Family Practice Law Firm

Client overview

In February 2021, a small family practice law firm came to us after growing frustrated with its previous digital marketing agency. The firm had an active Google Ads account, but the prior vendor had not produced meaningful results and blamed the firm's limited daily budget. We saw it differently: a focused budget, used with precision, is a competitive advantage.

The challenge

Legal advertising on Google is expensive, with popular keywords often costing $30 to $100+ per click. For a small firm without a large media budget, unfocused campaign management burns through spend with nothing to show for it. The existing account had clear problems:

• Bidding on high-competition, high-cost legal keywords with no quality differentiation
• Ad groups that were too broad, mixing intent and diluting relevance
• Competitor keywords using up budget without returning clients
• No call tracking, so there was no way to know which ads produced real inquiries
• No contact forms on landing pages, leaving calls as the only conversion path
• Geographic targeting that reached people outside the firm's service area

What we did

We found the traffic that converts, cut everything that did not, and built a campaign structure that lets a small firm compete with larger practices on intelligence rather than budget:

• Found medium-traffic, low-competition keywords the firm could win
• Set campaigns to Search only to remove display waste
• Built tightly themed ad groups for relevance and Quality Score
• Removed competitor keywords from active campaigns
• Implemented call tracking across all landing pages
• Added contact forms to every campaign landing page
• Narrowed geographic targeting to the firm's actual service areas

Results

• Higher click-through rate
• Immediate growth in conversions from calls and forms
• 2x increase in the client's ad spend
• Expanded to Google, Meta and Bing

Clicks, click-through rates and conversions from phone calls and contact forms rose from the campaign's first weeks. Those conversions turned into new clients, which gave the firm the confidence to double its advertising investment.

With the larger budget, we grew the program beyond Google Search into Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Bing Ads, so the firm shows up across the major platforms where prospective clients research legal services.

"A small budget isn't a limitation. It's a discipline. By focusing every dollar on high-intent, low-competition opportunities, we proved that smart campaign management beats big spending every time." Paid Media Team, White Label Agency