Overview
- Solo law firm marketing fails on sequence more than on budget, because most solos start with the slowest channel and quit before it pays.
- Month one is your Google Business Profile, your phone, and your reviews, and it should take about four hours a week.
- Month two is six pages of content that match what people actually search, at roughly five hours a week.
- Month three is the first paid channel and the first automation, and by then you’ll know which one to fund.
- The three things that sink solos are a 60 page content site built alone, broad PPC, and a full service retainer they can’t sustain.
You have maybe five hours a week for marketing and you’re already behind on discovery responses. That constraint is the whole problem, and it means the usual advice, which assumes a marketing coordinator exists, is useless to you. What follows is an order of operations. Do them in this order, because each one makes the next one work better.
Month one: capture the demand you already have
Four hours a week, roughly. Nothing here is creative. All of it is compounding.
Week 1, two hours: Google Business Profile. Categories, service areas, hours, a real description, photos of you and the actual office. This is the single highest return hour in solo lawyer marketing because map pack visibility drives calls from people ready to hire now. Our complete optimization guide walks through the fields that matter.
Week 1, one hour: fix your phone. Call your own number from a cell. Count the rings. If it goes to voicemail during business hours, that’s your biggest leak and no amount of traffic fixes it. Either commit to answering or get Smith.ai or a similar service running. A missed call from a personal injury or criminal matter is a case you funded someone else’s firm to take.
Week 2, two hours: call tracking. Put CallRail on the site and on your Google Business Profile. Without it you’re guessing for the next year about which of these steps worked.
Weeks 2 through 4, one hour a week: reviews. Make a list of every closed matter from the last eighteen months where the client was happy. Send a short personal text with the direct review link. Not a template blast. Ten to fifteen reviews from this alone is normal, and it’s the difference between third and first in the map pack in most markets.
Week 4, two hours: your homepage and one practice page. Not a redesign. Make sure both say what you do, where, and how to reach you, with a phone number in the header. That’s it.
Month two: publish six pages, not sixty
Five hours a week. The temptation here is to plan a content calendar with forty topics. Don’t. Six pages that answer real questions will out earn forty thin ones, every time.
Pick the six from what people actually type. Use Google Search Console if you have any history, and the free version of Semrush or Ahrefs if you don’t. You want questions with clear intent: “how long do I have to file a claim in [state],” “what happens at a first DUI hearing,” “do I need a lawyer to file an uncontested divorce.”
Write them yourself, or dictate them and clean up the transcript. You already say this to clients every week. That’s the advantage you have over an agency writer and it shows in the copy. Budget about ninety minutes per page including edits and posting. Law firm content marketing has the fuller method if you want it.
One page a week for six weeks, then stop and look at Search Console. You’ll see which topics Google is testing you for. That data tells you what the next six should be, and now you’re not guessing.
If you’re in personal injury, there’s a version of this sequence built specifically for your situation in our SEO tips for solo PI firms.
Month three: add one paid channel and one automation
Three to four hours a week, most of it in the first two weeks.
The paid channel. If you’re in a practice area Google’s Local Service Ads covers, start there and nowhere else. You pay per lead, you’re competing on a smaller field, and the Google Screened badge sits above everything. Our Local Service Ads guide covers setup and the screening process. If LSAs don’t cover your area, run a tightly scoped search campaign: one practice area, exact and phrase match only, your city, business hours, ten to fifteen keywords maximum. Not broad match. Not display. Not everything at once.
The automation. One thing. Pick the gap that costs you the most. For most solos it’s follow up: a lead calls, you’re in court, nobody calls back for six hours. Lawmatics or Clio Grow with a simple sequence closes that. If your problem is intake notes and matter setup instead, that’s a different automation. Our guide on what to automate first helps you pick.
By the end of month three you’ll have call data telling you which channel produced actual signed matters. Fund that one. Cut the rest.
