It’s 11:40 on a Saturday night.
A mother is standing in the parking lot of a police station with her phone in her hand.
Her son has been arrested. She doesn’t know what a bail hearing is.
She does not know what happens in the next 48 hours.
She has never needed a lawyer before in her life.
She types four words into Google.
“criminal lawyer near me”
And then she does what every single person in her position does: taps the first thing she sees, and calls it.
Not the fifth result.
Not the one with the nicest logo.
The first one she can call right now, because her hands are shaking and she wants a human voice with answers on the other end of the line.
If that first result is not you, you will never know she existed.
That is the whole game.
Criminal defense is not dog grooming.
You are not bidding against three guys with a Wix site.
You are bidding against firms that have been running Google Ads for a decade, that have full-time media buyers, that know exactly what each charge is worth for them, and that will happily pay whatever it takes to sit above you at 11:40 on a Saturday night.
Clicks in this niche are expensive.
And the person clicking is not browsing.
They are worried, in a hurry, and making a decision in under ninety seconds.
Which means there is no room for a campaign that is almost set up right.
And yet, so many criminal defense attorneys make the same mistakes.
Number one. Poor keyword targeting.
The account is bidding on “criminal lawyer” on broad match, and Google, doing exactly what Google does, decides that “how long does a criminal record last,” “criminal law degree,” and “free legal aid near me” are close enough.
Those are not people looking to hire you.
And you are paying premium money for every one of them.
Number two. The ads point at the homepage.
Someone searches for a DUI at midnight and lands on a page with a rotating banner, a firm history, five practice areas, and a phone number in eight point font at the bottom that doesn’t click.
They are gone in four seconds and calling the next firm on the list.
Number three. Conversion tracking optimizing for low quality leads.
This is the one that costs the most and gets noticed the least.
If the account is counting every form submission or phone call as a conversion, then the algorithm is being trained on garbage.
Google is not trying to get you cases.
Google is trying to get you more of whatever you told it a conversion is.
Tell it wrong, and it will obediently go out and buy you thousands of dollars of wrong.
Number four. Nobody is separating the case types.
A first-time DUI, a domestic violence charge, a federal fraud indictment, and a drug conspiracy charge are four completely different people with four completely different price points and four completely different levels of panic.
Running them in one campaign with one budget and the same ad means the cheap, high-volume searches strangle the budget before the high-value ones ever get a look in.
Every week your criminal defense PPC campaigns are making these mistakes is a week those clients are hiring somebody else.
We at Dominate Marketing fix exactly this, making sure you are the firm that potential clients hire when they need a criminal defense lawyer.
And making sure that your Google Ads campaign brings them in profitably, in a predictable, consistent manner, month after month.
