. The SRA Code and the CAP Code put constraints on ad copy, and Google's policies add others on remarketing. Neither stops you running campaigns.
The keyword "google ads for law firms" has about 30 searches a month in the UK: we mention it because this article exists for the firms that ask us, not for a mass search. Below: measured CPCs, account structure, negatives, tracking, a calculated minimum budget and the mistakes we find in accounts. The organic side is in the companion article on law firm SEO.
How much a click costs in the legal sector
The cost per click range runs from about £5 to almost £50. Personal injury, divorce and crime sit at the top, wills, lasting powers of attorney and landlord work at the bottom, and generic keywords with a town sit in between.
| Keyword | Searches/month | Average CPC | Top of page bid (high) | Competition |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| solicitors near me | 33,100 | £3.79 | £5.37 | medium |
| no win no fee solicitors | 12,100 | £46.05 | £43.22 | high |
| conveyancing solicitor | 9,900 | £17.14 | £16.26 | medium |
| employment lawyer | 8,100 | £12.79 | £13.43 | low |
| family solicitor | 5,400 | £18.49 | £19.12 | high |
| probate solicitor | 2,900 | £17.64 | £19.13 | medium |
| divorce solicitor | 2,900 | £20.59 | £26.39 | high |
| wills solicitor | 2,400 | £8.59 | £8.84 | medium |
| personal injury solicitor | 2,400 | £49.65 | £49.90 | medium |
| divorce lawyers london | 1,900 | £31.40 | £49.03 | high |
| criminal solicitor | 1,600 | £20.63 | £23.34 | medium |
| employment lawyer london | 1,600 | £14.05 | £17.22 | high |
| will writing solicitor | 1,300 | £6.78 | £7.13 | medium |
| family solicitor manchester | 880 | £17.16 | £18.68 | high |
| lasting power of attorney solicitor | 720 | £5.01 | £6.22 | medium |
| criminal solicitor london | 590 | £23.69 | £35.67 | high |
| divorce solicitor london | 480 | £35.90 | £39.48 | medium |
| landlord solicitor | 390 | £7.67 | £7.45 | high |
| best divorce solicitor london | 320 | £29.51 | £91.13 | high |
| employment solicitor london | 140 | £16.50 | £19.05 | high |
Three things to read. "best divorce solicitor london" has a high top-of-page bid of £91.13 against an average CPC of £29.51: someone occasionally bids very high, then disappears, and in fact our snapshot of the "divorce solicitor london" SERP showed no ads at all. "no win no fee solicitors" has 12,100 searches at £46.05 a click: it is priced by the personal injury market, and a general practice firm has no business competing there. And "solicitors near me" has 33,100 searches with no town in it: you buy it with location targeting, not with the keyword.
One limit of the data: for many legal keywords the September 2025 figure is two to four times every other month ("wills solicitor" has 6,600 that month against 1,000-2,900 in the rest of the year). We would not plan a budget on that peak. Campaigns will show you the real cost only once they are running.
Recommended reading: Google Ads statistics 2026 to compare CPCs and conversion rates.
What a solicitor can say in an ad
The SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors does not ban advertising: paragraph 8.8 requires that "any publicity in relation to your practice is accurate and not misleading, including that relating to your charges". The ASA's CAP Code, which covers paid search ads and firms' own websites, adds the rules on substantiation and comparisons. Together they turn into rules a Google ad has to follow to the letter.
- The firm has to show its SRA number and the SRA digital badge on its website (SRA Transparency Rules). A 30-character headline has no room for them: put "authorised and regulated by the SRA" in the description or on the landing page, but it has to be somewhere.
- No "best solicitor", "most experienced", "number one in Manchester" unless you hold the evidence (CAP Code rule 3.7 on substantiation). Google would accept them, the ASA might not.
- No promises of outcome: "win your case" or "guaranteed compensation" are the opposite of accurate and not misleading.
- No client names or case details without the client's consent (paragraph 6.3 on confidentiality), including testimonials on the landing page. And if the ad mentions a fixed fee or a free first consultation, the landing page has to say exactly what it covers, VAT included.
What is left to say is more than it looks: practice area, town, year of admission, terms of the first consultation, opening hours, languages, office. "Employment solicitor in Manchester. X Solicitors, authorised and regulated by the SRA. First consultation in person or by video" is informative, complies with the rules and answers the question People Also Ask raises on every legal SERP: how much does it cost and how do I start.
On bidding on other firms' names (the "conquesting" that dental chains do) our advice is not to: it adds little, and a competitor's name in the ad text invites a trade mark complaint to Google and a question about misleading comparison.
