Table of Content; PPC Marketing for Law Firms
- What is PPC Marketing? How to Define PPC Marketing for Law Firms?
- Why Should you Invest in PPC Marketing for Attorneys?
- How to Get Started with your PPC Campaigns for Lawyers? Learn the 12 Steps to Perform Google PPC for Lawyers
- Keyword and Competitor Research
- Optimize the Landing Pages
- Choose your Campaign Goal
- Select the Proper Campaign Type
- Work on Retargeting
- Customize your Campaign
- Set your Maximum Budget
- Turn on the Conversion Tracking
- Include Ad Extensions for Better Engagement
- Create Ad Groups Based on your Keywords
- Create an Engaging Ad
- Monitor your Google Ad Performance
Let’s started!
Most of you have confusion regarding whether PPC marketing is good for law firms or not. The good news is PPC marketing is one of those possible law firm marketing strategies that can use to reach out to the right audience who are actually looking for your service.
Before, we take a dive into law firm PPC strategies and their benefits, let us talk about PPC in brief.
What is PPC Marketing? How to Define PPC Marketing for Law Firms?
PPC or pay-per-click marketing is a paid advertising technique that allows advertisers to promote the brand on different advertising platforms including the search engine and social media. In this technique, you have to pay whenever someone clicks on the ad displayed on the online platform.
The amount that you need to pay for your ad click is determined at the time of your ad creation. You can estimate your budget by analyzing the top keywords that are used to drive high traffic to the landing page. Several factors are responsible for the cost per click. One among them is your maximum bid.
Now, coming to law firm pay per click advertising. You can simply define this as an advertising technique where attorneys create an engaging ad and pay for every click, conversion, and impression. If you are serious about promoting your legal services and want to gain a competitive edge in your business, you must invest in PPC marketing for law firms.
Most successful law firms use Google AdWords to advertise their services and get instant results. You can recognize them simply while browsing Google. They appear at the top of your Google search results.
Why Should you Invest in PPC Marketing for Attorneys?
PPC marketing for attorneys is nothing new in the industry. If you consider the successful law firms marketing, they always prefer using PPC over SEO services. Though PPC and SEO are similar and both of them have their own set of benefits, it is better to start with a PPC campaign than to struggle with SEO. However, it’s different that you can’t avoid SEO either, even if you are using PPC.
In this section, we are more concerned about law firm PPC management and its importance on your law firm. Take a dive!
Fast and Effective Results
Unlike SEO, PPC gives fast, effective, and instant results. You will never find a PPC ad displaying at the end of the search results. They are always visible at the top, boosting the search engine ranking of the site. Your law firm website will be visible at the highest position of search results. Quick and effective results are extremely needed when you want absolute exposure to your business.
Target More Prospects
With lawyer pay-per-click advertisements, you can reach out to prospective clients who are highly interested in your legal service and are ready to become clients. Instead of finding the audience who may or may not turn up as a loyal client, you can invest in PPC to gain instant conversions. This helps you to draw a majority of high traffic to the landing pages.
Drive in Mobile Users
People nowadays use mobile devices to make relevant searches on Google. Studies have proved that these devices can draw in a more percentage of traffic compared to other ways. Since PPC marketing for law firms is mobile-friendly, you can enjoy a significant volume of traffic from mobile sources.
Allow Smart Retargeting
Apart from targeting the prospects, PPC advertising allows lawyers to perform smart retargeting. Through this technique, you can find the visitors who have already visited your website and showed interest in your services. Retargeting and remarketing for law firms are thus easier with PPC advertising.
The handful of benefits are enough to think about investing in law firm pay per click marketing.
How to Get Started with your PPC Campaigns for Lawyers? Learn the 12 Steps to Perform Google PPC for Lawyers
Now since you have learned about the benefits, it is time to start with your law firm PPC marketing. As you know, PPC ads can be run on several platforms including search engines. We are here to help you out with your law firm pay per click Google ads.
Are you ready with a pen and paper? You must be!
1. Keyword and Competitor Research
The very first thing that you should think about while starting with your lawyer pay per click campaign is performing extensive keyword research and competitor research. Both keyword and competitor researches are required if you want your campaign to turn successful. This gives an idea of how to craft the ad campaign on Google.
