Law firm digital marketing in Australia: reading month four

Digital marketing for an Australian law firm is judged on 4 numbers, and 3 of them look like failure at month four. Impressions rising while clicks stay flat is what progress looks like from position 30, and telling that apart from a wasted retainer is the whole job.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

Which four numbers actually tell you anything?

Four, and they answer different questions in a fixed order.

They have to be read in that sequence, because each one is upstream of the next. A page cannot be clicked before it is shown, and it is barely shown while it sits on the third results page. Reading clicks in month three is reading the fourth number in a chain whose first link has only just started to move.

The admission that shapes the rest of this page: three of those four can rise while the firm gains nothing, and the fourth — whether an enquiry became a matter worth having — is one no supplier can see. It happens inside the firm, after the handover, and it is the only number that settles whether any of this was worth the money.

Why does month four look like failure?

Because a page climbing from the third results page to the bottom of the first earns almost no clicks along the way.

Position 30 to position 11 is most of the distance travelled and none of the reward. The page is being shown to progressively more people and chosen by almost none of them, so a report at month four shows one line going up, one line flat, and a bill. Without the underlying search-by-search data it is indistinguishable from a supplier doing nothing, which is precisely why the data belongs to the firm rather than in a summary.

There is a second reason particular to this market. On 39 of the 54 highest-value legal searches we measured on 3 August 2026, Google generated an answer above the ordinary results, and the pattern holds across 863 of 1,235 keywords in the wider set. A page can be shown, be read inside a generated answer, and never be clicked at all. Impressions on those searches are worth less per unit than they used to be, and no supplier's dashboard separates the two kinds.

What should each month look like, in order?

Roughly this, and a supplier who promises a faster version is selling something.

Month one is a build month and there is nothing to report at the end of it. Saying that at the start costs an enquiry occasionally and costs far less than saying it in the fourth week.

The comparison worth making is against what the same traffic would cost. In Sydney, family law runs at 7,200 searches a month at around A$30.15 a click, and criminal work at 2,400 searches at around A$28.08, both measured 3 August 2026. A hundred clicks in the first is roughly A$3,015 — arithmetic on a measured figure, not a forecast. Against that, a set of pages that will still be found in year three is a different kind of purchase, and the first six months are the price of it.

When is a flat number genuinely a bad sign?

When two of the four are flat together, which is a different picture from one being flat alone.

• Impressions flat after month three. The pages are not being shown at all. Either they are not indexed, or they were written for searches nobody runs. This one is real and should be raised immediately.
• Impressions rising, position flat, for two quarters. The pages are appearing on searches they cannot win. Usually the subject is too broad, and the fix is narrower pages rather than more of them.
• Clicks rising, enquiries flat. The traffic arrived and the site or the intake lost it. This is the most expensive of the three because it looks like success in the report.

The first two are the supplier's problem. The third usually is not, and a supplier who accepts the blame for it is agreeing to fix something they do not control, which helps nobody in month nine.

What can no supplier's report tell you?

Three things, all of which decide the answer.

Whether the enquiry was any good. A report counts enquiries. Only the firm knows which were the kind of work it wants, and a supplier optimising for the count will happily supply more of the kind you decline.

What happened after the enquiry arrived. How long it took somebody to ring back sits inside the firm, and it moves the result more than any change to a page.

Where the referral came from. A person who read three pages in March and rang in July after a friend mentioned the firm is recorded as a referral, correctly, and the pages get no credit. The only instrument that catches this is asking every new client where they came from and writing it down.

15 of the 62 questions buyers ask across these searches are price questions, measured 3 August 2026 — the largest single category. It is worth noticing that the thing buyers most want measured is the thing most reports never mention.

What do Australian suppliers report on, and what do they publish?

Reporting is not observable before signing. Price publication is, and it is a reasonable proxy for how much a supplier will put in writing.

Read 3 August 2026, from 40 legal-marketing suppliers read in full that day. The table records whether a figure appeared, not what it was — our tooling collected numbers that mixed genuine fees with case values and fragments, so attributing one to a named business would mean publishing something unverified. It is also a snapshot of a single day.

Across the full 40: twelve published a price at all, five of those showed only a range, eight claimed a guarantee of some kind, and one offered work with no minimum term. Of about twenty calls to action counted in this market, seventeen asked for a call, a quote or an audit rather than offering a document.

Ours, since this page is about being able to check things: A$1,900 for the sprint, A$4,200 for the build. Fixed, published, no minimum term. We never charge per enquiry or per matter, and we do not promise a position or a number of enquiries, because eight of the forty imply otherwise and nobody controls either.

Where is another supplier the better choice?

Two situations, and both send the work away from us.

When the firm needs an answer inside a quarter. Everything above describes a curve that cannot be judged before month six. Australian clicks are cheap enough that paid search settles the same question in a fortnight, and we do not manage ad spend, so this is a recommendation to buy from somebody else.

When the constraint is measurement of the whole practice rather than of a website. A firm wanting matter profitability, fee-earner utilisation and marketing attribution in one view needs its practice-management system configured properly, which is a different supplier and often a different kind of business entirely. Reporting on pages is a small part of that picture and should not be sold as the whole of it.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026 — including several on this page. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.

The free report gives you the full count, named, so you can repeat it rather than take ours. It also shows how many people search for your practice areas in your town, and what those clicks cost to buy at Google's own prices.

Get the report — five questions, about two minutes →

No call required. Our own prices are on that page.

Where should I read next?

For what the work consists of before there is anything to measure: law firm marketing seo, and lawyer website design for what belongs on each page.

If the question is who to buy it from: law firm seo agency covers what a retainer should contain, and law firm seo experts covers what a specialist adds to an existing in-house effort.

For a practice area where advertising is more tightly restricted: personal injury law firm seo.

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