Which campaign to open first
One Search campaign, on a radius around the office or on the town and the areas your clients come from, and nothing else. Not Performance Max, not Display, not the "Smart" campaign Google suggests when you open the account.
Performance Max needs conversions to learn, and a firm starts from zero: switched on on day one, it optimises for phone clicks and page views and reports that everything is fine. For Contesini Consulenze, two offices in the province of Mantua in another local sector, we added it only after Search had collected real conversions: 299 leads in seven months at €7.20 each. In legal services CPCs are higher and enquiries fewer, so the Search phase lasts longer.
One format to check is Local Services Ads, the "Google Screened" ads that dominate lawyer searches in the United States and are paid per lead. Google's documentation lists legal categories for the US but does not confirm them for the UK, and we saw none on the London SERPs we captured: check category and location in Google's eligibility tool before counting on it.
Recommended reading: when Google Ads makes sense.
How to structure a law firm's account
One campaign per practice area, not one campaign for the firm. Each practice area has a different CPC, value per matter and landing page, and the budget has to be set area by area.
- Family (separation, divorce, arrangements for children): CPC £11-36 with a town, high value per matter, searches peaking in October, January and March ("divorce lawyers london" has 2,400 searches in those months and 1,000 in July and August 2026).
- Employment (dismissal, disciplinaries, settlement agreements): CPC £13-17, clear seasonality ("employment lawyer london" goes from 1,000 searches in December 2025 to 1,900 in October 2025 and March 2026).
- Crime: CPC around £21-24 with or without a town, high urgency, almost only calls.
- Wills, lasting powers of attorney, landlord work: CPC £5-9, fewer searches, but the lowest cost per enquiry in the whole account.
Inside each campaign, ad groups by intent: "solicitor plus practice area plus town", "practice area plus problem" ("unfair dismissal solicitor"), "solicitors near me" with location targeting only. Phrase match to start, broad match only after a month of clean search terms. Ad scheduling for the hours when someone answers the phone: a £35.90 click at 11pm on a Saturday ends up on voicemail.
The negatives that save the budget
The related searches on the two SERPs we captured already name them: "divorce solicitors free advice", "employment lawyer london no win no fee", "employment lawyer london jobs", and the People Also Ask question "Where can I get free advice from an employment lawyer in the UK?". Part of the people searching for a solicitor are trying not to pay one.
The negatives list to add on day one: free, free advice, pro bono, legal aid (unless you do legal aid work), citizens advice, acas, union, salary, jobs, vacancies, training contract, how to become, sqe, course, degree, university, paralegal, apprenticeship, reddit, wikipedia. Then the search terms report every week, which in legal services is full of informational queries ("employment tribunal", 22,200 searches a month; "constructive dismissal", 14,800) that cost £2-5 a click and don't call anyone. They are blog keywords, not ad keywords: if you want them, they are in the article on law firm SEO.
A landing page that complies and converts
What it needs
One page per practice area, not the homepage. In the order the person reads it: practice area and town in the title; a clickable phone number on the first screen; who the solicitor is (name, year of admission, SRA number, practice areas); how the first consultation works and on what terms; FAQs taken from People Also Ask ("How much does an employment lawyer cost in the UK?"), with prices published where the SRA Transparency Rules require them, as for employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal; a form with a practice area field and space to describe the matter.
Form or phone?
Both, weighted differently by practice area. Crime and urgent matters are calls; wills and employment accept the form, because the person has documents to describe and often searches in the evening. A form with three required fields (practice area, town, description) filters better than one with two. We don't have a large enough legal sample to give a percentage split: measure it on your own account, with calls and forms as separate conversions.
Recommended reading: how to build a landing page that ranks and converts.
What to count as a conversion
Four events and nothing else: the call from the ad (call asset, with a minimum duration of 60 seconds to exclude wrong numbers), the click on the number on the landing page, the form submission, the appointment request if there is a booking calendar. Not page views, not scrolling, not the click on "about us".
It sounds obvious and it isn't. At Valore Solare, in another sector, the account we inherited counted 15,267 "conversions" in one month against 5,467 clicks: technical events, and automated bidding was optimising for them. At Sunscape there were 1,487 conversions at €0.61. With CPCs of £15-35, a month of automated bidding on the wrong conversion costs more than rebuilding the tracking.
Remarketing has one more constraint. Google's personalised advertising policy bans building audiences on personal hardships, and the examples it lists include relationship hardships such as divorce and separation and problems with the law: a "visited the divorce page" list cannot be used to follow the person around. Check the current wording on the policy page before switching on any audience.
Recommended reading: how to do remarketing, for sectors where it is allowed.