To perform the research, you can use Google Ads Keyword Planner and find the search volume, competition, estimated costs for keywords based on your law firm services. Guys, you can even discover new keywords by placing a seed keyword in the search bar. This will help you to analyze your competition in advance.
Therefore, it is hard to run Google ads for law firms, unless you have a list of brand-specific keywords that possess high user intent.
Coming to competitor research, this is another most vital step that helps to find out your competitors along with your competitive edge in the market.
On Google AdWords, you can easily access Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool to find the law firms you will be competing with. Alongside, you can use this tool to view your ads for Google search on both desktop and mobile devices. Just enter the keywords, the city code, and the device to find the competition level.
2. Optimize the Landing Pages
When you are talking about PPC campaigns for lawyers, you should put emphasis on the landing pages that are associated with your Google ads. Remember, the landing page is your window to attract prospective clients. Hence, optimizing the landing pages and making them a perfect fit for your PPC ad goal is extremely needed.
Here we have listed down a few things that you need to consider while optimizing your landing pages.
- The page should contain relevant law firm-based keywords to target the right audience.
- It should have a captivating headline that draws the attention of the potential clients and encourage them to make possible action.
- Include videos that support your ad content. For example, you can add testimonials of your clients who are satisfied with your services.
- Don’t forget to include your business contact information on the page.
- Add a form that a prospective client can fill up so as to get more information regarding legal procedures and services.
- Use a powerful call-to-action to convert the visitors into clients.
Many law firms prefer to create separate landing pages, different from their usual websites. Although you can even use the same website as your landing page, we will suggest you having a separate one to disclose your offers and discounts.
3. Choose your Campaign Goal
Now, it’s time to log in to your Google Ads account and create a lawyer pay per click campaign. The moment you click on the New Campaign link, a new page appears asking to set up your campaign goal. Have you decided on your Google ad campaign goal? If not, do it now.
The basic on Google PPC for lawyers is this. If you fail to choose your campaign goal properly, you will fail to enjoy the expected perks. Under the “Select the goal that would make the campaign successful to you” list, you will find several options with their own perspectives.
The goals listed on the page include Sales, Leads, Website Traffic, Product and brand consideration, Brand awareness and reach, and ad promotion. You can select any one of them and proceed further. However, you also have the option to create an ad campaign without a proper goal. If you want, you can make use of it.
Remember, no successful campaign on PPC marketing for law firms can be conducted without a proper campaign goal. Even if you are choosing this option, you should frame a campaign objective in mind.
4. Select the Proper Campaign Type
Once you are done with your law firm pay per click campaign goal, it is time to choose a proper campaign type. This implies on which form you want your ad to appear on Google search result pages. The format can be classified into several groups – display, search, video, shopping, and smart.
Now, under each category, a new section appears where you need to fill up the way you want to achieve your goal. For example, if you choose the “Search” ad type, you will have to click on the options through which you want to achieve more conversions. Options are like website visits, phone calls, store visits, app downloads, and leads from submissions.
Check the boxes and move on to the next step. This is another most important step for your law firm PPC campaign.
5. Work on Retargeting
PPC marketing for attorneys is also good for launching a retargeting campaign. Retargeting, as we all know, is a marketing method that allows marketers to reach out to the visitors who have already visited your site earlier but have made no action.
To perform this job, you need to build a remarketing list for your search campaign. The list will contain the audiences who have previously visited your website. Using the remarketing list for search ads, the ads will appear to them, encouraging them to perform any sort of action.
The goal of a remarketing list is to make the brand visible to the website visitors and stimulate them to come back to the website whenever they require. You can use your Google Analytics data to find the people who have visited your remarketing ads. Choose Google Ads Linking from Google Analytics and configure.
The moment you link your Google Ads account with Google Analytics, you can visit the Audience Definition to customize your audiences for remarketing ads. You can simply add the page for which you want to know the visitors and define your audience.
6. Customize your Campaign
Do you know campaigns on Google ads for law firms can be customized? Absolutely, they can be! You can call this a pro for Google AdWords.
Once you complete all the above-mentioned steps, you should visit the “General Settings” page for further customization. The page displays your campaign type, your campaign goal, and allow you to fill up the next few necessary details to run a successful ad campaign on Google.
Here you can perform the following things.