What you should never do as a solo
Build a 60 page content site by yourself. It takes 90 hours minimum, you’ll abandon it around page 22, and the half finished version performs worse than six good pages. The site that ranks is the one that got finished.
Run broad match PPC. Broad match with no negative keyword list will burn a solo’s monthly budget in nine days on searches like “free legal advice” and “how to sue someone.” If you can’t check the search terms report weekly, don’t run search ads at all. The comparison between SEO and Google Ads is worth reading before you commit either way.
Sign a full service agency retainer. At full service retainer prices, you’re paying a team’s overhead out of a solo’s revenue, and you’ll be their smallest account. If you want outside help at this stage, buy hours, not a program. A few hours of strategy or a one off technical fix is a different purchase than a retainer.
Rebuild the website first. A new site with the same six visitors is still six visitors. Fix the site in month five, after you know which pages people actually land on.
The weekly rhythm after month three
Two hours a week, permanently. Thirty minutes on reviews and Google Business Profile posts. Thirty minutes writing or updating one page. Thirty minutes in your call tracking and ad accounts. Thirty minutes following up on leads that went quiet.
That’s it. Solo law practice marketing is not a project you finish, it’s a two hour block you defend. The solos who grow are the ones who keep the block when the caseload spikes, because that’s exactly when the pipeline needs the work. If the operational side is what’s eating your week, our guides on running a small law firm and managing a small law firm deal with the rest of it.
When You Outgrow Solo: Small Law Firm Marketing
The 90 day sequence works for a solo. Once you’ve added an associate or two and you’re paying outside vendors, the problem changes. The usual gap is that nobody can say which channel is producing signed cases. You might be paying for SEO that brings in no qualified leads while your Google Ads are signing cases and getting underfunded. You won’t know until you can trace it.
So the first rule for a small firm is the same as the first week for a solo: attribution before spend. CallRail on every channel, every call tagged by outcome, and a monthly look at cost per signed case by source. Our guide to measuring law firm marketing ROI lays out the setup.
What small law firm marketing actually costs
Rough ranges for a small firm in a competitive practice area and a mid-size market:
- Google Ads management and ad spend combined: $3,000 to $10,000 a month. Legal clicks commonly run $15 to $150 or more depending on practice area and market.
- SEO retainer: $1,500 to $5,000 a month, depending on how aggressive you want to be.
- Call tracking: $100 to $300 a month, depending on call volume and features.
Those numbers don’t tell you what you should spend. Your cost per signed case does. Take your average fee per case and your close rate on qualified leads, and work backward to what you can afford per lead. If you don’t know those two numbers yet, find them before you sign any new retainer.
Two channels small firms tend to underweight
Google Ads and local SEO together. Small firms often pick one. Ads bring cases this month. Your Google Business Profile and local rankings bring cheaper cases over time. Run both, and let the call data decide how to split the budget. The trade-off is laid out in SEO vs. Google Ads for law firms.
AI search. More prospects now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for an attorney recommendation before they ever open Google. Showing up there takes clear, well-structured pages that answer specific questions, plus consistent listings on the directories those tools cite, like Justia, Martindale-Avvo and your state bar. GEO for lawyers covers what to do.
Do you need a fractional CMO yet?
Probably not if one solid vendor runs your ads and SEO and you can already see what’s working. It starts to make sense when you’ve got several vendors and nobody coordinating them, you’re spending real money with no clear read on results, or you want a growth plan rather than a pile of tactics. That’s usually when a firm has grown past a handful of attorneys but isn’t ready for a full-time marketing hire. Here’s what a fractional law firm CMO costs and what you should get for it.
If you’d rather not do all of it alone
Marketing for solo attorneys works fine as a do it yourself project for the first ninety days. After that, the highest value thing you can buy is usually a second opinion, not a retainer. Tell us where you are in the sequence through our contact form, or run your numbers through the law firm marketing calculator first to see what a case is actually worth to you.