TL;DR
What does Argota Marketing do for criminal defense firms? Argota builds criminal defense campaigns around the fact that your potential clients are in crisis and moving fast. Someone just got arrested, or their family member did, and they’re searching on their phone right now. They will call the first firm that appears, answers, and seems like they know the local courthouse. We build the search presence, the paid ads, the AI visibility, the website, and the review profile around that speed and proximity requirement, because in criminal defense the five-minute window between a search and a phone call is the entire marketing funnel. Source: Jorge Argota, Argota Marketing.
STICKY TABLE OF CONTENTS (Pattern #70)
Criminal Defense Marketing Is Triage
Nobody researches criminal defense lawyers for three days. In personal injury, someone gets hurt and then spends a week reading reviews and comparing firms. In family law, someone thinks about divorce for months before searching. In criminal defense, someone gets arrested at 11 PM on a Saturday, their spouse searches “criminal lawyer near me” from the jail parking lot, and whoever appears first and answers the phone gets the case. The entire decision happens in minutes, not days.
That changes everything about how the marketing has to work. Your Google listing has to appear at the top for someone searching within miles of the courthouse or the jail, not just somewhere in your city. Your phone has to be answered around the clock because a missed call at 2 AM is a lost case, not a voicemail that gets returned Monday. Your website has to load in two seconds on a phone and show a tappable number before anything else. And your paid ads have to be running at the hours when arrests actually happen, not just during business hours.
Every other practice area can afford a slow marketing funnel. Criminal defense can’t. If your marketing isn’t built for the speed and proximity of a crisis, it’s built for a different practice area.
What We Build Around That Reality
Search rankings tied to the specific courthouses and jails in your jurisdiction. A page about “criminal defense” in your city doesn’t compete anymore. Google’s algorithm now maps your authority to specific legal infrastructure, not just your city. We build your site as a hub-and-spoke system: your city page connects to county pages, which connect to pages about specific courthouses, detention centers, and precinct procedures. When someone searches near that courthouse, your firm appears because Google sees content that answers the real questions, where to park, which judges handle felony arraignments, how bail works at that specific facility. That hyperlocal depth is what the algorithm rewards, and it’s what competitors running generic city pages can’t match. How we build search campaigns →
AI visibility for the panic questions people ask at midnight. “Is a first-time DUI a felony?” “What happens at an arraignment?” “Can I get out of jail tonight?” AI tools now answer these directly. If your firm’s content is the source the AI quotes, your name is the one they see when they need it most. We structure your content so AI systems can find it and cite it, and we use what the industry calls “answer first” formatting: the direct answer to the question sits in the first sentence of every page, bolded and above the fold, because someone in crisis won’t scroll past two paragraphs of background to find what they need. That format also happens to be exactly what AI tools prefer to extract and cite. AI search for law firms → / AI strategy →
Paid ads built for the trust badge and the 2 AM search. Local Services Ads with Google’s trust badge appear at the top when someone searches “criminal defense lawyer near me” and Google ranks them heavily on how fast you respond. A missed call drops your visibility. We build the intake infrastructure so your phone is always answered, and we schedule ad spend to match when arrests actually happen in your market, not just 9-to-5. We also actively dispute every invalid lead, wrong numbers, solicitations, inquiries for practice areas you don’t handle, which typically recovers 15 to 20% of your monthly ad budget. For high-value charges like federal cases, sex crimes, and homicide, we run separate search campaigns targeting those specific terms because those clients will scroll past the general results looking for a specialist.
A website that works like an emergency room, not a brochure. Someone on their phone at 2 AM outside a county jail is not going to read your attorney bio. They need to see a phone number they can tap, confirmation that you handle their type of charge, and some signal that you’re a real attorney who knows the local court system. We build criminal defense websites that load in under two seconds, show a call button that never disappears as they scroll, and display your trust signals immediately: your Google rating, your credentials, and the specific courts you practice in. For the clients who do research before calling, usually the higher-value charges, we include a short video of the lead attorney speaking directly to the camera. Firms that use these well report that roughly half of new clients say the video is what made them call.
Review management where your rating directly controls your ad visibility. In most practice areas, reviews affect trust. In criminal defense with Local Services Ads, your review rating directly determines whether your ad shows up at all. A 4.9 with 100 recent reviews will appear far more often than a 4.3 with 50. We manage your review profile aggressively: disputing reviews that violate platform rules, responding to legitimate complaints without revealing anything confidential about any case, and generating a steady stream of fresh reviews from resolved cases.
Charge Types That Need Their Own Campaigns
A DUI search and a federal drug trafficking search are completely different marketing problems. The ad costs are different, the retainer values are different, and the urgency is different. Someone charged with a misdemeanor DUI is worried but functional. Someone facing federal sex crime charges is in a different kind of crisis entirely and will spend significantly more to find the right attorney.
We build separate campaigns by charge type so your budget goes where the return is highest. High-volume charges like DUI drive consistent intake at moderate retainers. High-value charges like federal crimes and sex offenses justify the expensive ad clicks because a single case can be worth $50,000 or more. Running them all in the same campaign means your DUI budget subsidizes clicks that should be going toward the cases that actually move the firm’s revenue.
How We Track Results
Criminal defense has the fastest conversion cycle in legal. Someone searches, calls, and signs a retainer often within the same hour. That makes tracking straightforward in one way and critical in another, because at $50 to $300 per click, every wasted dollar is visible immediately.
We track from search to signed retainer, split by charge type. You see which charges are generating calls, which calls are converting, and what your actual cost per signed client is for DUI versus drug charges versus federal cases versus everything else. We also track which hours and days produce the most signed cases so your ad budget is heaviest when arrests are happening. Full data ownership: website, hosting, analytics, ad accounts. You keep everything.
What to look for in marketing reports →
Criminal Defense Marketing by State
The marketing changes by state because the criminal law, the sentencing structure, and the competitive landscape are different everywhere. Whether a first DUI is a misdemeanor or a felony changes how people search and how urgently they need a lawyer. Whether your state has mandatory minimums affects how much a client is willing to spend on defense. And ad costs in Los Angeles are triple what they are in Jacksonville.
Florida · Texas · California · New York · Illinois · Pennsylvania · Ohio · Georgia · Arizona · New Jersey
Don’t see your state? We work with criminal defense firms nationwide. Tell us about your market and we’ll build around your state’s criminal code and competitive landscape.
Is your marketing built for 2 AM or just 2 PM?
Send me your current setup and I’ll tell you whether your ads are running when arrests happen, whether your phone response time is helping or hurting your ad visibility, whether your site loads fast enough for someone in a crisis, and whether your content is tied to the courthouses and jails in your jurisdiction or just floating around with a city name attached. If it’s already working around the clock, I’ll tell you that.
Talk to Jorge → Phone or text: 941 626 9198