- Add a campaign name.
- Include or exclude the Google Display Network.
- Set your campaign start and end time.
- Filter out your target audience based on demographics, especially on location.
Note: Attorneys should always create a solid remarketing campaign for the display network using engaging graphics and a strong marketing strategy. Hence, it is better to avoid including the Google Display Network in the search campaign.
7. Set your Maximum Budget
The best thing about Google AdWords is you can set your desired budget and bidding options for your ad campaign. Google PPC for lawyers is thus considered as a budget-friendly marketing concept. By entering an average amount, you can limit your ads and ensure getting the best out of the white label marketing campaign.
Surprisingly, you get access to multiple bidding options and craft your search campaign accordingly. For your Google Ads Search campaign, you can look for several bidding options to track your ad performance metrics. These include –
- Conversions – You can optimize your daily budget to get the most quality conversions.
- Clicks – You can set your daily budget to generate a greater number of clicks from lawyer pay per click ads.
- Impressions – You can set your budget to place the ad anywhere on the page and at the top of your search results.
With proper bidding, you can lower down the CPC (cost per click) and enjoy a higher ROI throughout your campaign.
Many successful brands prefer to choose manual bidding option and use their own bidding strategy. If you are specialized in building a proper bid, you can easily go for it. PPC campaigns for lawyers can be cost-effective if you choose your bidding smartly.
8. Turn on the Conversion Tracking
Now, since you are done with your campaign bidding, you must think about your law firm PPC management. Start with managing and monitoring your ad conversions.
Move down to the settings link. Under this link, click on the “More Settings” option and choose conversion tracking. Turning on the conversion tracking, you can get a notification whenever a conversion is made on the website.
Here you need to follow certain steps to track your conversions. Google Ads performs this very well. It will guide you till you determine the number of conversions made through your PPC ad.
Suppose you want to monitor lead submissions. For this, you need to use a code snippet. You will find this on the “Thank You” or “Confirmation” page of your website.
The page usually appears whenever a user completes the entire process of submitting a form. The moment someone registers for a legal service, a thank you page appears, showing a notification to Google Ads that a conversion is done.
9. Include Ad Extensions for Better Engagement
Ad extensions are the important elements of law firm PPC ads. These extensions are used to draw in more engagement and build more brand exposure to the right audience. If you want to make your brand stand out in the Google search results, you must not forget to incorporate ad extensions.
According to Google’s statement regarding ad extensions is ads with relevant ad extensions are likely to obtain 15% more click-through rates, as they display additional and relevant information to the users.
Frequently used ad extensions are as follows;
- Call Extensions – Google ads with clickable phone numbers are defined as call extensions.
- Location Extensions – Location extensions are clickable address added to an ad that is displayed on Google search results.
- Callout Extensions – Callout extensions are the added descriptions that complete a PPC by displaying additional information to the users. Several lines with 25 characters each can be used in it.
- Sitelink Extensions – Adding additional links to your Google ads are termed as site link extensions that make the turn more relevant to the search user’s query.
- Promotion Extensions – With promotion extensions, you can add a better deal to your ad, making it more competitive and engaging to a great extent.
- Message Extensions – Message extensions allow potential clients to send messages to your business using a specific number or via email.
While creating the ad extensions for your law firm pay per click campaigns, you can use the preview link and find how the extensions will appear on the Google PPC ads.
10. Create Ad Groups Based on your Keywords
You have the list of keywords that you are going to target in your Google search campaign. Now it’s time to create ad groups based on these keywords. In PPC campaigns for lawyers, this is the most significant step that contributes a lot to the Google Ads Quality Score.
The Quality Score of a Google Ad varies between 1-10. The score is based on a few factors – ad relevancy, quality landing page, and expected click-through rate. The better is your ad relevancy, the higher will be your quality score.
You can create multiple ad groups for your search campaign. Start with creating a name for your ad groups and organize your keywords. The ad groups are usually linked to some specific ads with the same target audience and landing page.
Hence the keywords used for the ad groups are always similar to that of the ad. The best thing is you can get more keyword ideas to target if you want to.
For your law firm, you can start with Exact Match Keywords or Phrase Match Keywords to target the right audience. However, if you have enough budget, you can look for the Broad Match Type keyword sets to expand your campaign.
