TL;DR
- The most expensive mistake in geo targeting lawyer ads is leaving Google’s location setting on “presence or interest,” which serves your ads to people who searched about your city from three states away.
- Radius targeting fits cases that come from driving distance, and zip code targeting fits cases that come from a specific income band, so pick the shape that matches how your cases actually arrive.
- Exclusions do more for cost per case than any bid adjustment, because every county you cut is budget that moves to a county you can serve.
- The location report in Google Ads tells you which cities converted and which only spent, and most firms have never opened it.
Your Google Ads geography is probably the cheapest thing you can fix this month. Most law firm accounts I audit still run the location settings a contractor set up two years ago, on defaults, spending real money on people who live nowhere near the office. Good geo-targeting strategies for local attorney ads aren’t complicated. They require you to decide, on purpose, where a case can come from and where it can’t, and then tell Google that in the specific way Google understands.
Four ways to draw the map, and when each one is right
Google gives you four practical shapes: radius, zip code, city or county, and DMA. They’re not interchangeable.
Radius targeting
A radius is a circle around a point. Use it when travel time is the real constraint on whether someone hires you. Criminal defense is the clearest example. A person arrested in a given county needs a lawyer who appears in that county’s courthouse, and they’ll drive 30 minutes but not 90. Family law behaves the same way, because clients come to the office repeatedly over a year or more.
If your office sits on the edge of your service area, center the radius on the courthouse instead. A 25 mile circle drawn around your building can put half its area in the ocean or in a county where you don’t practice. Radius targeting law firm ads only work when the circle covers people, not water and farmland. Practical range: 15 to 30 miles in a metro, 40 to 60 in a rural market where people already expect to drive.
Zip code targeting
Zip codes are the right tool when the thing that qualifies a lead is demographics rather than distance. Estate planning is the obvious case. A person with a taxable estate and a trust question lives in identifiable zip codes. A 25 mile radius around a suburban office gets you everyone, including the people who want a $400 will and will call four firms about it.
Build the list from actual data. Pull your last 50 signed clients from Clio or Lawmatics, export the addresses, count the zips. Most of your revenue will trace back to a dozen of them. Target those, then add the adjacent zips with similar household income.
City and county targeting
Use city and county when your practice is tied to a court system or a licensing boundary. Workers comp, probate, anything filed in a specific venue. Counties beat cities, because city boundaries are strange shapes that leave out the unincorporated areas where plenty of your clients live.
DMA targeting
The DMA (the TV market) is too big for almost every firm. It earns its place only in mass tort or a statewide practice where you’ll genuinely take a case from anywhere. If you run a single office and your location targeting google ads law firm setup is on DMA, you’re funding clicks from two hours away.
The setting that quietly wastes most of your budget
In each campaign, open Settings, then Locations, then Location options. Two choices. “Presence or interest” shows your ad to people who are in your target area or who have shown interest in it. “Presence” means people actually there.
The default has historically been presence or interest, and it’s wrong for nearly every law firm. Someone in Ohio reading about a Florida car accident shows “interest” in Florida. Someone researching a move to Austin shows interest in Austin. Neither one hires you.
Set it to “Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations.” For exclusions, set the matching option to “Presence: people in your excluded locations,” so you only cut people who are actually there.
Immigration is the exception, since a real share of those clients search from out of state or out of the country. If you practice immigration, test both and read the data.
Exclusions matter more than additions
Every firm has counties it doesn’t want cases from. The one where the drive is two hours for a $3,000 fee. The jurisdiction where you’d rather not appear. The neighboring state where you aren’t licensed but the radius spills over anyway.
Add those as negative locations, then check your radius on an actual map, because a circle drawn on a metro almost always crosses a line you didn’t intend. Exclusions compound. Cut 20 percent of wasted geography and that budget doesn’t disappear, it moves into the areas that convert and raises your impression share where it counts.
Two practice areas, two completely different maps
A personal injury firm and an estate planning firm should have almost nothing in common in their location settings.
Personal injury. Cases happen where crashes happen. Target the corridors: the interstate exchanges, the state highways with a bad record, the areas around the trauma centers where injured people get taken. Layer zip codes over those corridors instead of drawing one big circle. People search “car accident lawyer near me” from a hospital parking lot or a passenger seat, so the search happens where the crash was, not where they live. Our guide to what actually brings personal injury cases in the door covers the channel mix around these ads.
Estate planning. Nothing about estate planning is geographic urgency. It’s household income, homeownership, and age. Build a zip list weighted toward owner-occupied housing and the retirement communities in your market, and let the radius go. Our post on estate planning ad campaigns covers what the copy should say once the geography is right.
Bid adjustments by location
Once you have 30 days of real conversion data, add location bid adjustments. In the campaign, go to Locations and sort by cost per conversion.
Raise bids 15 to 30 percent on the cities where cost per signed case is lowest. Lower bids 20 to 40 percent where cost per conversion runs more than double your account average. Skip any location with fewer than about 15 conversions, because you’d be reading noise.
Under Performance Max and some Smart Bidding strategies, location bid adjustments behave differently or get ignored. There, control geography by splitting campaigns, one per tier of location, with separate budgets. Blunt, but it works, and it’s how we structure most accounts at our PPC practice.
Read the location report every month
Google Ads, Campaigns, the Locations tab, then “Report on: matched locations” rather than “targeted locations.” That’s the one showing the actual cities and counties where impressions happened, and it’s where waste shows up. Sort by cost descending. Any location with real spend and zero conversions over 60 days is a candidate for exclusion.
Pair it with call tracking, because a location that looks like it converts may be producing calls that never become cases. CallRail tagging by campaign lets you trace a signed matter back to the city it came from, which is the only number that counts. If your calls aren’t tracked to that level, start with an intake review before you spend more on geography.
One naming note, since people mix these up: “GEO” in marketing now usually means generative engine optimization, which is about getting cited in AI answers. Different subject, covered in our piece on generative engine optimization for law firms. This post is about literal geography.
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