Law firm online marketing: what £1,000 a month really buys

A £1,000 monthly budget in the UK is one retained channel and a small amount of paid traffic. A £3,000 budget is two channels running at once. At Bristol conveyancing prices of £17.75 a click, measured 3 August 2026, the difference is roughly 22 clicks a month against 101.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What does £1,000 a month actually buy?

One channel done properly, and a little of a second.

Everything below is arithmetic on two sourced inputs: our own published prices, and the cost per click Google charges in Bristol for residential conveyancing, which is £17.75 against 1,440 searches a month, measured 3 August 2026 across twenty UK cities. None of it is a forecast of enquiries, and any supplier converting it into one before seeing your website is quoting a number they invented.

The top row leaves £400 of the budget unspent, and that is a legitimate answer rather than an oversight — the retainer tiers are £600, £1,200 and £2,400, so a £1,000 budget either buys the £600 tier and stops, or buys the £600 tier and puts the remainder somewhere it can be measured.

The middle row is the one most firms should take. £600 a month buys continuity — pages written, published and left to accumulate — and the £400 buys enough traffic to learn something about the pages while they are still new.

The bottom row is the one that feels most productive and ages worst. Fifty-six clicks arrive this month and nothing is left of them next month. That is not an argument against advertising; it is the reason the split exists.

What changes at £3,000 a month?

The second channel stops being a test and becomes a channel.

Same arithmetic, same two inputs. The balanced row is where the two halves start to inform each other: 101 clicks a month tells you within a fortnight which practice-area page people actually open, and that answer decides what the retained half writes next. At £400 a month of traffic you are guessing at that; at £1,800 you are not.

What none of these rows include is the fee somebody charges to run the campaign. We do not manage ad spend — no account management, no bid strategy, no keyword lists — and we hold no sourced figure for what a UK agency charges to do it, so the paid column above is media cost only. Budget for the management fee separately and ask the agency to publish it.

Which practice area should the money go to first?

The one where your budget covers a meaningful share of the search, which is rarely the one with the most searches.

Buying every legal search in Bristol for one month at Google's own prices would cost £54,412, measured 3 August 2026. A £3,000 monthly budget is about 5.5% of that. That is arithmetic, and it is the number that makes the decision: no realistic budget covers a city, so the budget has to pick.

Read that table as a buyer rather than as a marketer. Immigration in Bristol is 140 searches a month at £5.65, so £400 buys about 70 of them — roughly half the month's demand for one of your practice areas, for the smallest row in the £1,000 budget above. Personal injury at £53.70 buys seven clicks for the same money.

The instinct is to start with conveyancing because it is the biggest number. The arithmetic says start where your money is a large fraction of a small market, learn there, and move up.

How should the first year be sequenced?

Build once, retain continuously, and expect nothing measurable from month one.

Take £700 off a build taken with six months of retainer, which makes the £2,400 Firm Site £1,700 alongside a £600 retainer. A first year at the £1,000 level is therefore £1,700 plus twelve months at £1,000, which is £13,700. At the £3,000 level it is £1,700 plus £36,000, which is £37,700. Both are arithmetic on published prices, not quotations, and both assume the retainer runs the full twelve months, which nothing obliges you to do — there is no minimum term.

Month one is a build month and produces nothing to report. Three to four months brings movement, six to nine before it can be judged fairly. A firm that needs instructions inside this quarter should spend the whole budget on paid traffic and read this page again next year.

Which of these suppliers publish a price you can budget against?

Three of the four named here, which is better than the market as a whole manages.

Across all 40 suppliers we 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, and attributing one to a named business would publish something unverified about a competitor.

15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions. A budget cannot be allocated across suppliers who will not publish one, which is why the five who show a range rather than a figure are a practical problem rather than a stylistic one: a range cannot be added up.

What does not belong in the budget?

Three line items to refuse before the arithmetic starts.

1. Payment per enquiry, per lead or per matter. LASPO 2012 section 56 prohibits referral fees in prescribed legal business including personal injury, and it binds the firm paying as well as the party being paid. Our own pricing is fixed by scope for that reason, including for work the restriction does not reach.
2. A guarantee. Eight of the 40 suppliers claim one. Nobody controls Google's ranking, so the guarantee is either unenforceable or attached to a metric that does not matter.
3. A minimum term you have not priced. One supplier of the 40 stated no minimum term. If the contract runs twelve months, the annual figure is the real price, not the monthly one, and it belongs in the budget at the annual number.

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?

On the retained half of the split: law firm seo marketing covers what the work consists of, and law firm marketing website covers the asset it is spent on.

If the budget is smaller than the figures above: small law firm marketing.

Two questions worth settling before allocating anything: Does SEO work for law firms? and What are the ranks in a law firm?.

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