Summary
Growing a personal injury firm in a field where the usual playbook is against the law
Personal injury law may be the hardest category in Australian digital marketing, because the standard playbook is against the law. In this firm’s state, advertising that is merely likely to encourage someone to make a claim can be unlawful, and the test is objective. A 2025 disciplinary decision raised the stakes for the whole profession, handing down a thirty thousand dollar penalty, a public reprimand and a finding of professional misconduct over exactly the language, “No Win No Fee”, “maximum compensation”, “we fight for you”, that much of the industry had run for years.
We took over this firm’s Google Ads and SEO in March 2026. The brief was really two briefs at once: grow the pipeline, and rebuild both channels to perform under rules where a regulator may one day read every word.
The Situation
Like most of its competitors, this firm’s website and ad copy predated the 2025 shift. The Google Ads account had its own problems. It looked busy and was quietly broken: sixty plus campaigns, nearly all paused, and more than four and a half thousand keywords enabled with barely sixty alive in any real sense. Cost per lead was high even for compensation law, budget was leaking into places like a broad keyword paying for job-seeker clicks, and the conversion tracking was recording almost nothing, so nobody could see what was working. And the website was not earning meaningful organic visibility, in a category where the best-known selling lines were now off the table.
What We Did
We treated it the way we treat every account: as if the firm, the leads, the reputation and the legal risk were all ours.
Compliance as the foundation
Across the ad account and the website we mapped every phrase against the law. We audited all 58 live ads and more than 400 paused ones, including for dynamic keyword insertion, a setting that can drop a banned phrase straight into a headline with nobody having typed it. We found 61 of those landmines waiting in paused ads. We rewrote the account’s language to describe what the firm does rather than push people to act, then put the entire live ad set in front of the firm’s own lawyer for documented sign-off.
Google Ads
We stripped out roughly 4,600 dead keywords, shut down a campaign spending with zero return, killed the keyword bleeding budget on job-seekers, and got conversion tracking recording properly so every dollar could finally be judged on what it brought back. Then we concentrated spend on the searches that actually bring in clients.
SEO
In a field where you are not allowed to persuade, the winning move is to inform. We built the content programme around explaining how the law actually works: how a claim is calculated, the time limits that apply, what a payout involves. This content is explicitly permitted under the public-information exception in the advertising rules, it answers what people search at the research stage, and it earns rankings because it is genuinely useful. Around it we ran technical fixes and an ongoing link-building programme.
What Happened
Since we took over in March, both channels have been rebuilt to perform inside the rules.
We rebuilt the site’s authority first, more than tripling its referring domains, then put real weight behind useful content. Over the year the firm’s average position in Google climbed from the low forties to around fifteen, and it has held and extended those gains since we took over. The firm now ranks on the first page, and often in the top three, for the practice-area and claims questions most important to its business, including terms where it had previously been invisible, and it brought a key claims page back from the bottom of page two to number one.
Highlights
- 23 percent more clicks from Google, year on year.
- Referring domains more than tripled.
- Multiple number-one rankings across the firm’s core practice cluster.
- Every live ad rewritten and signed off by the firm’s own lawyer, with the paperwork to show it.
The ad account now runs entirely on lawyer-approved copy, the waste is gone, and it delivers a steady monthly flow of measurable leads, enough that the firm has chosen to invest more in the channel rather than pull back from it.
Growth for Regulated Businesses Is What We Do
Most agencies treat compliance as a box to tick once the campaign is already built. In a regulated industry that gets it backwards, and it can get a client fined. Fields like law, healthcare and finance, where a regulator can read every word of your advertising and object to it, are exactly the businesses we are built to grow.
We have spent years learning the difference between marketing that is merely effective and marketing that is effective and safe. That is a genuinely hard combination, and it is where we do our best work. We map every claim against the rules, get documented sign-off where it matters, and find the growth that lives inside the constraints instead of outside them. When we take an account on, we treat the client’s licence and reputation as our own, because to us they are.
And as this account shows, working inside the rules is not the compromise it sounds like. Ads written to inform rather than pressure still bring in clients. Content written to explain the law outranks content written to sell it. Done properly, the compliant path is usually the stronger one.
If you run a business where a single wrong word in an ad is a real risk, that is not a reason to market timidly. It is a reason to work with people who have done it before. We would be glad to take a look.