Marketing for a small or solo law firm is uniquely brutal: the bar association rules every word, your prospects are self-conscious about even searching, and every competitor is running the same Google ads against the same ten keywords. Here’s the 90-day playbook we’d run for a 3–15 attorney firm right now.
Start with the economics
Law-firm marketing breaks if you don’t segment by matter type. The cost-per-signed-case for a personal injury firm and an estate planning firm aren’t in the same universe.
- PI / mass tort: $400–$2,500 per signed case is normal.
- Estates / family / immigration: $80–$300 per signed case if you do it right.
- B2B / transactional: Cost per qualified call matters more than cost per signed case.
The three channels that actually work
- Local SEO + Google Business Profile. Still the highest-intent traffic in the category. The ranking factors in 2026: real reviews collected weekly, complete service-area markup, and consistent NAP across the 30 directories that still matter.
- Long-tail content for the questions clients actually Google.“Can I sue if I slipped on a wet floor in Florida” outranks “personal injury attorney” for buyers who’ll actually pick up the phone.
- Targeted YouTube pre-roll. Sleeper channel. Cheap CPMs, you can geo-target tightly, and a 30-second answer to one common question converts at 2–3× a generic display ad.
A 90-day plan we’d run
- Month 1: GBP audit + review-collection system (one-click email, weekly cadence). Build a 10-page topical-authority cluster around your top matter type.
- Month 2: Launch one Google search campaign on the long-tail (not the head term — the head term is too expensive). Start a two-attorney YouTube series, one short video per week.
- Month 3: Add a free-resource lead magnet (e.g., a 2-page “what to do in the first 48 hours after X” PDF) to the highest-traffic page. Begin retargeting.
What to skip in 2026
- Display banner buys on legal-directory sites. ROI is a memory.
- Ranked-list directory placements beyond Avvo / Justia. Diminishing returns.
- TV / radio unless you’re running a PI shop above $5M revenue. Otherwise, the floor is too high.
- Generic content rewritten from FindLaw. Google can tell.
“We doubled signed cases in two quarters by doing two things: weekly review collection and one YouTube short per week. Stopped spending on TV. The juniors finally got bandwidth back.”
— Managing partner, 6-attorney firm
What it looks like when it works
We worked with Northstar Legal on essentially this plan. Numbers and the “here’s what we’d do differently next time” section are on the case study.
Want this applied to your firm?
Book a Free 20-min audit. We’ll review your GBP, your top landing pages, and your current ad spend allocation, then tell you the one move that’ll matter most this quarter. Pick a time.