Personal injury marketing: SEO and ads judged on signed cases

Personal injury is the most competitive corner of legal marketing. We run SEO, AI search, Google search ads and Local Services Ads for injury firms in English and Spanish, with intake speed treated as part of the job, and we judge all of it on one number: signed cases, counted in your own records every Monday.

The injury market, in five facts

1. Clicks are expensive. Legal has the highest average cost per click of any industry, $9.87 in one benchmark (LocaliQ), and injury terms run far higher. Every wasted search term costs real money.
2. TV and vendors crowd the field. Over 90% of injury claimants report seeing attorney ads, mostly on TV (Insurance Research Council). Lead vendors sell the same searchers back to firms; in one 2026 federal suit, an injury firm alleges it rejected 204 of 265 vendor leads, at about $5,000 a lead (E.D.N.Y. No. 2:26-cv-04412; Rankings.io; an allegation, not a finding).
3. The phone decides. In Clio’s 2024 study of 500 law firms, only 40% answered a secret shopper’s call (Clio, via 2Civility).
4. Spanish matters. Hispanic workers suffered 1,229 of the 5,070 US workplace deaths in 2024 (BLS), and California, Texas and Florida alone have 35.4 million Hispanic residents (Pew Research Center).
5. The law keeps moving case values. Florida’s 2023 HB 837 bars recovery for a plaintiff more than 50% at fault and cut the negligence deadline from four years to two (Florida Senate). Georgia’s 2025 SB 68 lets juries see both billed and paid medical amounts (Georgia Governor). When values shift, the values your ads learn from must shift too.

Intake speed decides cases

A caller who can’t reach your firm can reach another one in seconds, and the next firm’s ads are on the same page. That’s why intake sits inside every injury plan we run.

• Answer every hour you advertise. Google weighs responsiveness in Local Services rankings, saying that “missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness” (Google), and since October 1, 2026 it can bill some missed calls during listed hours (Google).
• Call back in minutes, not hours. In a 2011 study of 2,241 companies, those that tried to reach a web lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited even an hour longer (Harvard Business Review).
• Screen against your written criteria. Your intake team records the facts that decide a case for your firm, such as liability, injury and treatment, insurance coverage, the limitation period and conflicts. Those decisions become the “qualified” stage that bidding learns from.
• Sign the same day where you can. Electronic signing of your engagement agreement shortens the gap between a good call and a signed case.
• Grade calls as coaching. A sample of calls is graded each month, English and Spanish, and the results go to your intake manager. See intake monitoring.

Local Services Ads for injury firms

Personal injury is one of Google’s Local Services lawyer categories, and for many injury firms it is the busiest. We run it as a system: every lead rated within 48 hours, every missed call alerted within 5 minutes, billed missed calls audited against your listed hours, hours and service areas tuned, and every lead matched to a signed case. Full detail is on Local Services Ads.

Built in Spanish

Spanish-speaking clients get Spanish ads, Spanish pages and Spanish intake, written by native writers and checked by a second. Pages explain how a contingency fee works and what a client owes if a case is lost, because those are the questions that keep people from calling. Required statements appear in Spanish wherever an ad uses Spanish; Texas requires them “in each language used” (State Bar of Texas). Your report shows Spanish signed cases on their own line. See the Spanish program.

Our two pillars for injury firms

Both are judged on the Monday report, which shows what each signed case cost by channel, case type and language.

Values, timing and the forecast

• Values by case type. A truck crash and a soft-tissue case are not worth the same to your firm, and your ads shouldn’t bid as if they were. Value bands come from your own resolved cases, grouped by type, and are sent to Google as bands, never as one client’s fee.
• Signing takes time. Some cases sign the day they call; others take weeks. Cohorts in the Monday report show how each week’s leads sign over time, so no budget decision rests on an unfinished month.
• Fees take longer. Injury cases took about 11.4 months to resolve on average in one survey (Nolo). On plans with a caseload forecast, we show when fees are likely to arrive, not just when cases sign.

State rules that shape injury marketing

• Fee claims carry cost statements. “No fee unless we win” appears only with the statement your state requires about costs. Texas, for example, requires a contingent-fee ad to say whether the client pays expenses (State Bar of Texas), and the wording has to match your actual fee agreement.
• California is strict about money and injuries. In electronic ads, money references and injury or accident scenes are presumed misleading (§6158.1). Our California default: no money, results or injury imagery in ads.
• No contact with injured people who didn’t ask. Texas makes it a crime to solicit accident victims within 31 days (Penal Code §38.12), and many states set a 30-day waiting period. We never contact anyone; your ads answer people who search.
• No audiences built from injury data. Google bars remarketing, Customer Match and lookalikes in sensitive categories, including health (Google). We never build Customer Match or lookalike audiences from client lists, and remarketing runs only where the platform’s policy allows it. Signed-case uploads for bidding are allowed, and carry no injury details.

Each state’s basics are in the lawyer advertising rules by state, including Texas, Florida and California. Your counsel and your bar have the final word.

What we never do for injury firms

• Sell, buy, share or route leads, or run a consumer “accident help” brand of our own.
• Charge per case, per lead or a share of your fees.
• Geofence hospitals, clinics, accident scenes or police stations.
• Upload injuries, treatment or case facts to any platform.
• Build audiences from client lists, or run remarketing where a platform’s policy doesn’t allow it.
• Promise a number of cases, a ranking or a settlement.

Start with a free video review of your firm’s public ads and search presence, or the measurement study of your own numbers.