The online legal marketplace is very competitive. As a lawyer, you are usually competing against dozens, if not hundreds, of other law firms, all vying for the attention of prospective clients looking to hire some form of legal service. While traditional forms of advertising still have their own merit, online advertising, particularly PPC advertising, has become an important tool for those attorneys who wish to outrank their competition. PPC can put your firm right at the top of the SERPs when potential clients are searching for a relevant legal service. However, employing PPC is about much more than throwing up a few ads and calling it a day; you’ve got to have a strategic approach to ensure that your firm rises above the competition.
PPC is an incredibly technical platform in which bid strategies, ad relevance, and keyword choice are going to make or break a campaign. When done properly, PPC can help your law firm reach significantly more users, drive qualified web traffic, and ultimately convert those prospects into customers. For law firms that have to struggle in the jam-packed marketplaces, merely setting up a campaign isn’t enough. Your approach needs to be pinpoint-focused, using a steady stream of data-driven insights to reach the right clients and tune your campaigns for maximum effectiveness. Indeed, the firms that have managed to come out on top are the ones that know exactly how to work their way around the fine details of the PPC platforms, like Google Ads, into top position, outbidding their opponents and ensuring higher ROI.
Keyword research is key in any paid campaign. For attorneys, this can be taken one step further: finding and bidding on the best keywords is another avenue of outcompeting the competition in PPC. This isn’t just about choosing a few popular keywords, such as “lawyer near me” or “personal injury attorney.” These general terms are highly competitive and expensive and lead to only broad targeting that misses the target.
This is the area in which law firms should be targeting their long-tail keywords—much longer queries a client might use when attempting to retain counsel. Suppose one wouldn’t bid on “divorce attorney”; instead, a firm could bid on “high-net-worth divorce attorney” or “Miami divorce attorney with mediation experience.” Normally, these longer, more specific phrases have lower search volume but higher-qualified leads. Such keywords are also usually cheaper in terms of cost per click.
Keyword research tools, such as Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs, will assist you in finding some performing keywords that your competitors have not identified. Targeting such keywords would allow your firm to establish a niche in a competitive market and ensure that only potential clients are more likely to be converted to clients who actually view your ads.
Apart from keyword selection, competitive bidding strategies are essential. When many different law firms are bidding on the same keyword, then their ad positioning and cost become an equation involving bid amount, ad relevance, and Quality Score. For law firms, it’s essential to balance a budget with strategy in order to make sure they outbid their competitors yet make a profit at the same time. Automation tools on platforms such as Google Ads usher in dynamic bidding strategies, which automatically adjust to the latest conditions, whether it is competitor activity or the probability of conversion. This should be in the setting of a target cost-per-acquisition to ensure that your firm is not overpaying for underdelivering while, at the same time, driving qualified leads.
Besides choosing keywords and bidding, a lot depends on the actual ad copy of your campaign. Creating an ad that stands out in a very busy market involves developing compelling, relevant, and targeted ads that speak to your target audience. “Top-rated attorney in” and “Experienced lawyer for your legal needs” are two examples of plain ad copy that just will not work in a very highly competitive environment.
Effective PPC ad copy must be specific and solution-oriented. Your PPC ad copy must communicate highly specific unique value propositions about the firm, like experience within a particular area of law, successful case outcomes, or a focus that separates it from others. A criminal defense attorney may wish to emphasize acquittals or dismissals in their advertisements, for example. In contrast, a personal injury attorney may advertise with headlines about the millions of dollars recovered for clients in a settlement.
It’s also important to make sure that, within your ads, calls-to-action are clearly provided that will encourage potential clients to take immediate action. Calls to action such as “Schedule a Free Consultation Today” or “Speak with a Qualified Attorney Now” drive traffic. A/B testing can be an especially valuable exercise to show law firms which ad copy works best and allows further honing of messaging for maximum return on investment.
Even with the best keyword strategy and most appealing ad copy, the real success of your PPC campaign is going to come down to what happens when one clicks on your ad. If the landing page they arrive at needs to be optimized for conversions, you may find yourself wasting money on clicks that never turn into clients.
A good landing page should load fast, be mobile-friendly, and be conducive to moving visitors to take action. For lawyers, this generally includes encouraging them to complete a contact form, schedule an appointment, or call the firm directly. The landing page should match the messaging from the ad in clearly describing the offered legal services and the benefit to a customer of selecting your firm over your competition.
With the help of Google Analytics and Hotjar, law firms can watch the behaviors of users on landing pages and find all the places in which improvements need to be made. Through heatmaps, for instance, it is clear which particular part of any given page the visitors click on more, while the session recording offers a way to understand customer interaction and possible points of friction. With this information at hand, attorney firms can then make adjustments to have a better user experience and improve their conversion rate. Testing of a landing page is essential, and ongoing optimization is critical to effective pay-per-click advertising.
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of PPC advertising is the data it provides law firms. For law firms, from impressions and clicks to conversions, one can track almost every metric directly to how much it is costing them to acquire a client. These can be transformed into affirmative working strategies so that these firms can outshine competitors.