How much budget you need, with the maths
Start from the volumes. "divorce solicitor london" has 480 searches a month; with a 5% CTR that is 24 clicks, at £35.90 that is £862, and with one conversion every twenty clicks that is just over one enquiry a month. On its own it is not enough to judge anything.
A London family campaign covering "divorce solicitor london", "divorce lawyers london", "family solicitor london", "divorce solicitor near me" and phrase variants reaches, on our estimate, 100-150 clicks a month, which is £2,000-3,500 with an average CPC lower than the lead keyword. At a 5% conversion rate that is 5-7 enquiries a month at roughly £400-500 each. A wills and lasting power of attorney campaign with the same budget, at £5-9 a click, brings three to four times as many at about a quarter of the cost, but on matters worth less.
The sensible minimum budget for a family or crime campaign in London is therefore £60-100 a day, £1,800-3,000 a month, for at least three months; for wills or landlord work, or in a smaller city, £20-30 a day is enough. Below that, enquiries are too few to tell a campaign that works from a lucky one. For comparison, at Macropix, industrial B2B, the cost per enquiry was €39.44 in 2025 after eight years of work; in London family law an enquiry under £300 is a very good result.
Recommended reading: Google Ads for SMEs, with the method to calculate budget from CPC and conversion rate.
The mistakes we find in law firm accounts
- The keyword "solicitor" in broad match: 74,000 searches a month, most of them people looking up a word, a job or a firm they already know, and the budget is gone in an afternoon.
- UK-wide targeting for a firm with one office: calls come in from 200 miles away and end in "I'll call you back".
- A landing page that is the homepage, with twelve practice areas on one page and the phone number in the footer.
- No ad scheduling: ads running at night and at weekends, when voicemail answers.
- The conversion set on visits to the contact page, with automated bidding chasing it.
- "Best solicitor" in the headline because "the keyword has volume": the volume is there (320 searches for "best divorce solicitor london"), the evidence the CAP Code asks for usually isn't.
The fact that frames everything: in both London SERPs we captured, on keywords costing £14-36 a click, the desktop snapshot showed no ads at all. One snapshot is not a market survey, but it says ad presence in legal search is patchy: a good condition for a firm that comes in with a well-built account and a steady budget.
Where to start
The first campaign, in three weeks
Pick the practice area with the highest value per matter among those you really bill. Write the landing page for that area with the solicitor's name, SRA number, terms of the first consultation and the phone number at the top. Open a phrase-match Search campaign on 10-15 "solicitor plus practice area plus town" and "practice area plus problem" keywords, with the negatives list above, £40 a day (more for family or crime in London), office hours only. Track calls and forms as two separate conversions. After three months, if the maths above holds, you have 12-20 enquiries and a real cost per enquiry, and that is the number to decide whether to extend to other practice areas, move part of the budget to SEO or stop.
The method works for firms across the UK, with smaller budgets outside London, and with a few adjustments for other regulated professions (Google Ads for professional practices). If you want us to look at your account or the SERPs in your town, get in touch; account management is on the Google Ads service page.
Frequently asked questions
Can a solicitor advertise on Google?
Yes. The SRA Code allows publicity as long as it is accurate and not misleading, including on charges (paragraph 8.8). The limits are in the content: no comparisons or superlatives you cannot substantiate, no promises of outcome, no client names without consent, and the SRA number and digital badge shown on the website. An ad stating the practice area, the town and how to book a first consultation is within the rules.
How much does an enquiry from Google Ads cost?
It depends on the practice area more than the town. With the measured CPCs and a 5% conversion rate, a family law enquiry in London costs £400-500 or more, an employment enquiry £280-330, a wills or lasting power of attorney enquiry £100-180. A 5% conversion rate is a reasonable working assumption for a dedicated landing page; on the homepage it drops below 2% and costs more than double.
Google Ads or SEO for a law firm?
Google Ads brings calls from the first week and stops with the budget; SEO on "practice area plus town" pages takes six to twelve months and then costs only maintenance. In the projects we run, Ads covers the wait and stays on the practice areas with the highest value, as we explain in SEO and Google Ads together.
Can I run remarketing to people who visited the divorce page?
No. Google's personalised advertising policy excludes audiences built on personal hardships, and separation, divorce and legal problems are among the examples. You can run generic remarketing to site visitors with ads that don't refer to the practice area, but in legal services it performs poorly: someone who needs a solicitor searches again, they don't wait for a banner.
Does £500 a month make sense?
Only outside London and on a practice area with a low CPC, such as wills or lasting powers of attorney: £500 at £5-9 a click is 55-100 clicks and 3-5 enquiries a month. For family law in London it is about 14 clicks and less than one enquiry, too little to tell whether the campaign works. Three months at the daily budgets above give you the numbers to decide.