Apart from the positive match type options, you should also include negative keywords with the ‘-‘ minus sign. This will narrow down your targeted audience and help you to build high conversions in no time.
11. Create an Engaging Ad
Finally, it’s time to create a Google search ad. Now for this, you need to understand a trick.
Google Ads allows you to create different ad groups with at least three quality ad variations that you can use in rotation. Hence with Google PPC for lawyers, you get the option to choose the best one among the multiple ad variations based on their performance.
Suppose you have selected an ad that serves your target audience. You can further add a headline along with an engaging description to improve its appearance on Google search results.
A few things that you need to take care of include –
- Headline 1, Headline 2, Headline 3 – 10 characters
- URL display path 1, path 2 – 15 characters
- Description 1, Description 2 – 90 characters
Keep these figures in mind while you are creating your Google ad.
You can save the lawyer pay per click ad copy and move back to your ad extensions to ensure all are properly imposed. You can even add a new extension or remove an extension if you want.
Finally, hit the submit button and wait for the ad to appear on the Google search results.
Finally,
12. Monitor your Google Ad Performance
Are you completed creating your law firm PPC ad on Google? No need to feel excited. It’s not over yet.
The real struggle starts just after you post your ad on Google. The moment you submit your ads for all ad groups, Google will approve it and eventually start running based on the scheduled time. This is when you need to monitor the entire ad campaign. Here you can make use of law firm PPC management tools to diagnose the keyword quality and other metrics.
Get into the Google Ads dashboard and get a quick overview of the ad campaigns. Check out the performance metrics including the number of clicks, impressions, conversion rates, views, CPC, etc., and find the Quality Score of your ad. If it is below average, optimize your ad quickly by analyzing the campaign properly.
PPC Marketing Tools for Advertisers
Lawyer pay per click marketing can be tiring unless and until you choose proper PPC marketing tools to advertise your legal services.
For Google PPC ads, you can access the Google-sponsored tool like Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, etc. to have extensive competitor research and keyword research. However, you can even look for other third-party tools to avail the same benefits. Here they are!
- Keyword Competitor
- iSpionage
- SEMrush
- SpyFu
- KeywordSpy
- Adbeat
- The Search Monitor
- What Runs Where
- AdGooroo
Other than the keyword research tools, you would also need a proper law firm PPC management tool to manage your advertisements on online platforms. Find them below.
Different tools have different characters. Analyze your requirement and choose the best tool for a seamless PPC marketing process.
What are the Best Alternatives to Google PPC for Lawyers?
PPC marketing for attorneys is not just confined to Google ads. Apart from Google ads for law firms, you can even run your PPC campaign on several other popular platforms. If you are looking for a cost-effective alternative to your Google ads, you must choose any one of the following.
1. Microsoft or Bing Ads
Besides Google, Bing is another most popular search engine used by millions to perform their relevant searches. Though Google is more familiar, people are not skipping out the old Yahoo and Bing browsing platforms to find their search queries.
You can certainly choose this advertising channel to promote your law firm. But since the search engine isn’t ranked #1, the level of competition is quite less and so the CPC of the ad.
2. Facebook Ads
Billions of users are using Facebook not just to make connections but even to search for a relevant brand. Among the popular social media platforms, Facebook is considered the most significant channel to reach out to new audiences and brand service.
Even if you are choosing this for your law firm, you can leverage PPC ads by running them on your newsfeed, stories, messenger apps, and so on.
3. LinkedIn Ads
PPC campaigns for lawyers can even be run on LinkedIn. Just like Facebook, LinkedIn is a hub for professionals. If you want to grab the attention of your professional audience, LinkedIn is the best fit for advertising. Run your PPC ads on the LinkedIn newsfeed and drive in more connections.
4. Buy-Sell Ads
You can even choose networks like BuySellAds to run display ads for your law firm. These ads are displayed on any local site in the Google Display Network and reach the local community along with the target audience.
Final Thoughts
PPC marketing for attorneys is not that challenging if you know the right techniques and tools. But we guess after going through the entire article you have gained a complete idea about – What is pay-per-click advertising, the importance of PPC campaigns, how the campaign works, and what are the advertising tips to consider while creating Google ads for law firms.
Get started with your PPC campaign now and enjoy the quick growth in your law firm.