Metrics to be tracked would involve CTR, CPC, conversion rate, and CPA. However, one would also need not to strictly judge by mere ‘surface’ metrics. For example, a high CTR may sound good, but if those clicks aren’t converting into leads, your targeting, ad copy, or landing page is probably off.
Equipped with advanced analytics tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, and HubSpot, it is now easier to delve into the details and analyze trends and patterns that will constitute a strategic course of adjustments. For instance, analytics will be able to determine the keywords most leading to valued leads so that firms could carve out more budget for those words and scale back spend on underperforming keywords. Data will also inform necessary adjustments in ad copy, bidding strategy, and targeting in order to make certain of maximum ROI.
Meanwhile, automated bid management and machine learning algorithms can enable law firms to tune their campaigns on the fly. For instance, Google Smart Bidding tools will automatically set bids in any auction to get the most conversions possible while staying within the target spend. This allows law firms to outperform their competition, which is working with manual changes to their strategies.
With PPC, there is a lot of potential for law firms, but it really is a technical and labor-intensive process. Since it constantly needs monitoring, optimizing, and adjusting, it easily steals the attorney’s focus from legal work. That is why many law firms send their PPC marketing duties to specialized marketing agencies. The marketing agency will be experienced in PPC for law firms, from keyword research and creating ads to bid management and analysis of data.
A good Google Quality Score simply means more relevance and quality of your PPC Ads, Keywords, and Landing Page, as well as an improved Ad position. This makes it an essential consideration for law firms, especially when optimizing their PPC campaigns.
Advanced PPC strategies would be targeting your previous website visitors via remarketing ads, creating highly targeted geo-specific campaigns, and using automated bidding strategies focused on ensuring maximum conversions. Besides that, firms can use negative keywords to ensure their ads do not show for irrelevant searches.
The legal industry is a cutthroat business, and continuous optimization for PPC is going to be necessary to remain competitive. That means refining keyword bids, updating ad creative, optimizing landing pages, and ensuring data guides adjustments. Constant optimization will keep law firms competitive and maximizing their ROI over time.
Negative keywords are keywords that you define to block your ad from showing up in irrelevant searches. Imagine you are a criminal defense attorney. You may want to define “legal forms” or “free legal advice” as negative keywords so that your ad will not show in front of those customers who do not seek paid legal counsel. Adding negative keywords makes your PPC campaigns become increasingly relevant, and you may spend your ad budget only on high-quality leads.
That is how geo-targeting helps law firms pinpoint their pay-per-click ads in certain geographic locations wherein the chance of finding their potential clientele is high. For example, any firm operating in Chicago can employ geo-targeting to make sure its ads appear only for users searching for legal services within the location of Chicago. It saves money for law firms as it focuses on relevant, location-based searches instead of wasting it on clicks coming from out of the area.
Remarketing allows you to reach users who have visited your website before but didn’t convert. For law firms, the value of remarketing ads is even higher since the decision to resolve legal issues usually takes a long time. By staying in front of potential clients who might not be ready to hire an attorney immediately, you build up the chances they’ll return to your site at the right time to make a decision.
Ad testing, better known as A/B testing, revolves around the very concept of creating multiple versions of your PPC ads to see which one works the best. This is a very important process for law firms in that, sometimes, small changes in ad copy headlines, CTA, or value proposition can have large fluctuations in click-through rates and conversions. Constant testing and refinement of ad copy are about making sure the performance of the PPC campaigns is the best.
The process of tracking the ROI for PPC brings into play so much more than just sifting through the number of clicks. In other words, law firms really should be focusing on conversions, such as how many consultation requests or calls flow directly from the ads. Tools, such as Google Analytics or call tracking software, give firms more in-depth details about how well their campaigns are converting clicks into actual clients. This is done by enabling adjustments to the strategies with more ease and in a way that brings forth effectiveness in increasing the return on investment.
A landing page that is not well optimized carries a very high risk of experiencing high bounce rates, wherein users click on your ad and then leave your site in less than a few seconds without continuing through to other pages. Apart from wasting your ad spend, this will also have an adverse impact on your Quality Score on platforms like Google Ads and result in higher CPCs and probably low ad positions. It goes without saying that the landing pages should be optimized for speed, relevance, and user experience if one wants to leverage the most out of any pay-per-click campaign.
These FAQs should explain some of the technical aspects of PPC for attorneys and help you better optimize your PPC ad campaigns.
When you partner with FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, your law firm can rest assured that a professional manager, familiar with the legal market and technical details of online ad campaigns, will be managing your law firm’s PPC campaigns. Our attorney PPC experts will work with you to devise a unique approach that speeds up exposure for your firm and competitively differentiates it to drive the highest quality leads. We invite you for a free consultation to discuss your firm’s unique needs and the ways in which we can help you reach your marketing goals. Contact FORWARD Lawyer Marketing at (888) 590-9687 for your free consultation or to get started.
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