Marketing for law firms: a plan that ends at the signed client

Most law firm marketing advice starts with tactics. Post on social media. Buy ads. Write a blog. I’d rather start with the thing every tactic is supposed to produce, which is a signed client, and work backwards.

This guide is the plan we use at XYR Partners, written so you can follow it with or without us.

On this page

• Start with how your clients search
• The five parts of a law firm marketing plan
• Fix intake before you buy more traffic
• A four-week plan you can start Monday
• What to ask any law firm marketing agency
• Stay inside the advertising rules

Start with how your clients search

Your clients search for the help they need, in their own words, and almost never for anything that sounds like marketing.

We pulled US Google search volumes for one common client search and one firm-side search in four practice areas. The gap is enormous.

Practice area	What clients search	Searches a month	What firms search	Searches a month
Estate planning	estate planning attorney	368,000	estate planning attorney marketing	50
Immigration	immigration lawyer	135,000	immigration attorney marketing	210
Family law	family law attorney near me	110,000	family law marketing	210
Criminal defense	criminal defense lawyer near me	90,500	criminal defense attorney marketing	480

Method: US Google Ads search volumes from OpenSEO’s keyword data, measured on 30 September 2026. Limits: national monthly averages for one search per column, so your city’s numbers will be smaller.

Three lessons come out of that table:

1. Name your pages the way clients talk. “Estate planning attorney” beats “wealth transfer solutions” every time, because that’s what people type.
2. “Near me” is everywhere. Two of the four biggest client searches end in “near me”, which means your Google Business Profile matters as much as your website.
3. Situations beat services. Nobody wakes up wanting “legal services”. They wake up wanting their ex to follow the custody order. Pages written for a situation answer the search better.

We’ve written up how this plan changes by practice area: estate planning attorney marketing, immigration attorney marketing, family law marketing and criminal defense attorney marketing.

The five parts of a law firm marketing plan

A law firm marketing plan has five parts, and each one only works if the one before it does.

1. A website that earns the call

Your website is where every other channel sends people, so it has to load fast, read clearly on a phone and make the next step obvious. Or, as I like to put it: “Marketing sends people to your website. If that site is slow or clumsy, you’ve paid to make a bad first impression.”

Good looks like this:

• a phone number you can tap
• a short consult form on every page
• a page for each case type you take
• real names and photos of the attorneys

2. Local and organic search

Organic search brings people who are already looking for a lawyer like you. For most firms it starts locally: a complete Google Business Profile with the right categories, then pages that answer the searches in the table above, then a steady flow of reviews.

It takes months to build, which is exactly why competitors who start later find it hard to catch up.

3. A place in AI answers

Clients can now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity to recommend a lawyer. Those assistants can only recommend firms they can find, read and trust, so the basics of search apply, plus a few extra steps. Our guide to showing up in ChatGPT’s recommendations covers them, and you can see whether AI assistants name your firm today.

4. Intake that answers every inquiry

Every channel above produces calls, forms and chats. If those go unanswered, or get answered the next day, the money is spent and the client calls someone else. Intake is the cheapest part of the plan to fix and the most expensive to ignore.

5. Reporting that ends at the signed client

Clicks, rankings and “leads” are all steps on the way. The number that matters is how many inquiries became signed clients, and which source each one came from. A useful monthly report answers three questions:

• Where did each call, form and chat first come from?
• Which of those were real, qualified inquiries?
• Which became signed clients, as confirmed by your team?

Our Source-to-Inquiry Report is built around those three. If you can’t answer them today, that’s the first thing to fix.

Fix intake before you buy more traffic

Here’s the opinion part. When a firm says marketing doesn’t work, my bet is that it doesn’t have a traffic problem. It has a leak.

Picture it: the firm pays for ads or SEO, the phone rings, and nobody picks up at lunch, after five or on Saturday. Or a form arrives and sits in a shared inbox until Monday. More traffic poured into that bucket just leaks faster.

So before you spend another dollar on visibility, check four things:

• Call your own number at 12:30 and at 6:30 in the evening. Does a person or an approved assistant answer?
• Fill in your own contact form. How long until someone replies?
• Ask your intake team where last month’s signed clients came from. Can they say?
• Look at your Google Business Profile on a phone. Is it complete, current and full of recent reviews?

Every “no” is cheaper to fix than a month of ads.

A four-week plan you can start Monday

You can get the foundations in place in a month with one person and a few hours a week.

1. Week one: measure. Run our free law firm SEO audit, call your own line at awkward hours, and write down where your last 20 signed clients came from, as best you can.
2. Week two: fix intake. Cover missed and after-hours calls, route web forms to a named person with a same-day reply rule, and start recording the source of every inquiry.
3. Week three: fix the profile and the pages. Complete your Google Business Profile, then make sure each main case type has its own clear page written in your clients’ words.
4. Week four: start the habits. Ask every satisfied client for a review, publish one useful page answering a real client question, and check whether AI assistants name your firm.

After that, it’s a monthly rhythm: publish, ask for reviews, check the numbers, fix the weakest link.

What to ask any law firm marketing agency

If you’d rather hire a law firm marketing agency, ask these questions before you sign anything, including if you’re talking to us.

Price is the first test, and most agencies don’t pass it in public. We checked the seven agency pages that ranked in Google’s US top 10 for “law firm marketing agency” on 30 September 2026. Only one printed a price for its marketing on the page, and one more priced website design, not marketing, on a linked page. The other five asked you to request a quote or book a call first.

Method: we read each agency’s ranking page and, where its menu had one, its pricing page, and recorded any printed price and contract terms. Limits: one search, one day and up to two pages per site, and prices change.

• What does it cost, in writing, before the first call? If a price only appears after a sales pitch, ask why.
• What’s the minimum term, and what happens if I leave? Know whether you own the website, content and accounts.
• Who actually does the work? Find out whether you’ll speak to the person doing it or to an account manager.
• What will the report show? Ask to see a sample, and check whether it ends at signed clients or stops at clicks.
• What can you prove? Ask for results with a named client, a number and a timeframe, and be wary of anything vaguer.

Our own answers are on the Charter Offer page: one price on the page, no minimum term, the founder doing the work, and a report that follows each inquiry to what your team confirms it became. We’re a new firm, so we can’t show client results yet, and we say so there too.

Stay inside the advertising rules

Lawyer advertising has rules that other businesses don’t face. The ABA’s Model Rule 7.1 says a lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer’s services, and each state has its own version.

In practice, your marketing should never:

• promise outcomes or results
• invent or buy reviews
• overstate experience or credentials
• go out under the firm’s name without an attorney’s approval Good marketing doesn’t need to bend those rules. It needs to tell the truth clearly to the right people at the right moment.