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Criminal law is one of the most misread fields when it comes to digital marketing. Most firms rush at the most obvious queries, burn budget on traffic with no value, and miss the real pockets of demand. Our market study of Google search in criminal law (123,250 monthly searches analysed in total) shows a landscape very different from what intuition suggests.
Here is what the data says, and how a criminal practice should use it.
Two markets with almost nothing in common
Under one name, criminal law covers two opposite client bases.
The everyday criminal practice is a B2C market, urgent and high volume: police custody, immediate appearance, drugs, drink-driving, assault. The client searches in a crisis, often within the hour. The volume is high, but most of it stays informational: people want to understand what is about to happen before they even think about paying a lawyer.
The white-collar practice is the reverse: B2B, heavy stakes, near-zero search volume. Misuse of company assets, money laundering, financial fraud, tax fraud. The client value is on another scale, but the case is won on reputation and network, not on Google.
The direct consequence: a firm cannot have a single "criminal" strategy. It has to choose its ground.
The volume trap: 60% of the market is worth nothing
The keyword "criminal record" weighs 74,000 searches a month, 60% of the whole market on its own. That is enormous. It is also useless to a lawyer: zero intent to instruct anyone behind it. These are administrative errands, not cases.
More broadly, 86% of search volume in criminal law is informational. People want to understand a procedure, not find a firm. Commercial intent is only 14%.
The lesson: never build a strategy on apparent high volume. Setting the criminal record aside, the market is a fragmented long tail, with a median volume of 140 searches per keyword.
Paris is expensive, the regions are reachable
This is probably the most actionable finding in the study. The same keyword is twice as hard in Paris as elsewhere.
A firm in Lyon, Bordeaux or Marseille can realistically dominate its city within 12 months on organic search. In Paris, the difficulty is such that paid search becomes the fast lane to exist while the organic work builds.
If you are outside the capital, that is your best lever. Use your city in the keywords you work on.
In criminal law, the keyword is above all: urgency
This is the specificity that changes everything. The relative searching for "police custody lawyer" calls within the hour. Nobody compares: they contact the first one who reassures them. The cost per click on that query climbs to 4.11€ in Paris, the highest in the market, precisely because conversion is immediate.
Without a visible emergency line, without online booking, without a fast mobile page, the click is lost. The marketing set-up is not enough if nobody picks up the phone.
Worth noting too: criminal law has no seasonality. Unlike employment law with its spike in settlement agreements, searches here are constant.
Paid search: buying when organic is too slow
Paid has a precise role. It is worth it on urgent queries and on those with high organic difficulty: police custody, driving licence, or the Paris generic term that is too hard to win any other way. Always on exact match, tight geolocation, with negative keywords.
Two exclusions are non-negotiable: the criminal record (74,000 views that swallow the budget for nothing) and white-collar crime (not enough volume to feed a campaign).
Five actions to launch
- Choose your ground. The regions rather than Paris if the firm is outside the capital. Everyday work rather than white-collar for organic search.
- Build the priority service pages, optimised on commercial intent and on trust.
- Publish on the urgent questions. Target fraud (KD 9) and assault (KD 18) first.
- Capture in the moment: an emergency line, online booking, reviews on display.
- Test paid search on urgency only, excluding the criminal record and white-collar crime.
Criminal law is not a national volume market. It is a market of city, of niche and of the moment. The firm that publishes clearly and captures fast wins.
We have already published 2 other guides, on different specialisms:
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