LEGAL PAID ADVERTISING

All You Need To Know About Paid Advertising As A Lawyer

If you’re paying to bring people to your website, you’d better convert them to a client. Legal PPC terms are among the highest online. It is not uncommon to pay $150 – $250 per click for “car accident lawyer” type terms. It won’t take you much time to spend yourself into bankruptcy if you’re not converting. I’ve worked with law firms who have large PPC budgets but don’t take the time to invest in their landing pages. You need both to see success with paid ads.

Paid Search Advantage

You can be a lot more direct with a PPC landing page when you don’t have to consider ranking organically. The quality of your page still needs to be good and relevant but you can focus more on calls to action than information. Google will assess you with a “Quality Score“. If your page has a better score than your competitors you could show up higher and pay less for each click. Google is still concerned with search experience. Even if you’re paying for traffic, they don’t want to present a poorly crafted page to their users.

Fine Tuning A PPC Campaign

As an advertiser you have more tools and information when you run a paid campaign. You can measure every link in the chain of events including:
  • Impressions – How many times your ad is shown for a particular search. This can be increased with higher budgets and quality scores
  • Click Thru Rate (CTR) – This measures how many times your ad is clicked on compared to everyone else on the results page
  • Conversions – Of the people who land on your page, how many fill out an intake form or call
Each one of these factors can be measured and toggled. A few improvements in each area can be the difference between losing money and an incredible client development tool. For example, let’s say you’re getting a decent amount of Impressions but no clicks. In that case you would experiment with your ad copy to see which one gives you a better CTR. A well managed campaign will constantly test new ad copy to make sure you’re getting the most out of your budget.
Now that you’re getting clicks, what if you’re not getting any calls? That could be due to the messaging or imagery on your website. Are you conveying that you are the right attorney for their problem? Is it easy for them to find your contact information? Do you have strong calls to action that will prompt someone to pick up the phone and call you? You can measure these details on every term you are buying. If you are getting lots of clicks but no conversion you have several options. Maybe it’s your messaging or maybe you’re wasting your money on that term. Creating negative keywords are very important for a successful campaign. A negative keyword tells Google about words or phrases you DON’T want to pay for.
PPC can be a great tool to bring in new clients but it must be properly managed. The stakes are too high and the cases are too valuable to depend on a couple lucky conversions. If you’re not managing every aspect of your paid search campaign your competitors will walk all over you.