Law firm digital marketing: the four numbers to watch

Six months of measurement on a law firm site comes down to four numbers: impressions, clicks by query, enquiries by route, and instructions by source. Month one produces none of them. AI Overviews now appear on 39 of 54 money searches we measured, which changes what a falling click-through rate means.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What should a firm actually measure?

Four numbers, in the order the work reaches them.

1. Impressions by query. How often a page of yours was shown for a search somebody typed. It moves first, months before anything else does, and it is the only early evidence that exists.
2. Clicks by query. Not clicks in total. The query matters more than the count, because ten clicks on how much does a conveyancing solicitor cost are worth more than a hundred on the firm's own name.
3. Enquiries by route. Telephone, web form, email, walk-in. Counted at the point they arrive, by whoever receives them.
4. Instructions by source, recorded at intake by asking the client. Nothing else recovers this.

The first two come out of Google Search Console and are free. The third is a tally sheet. The fourth is a question added to the client care process, and it is the only one of the four that connects marketing spend to fee income.

A damaging admission: we cannot supply the fourth number, and neither can anybody else. A person who searched three weeks ago, read two pages, and later telephoned after a friend mentioned the firm is not attributable by any tool. We do not install call tracking and would not claim it closes the gap. If the firm does not ask callers how they found it, that number does not exist, and no supplier report can invent it honestly.

What do the numbers look like in the first six months?

Flat, then strange, then legible, roughly in that order.

The right-hand column is the useful one. Most firms stop the work because the left-hand column looks disappointing, when the thing that should trigger a conversation is the right-hand column.

Three to four months brings movement, six to nine before the work can be judged fairly. Month one is a build month and there is nothing to report at the end of it, which is worth agreeing out loud before the first invoice.

Why do impressions rise while clicks stay flat?

Because a page at position 30 that moves to position 11 is seen far more often and clicked no more often at all.

This is the single most misread pattern in the first quarter, and it reads exactly like failure. A page ranking outside the first results page is shown to people who never scroll that far. As it climbs, the impression count rises steeply. The click count does not move until the page crosses onto the first page of results, which happens late and then happens quickly.

So the sequence is: impressions rise, click-through rate falls, clicks stay flat, and every one of those three statements is a description of progress. A supplier whose report shows only clicks is showing you the last of the three to move, which is why the query-level table matters more than any summary.

What to check instead, at month three: are the impressions arriving on queries a client would type, or on irrelevant ones? Rising impressions on conveyancing solicitor Sheffield is the mechanism working. Rising impressions on unrelated searches is a page about the wrong thing.

What does an AI Overview do to these numbers?

It converts some of your impressions into answers nobody clicks, and that is not always a loss.

Across the full keyword set we measured on 3 August 2026, 863 of 1,235 keywords carry an AI Overview — 70%. On the money searches specifically, it is 39 of 54, which is 72%. Those are unusually high figures and they change how a report should be read.

The mechanical consequence: when a search returns a generated answer, a page can be the source of that answer, receive an impression, and receive no click. Click-through rate falls. Visibility has not. A firm judging the work on click-through rate alone will conclude that a page is failing at the exact moment it has become the answer.

There is a second consequence that is less comfortable. If the answer is lifted and the reader is satisfied, the click never happens at all, whatever anyone does. The only available response is to write so the lifted passage is unmistakably yours — a direct answer in the first forty words, attributed to a named firm — and to accept that some searches now end without a visit.

Which numbers are worth ignoring?

Four that appear in reports and decide nothing.

• Total sessions. A number that goes up when anything goes up. It cannot tell you which page or query moved, so it cannot inform a decision.
• Bounce rate on an answer page. Somebody who read your costs page, learnt what conveyancing costs, and left has been served. That is what the page is for.
• A count of keywords ranked. Ranking position 60 for nine hundred phrases is not progress. Ranking position 8 for eleven is.
• Third-party authority scores. They are inventions of the tools that sell them, they are not inputs Google uses, and they move without anything happening to the firm.

Ask for the query-level table instead. If a supplier cannot produce one, they are not measuring; they are summarising.

What should a monthly report contain?

Four items, on two sides of paper, and none of them a dashboard screenshot.

An organic click is worth roughly what the same click would cost to buy. In Nottingham, family and divorce searches run at 1,020 a month with a cost per click of £17.18, measured 3 August 2026. A hundred organic clicks on that query is £1,718 of traffic at Google's own prices — arithmetic on the click price, not a forecast, and not revenue. Personal injury in the same city is 140 searches a month at £76.53, so the same hundred clicks would be £7,653. That is the most defensible way to put a number on organic work, and it is still not a claim about instructions won.

Should a supplier guarantee a result?

No, and 8 of the 40 suppliers we read do it anyway.

Across all 40 read in full that day:

⚠ We record whether a price appeared, not what it was. The figures our tooling collected mixed genuine fees with case values and fragments, so attributing one to a named business would publish something unverified.

Nobody controls Google's ranking, so a guarantee attached to a position is either unenforceable or attached to a measure that does not matter. We decline to offer one. What we will commit to is the report above, the published price, and no minimum term — which is a commitment about our own conduct rather than about a search engine's behaviour, and is therefore one we can actually keep.

Our prices: £890 for the Price Transparency Pack in 10 working days, £2,400 for the Firm Site, £4,200 for Firm Site+, £6,900 for the Authority Build, retainers at £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month with no minimum term, and £700 off a build taken with six months of retainer. Never per enquiry, per lead or per matter — LASPO 2012 section 56 prohibits referral fees in prescribed legal business including personal injury, and binds both sides of the arrangement.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026, including several that appear on searches like this one. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.

The free report gives you the full count, named, so you can repeat the exercise 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?

Two pages the measurement usually points at first: price transparency pages: what good looks like, with the rule quoted and complaints information, the Legal Ombudsman and the SRA digital badge: what belongs where.

On the search work being measured: law firm seo and law firm internet marketing.

Wider than search: lawyer firm marketing.

Frequently asked questions