Google Ads for a Birmingham solicitor: what the rules allow

A Birmingham solicitor can advertise on Google, and the rules that shape the ad are the firm's own: the SRA's standards on publicity, which require an advert to be accurate and not misleading, and the transparency rules, which require price and service information on the website for the work they cover. In practice that means no guaranteed outcomes, no best or leading without a basis, no fee claim the price page does not support, and a landing page that carries the price information the rules require for that service. The second half of the job is the search terms: in a city with the Colmore Row firms, the law schools and the claims management companies, a share of every solicitor's clicks are candidates, students and claims farms, and the negatives decide the cost per client.

What the ad may say, and what it may not

The transparency rules name the services that must carry price information on the website: conveyancing, probate, immigration, motoring offences and employment tribunal claims for individuals, and employment defence, debt recovery and licensing for businesses. An ad for any of those lands on a page that carries the price information in the form the rules describe, with the disbursements and what is not included. An ad for a service outside that list, family law for instance, has no price requirement, and a firm that chooses to state a fixed fee states it exactly as the engagement letter will.

The searches that are not clients

• Candidates: solicitor jobs Birmingham, trainee, paralegal, vacancies, salary, training contract, with the law schools and the recruitment agencies by name.
• Students and the curious: what does a solicitor do, how to become, law degree, with every question that starts with how to or what is.
• Claims management traffic: claim calculator, how much compensation, am I entitled, with the compensation calculators by name. Some of those are clients; most are comparing calculators and will not instruct anyone.
• Other firms' names, which some agencies bid on and which cost a Birmingham firm money and reputation in equal measure. We do not bid on them.
• Free advice, free solicitor, legal aid, where the firm does not offer legal aid; and Citizens Advice, which the searcher means literally.

Read the search terms report for the last 90 days with one question: would a partner take this call? The rows a partner would not take are the negatives list, and in the Birmingham accounts we have audited they are usually a third of the spend before the list exists.

The landing page a regulated firm lands on

1. The service, the price information where the rules require it, and what is not included, above the fold on a phone.
2. The named solicitor who will handle the matter, with their qualification and the firm's SRA number in the footer.
3. A form that asks for the matter and the urgency, and a number that is answered by a person during the hours the ad runs.
4. The complaints information and the regulator's link, which the rules require and which a nervous first-time client reads.
5. No chat widget that promises a solicitor and delivers a bot, which is both a conversion problem and an accuracy one.

By practice area, what the Birmingham searches look like

Each row is an ad group with its own page, its own conversion count and its own line in the report. A firm that runs one campaign for every practice area cannot read which one earned its fee, and in a city where a conveyancing click and a personal injury click cost very different sums, that reading is the whole account.

The two claims that get a Birmingham firm into trouble

The first is a comparative: cheaper than, faster than, better than the firms on Colmore Row, without a basis the regulator would accept. The second is the implied guarantee: your claim will succeed, you will get, we always win. Both appear in ads written by agencies that have never read the publicity standards, and both are caught, eventually, by a complaint from the firm across the road. The ad that lasts says what the firm does, where, since when, with whom, and what the first step costs, and leaves the rest to the page.

Conversion actions for a firm

A call over ninety seconds, because a legal enquiry that is real takes that long, and the enquiry form, with the matter type passed through so that the report can say which practice area the enquiries came from. Nothing else counts. A download of a guide is not a client, and bidding that learns from downloads finds students. The firm's own reception keeps the log that turns enquiries into instructions, and that log, read monthly against the spend, is the number the account is judged on.

The solicitors page describes how we run accounts for Birmingham firms by practice area, and the not-converting guide beside this one is the list to read when the clicks arrive and the phone does not ring.