Errard Legal is a boutique law firm operating across two locations. They offer services across multiple practice areas including commercial litigation, business law, family law, building and construction and migration law.
They initially engaged us with a clear goal: generate more qualified leads without wasting budget.
We’ve now worked together for over 5 years, supporting steady growth through strategic Google Ads management.
The firm needed:
A consistent flow of high-intent enquiries
Clear separation between different legal services
Strong performance on a modest monthly budget
A scalable strategy that wouldn’t compromise lead quality
Search terms in the ‘Legal Services’ category is highly competitive, especially across multiple practice areas, making efficiency critical.
We built separate campaigns for each area of law, including:
Building & Construction Law
Property Law & Retail/Commercial Leasing
General lawyer search terms
This ensured:
Highly relevant ads and landing page experiences
Clear visibility into performance by practice area
Better control over budget allocation and bidding
Campaigns were structured and optimised around each physical location, allowing us to align messaging, bidding, and spend with local competition and demand.
Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, we used a combination of bidding strategies based on:
Search volume
Competition intensity.
This allowed us to stay competitive where it mattered, without overpaying for less competitive terms.
The cost-per-click for legal keywords can be as high as $9 in our target areas, which means wasted budget can accrue very quickly if not smartly planned and actively controlled. For this reason, we carefully chose our keywords. This was the single most important part of the strategy. Getting the keywords right means we were only showing our ads to the businesses ideal customers.
We primarily used phrase match keywords which ensured Google only triggered our ad when the users phrase included the meaning of the word (or the exact word). This ensured our traffic was highly targeted while leaving room for expansion.
Negative keywords were aggressively added, especially for competitor terms, to prevent our ads from showing to users who were looking for our competitors.
Even though we saw strong results in the first few months, we continued to optimise click-through-rate and conversion rate through experimentation. We A/B tested a range of variables such as; ad copy containing the users search term vs. ad copy containing a more personal touch. For example:
“Commercial Lawyer Ballarat” vs. “Meet Dale Brown”
Google gave us the exact statistics to determine this, so there was no guesswork needed. Using these continuous optimisation techniques, we increased the click-through-rate by 32%, from 5.6% to 7.5%.
On a $1,000 per month budget, the campaigns delivered:
An average of 11 high-quality conversions per month
Strong lead intent across all practice areas
A cost-per-conversion that made commercial sense for the business
These weren’t low-quality form fills - they were genuine enquiries with real case potential.
With consistent performance proven, we moved into a controlled scaling phase:
Monthly budget increased by 137%
Campaigns expanded while maintaining segmentation and intent
137% increase in spend
163% increase in conversions
10% reduction in cost-per-conversion
All while maintaining lead quality during the growth phase
This outcome validated the underlying strategy of targeting high-intent search terms and marrying them with precise ad copy and landing pages.
When budgets were allocated deliberately and performance was measured granularly, Google Ads became a stable growth lever rather for the business.
Five years on, Errard Legal continues to benefit from a strategy that delivers consistent, high-value leads at sustainable costs, providing a reliable foundation for long-term growth.
