PPC for estate planning lawyers requires a specific skill set in order to keep advertising costs reasonable. “Pay per click” might sound expensive — and it is. In fact, estate planning PPC can be some of the most expensive advertising online.

It’s counterintuitive, but the high cost is exactly why you need to hire a law firm PPC expert. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we know the expensive mistakes that your competition is making, and we know how to help you avoid them. Better yet, we know how to laser-target your ads so you get the highest return possible for the money you spend.

Feel free to contact us at (888) 590-9687 for an initial consultation. For more information, we’ve included some resources below:

• What is PPC?
• When is PPC useful?
• How to write a good PPC ad
• How to lower cost per click
• Why are law firm keywords so expensive?
• Increasing ROI for estate planning PPC
• How to manage a PPC campaign
• Integrating PPC with other online marketing
• Designing profitable PPC campaigns
• Getting the support you need

What Is PPC?

“PPC” stands for “pay per click”. It’s a popular format in online advertising. The most popular type is Google Ads, formerly Google AdWords.

There are many different types of PPC out there, but the two most common ads for estate planning lawyers are:

• Search ads: You pay for clicks at the top of Google search results for specific keywords.
• Remarketing ads: You pay for clicks on other websites (usually Facebook) after people visit your site.

Here’s how it works. First, you would set up a campaign. This campaign includes elements such as images, phone numbers, advertising copy, and links to your website. Then, you would choose specific conditions under which your ad displays.

Your ad displays when the conditions are met. Then, you pay out of a pre-allocated budget whenever anyone clicks. Of course, this is a simple summary, and things get much more complicated if you want to make the most out of your ad spend.

When Is PPC For Estate Planning Lawyers Useful?

Some of our clients run non-stop PPC campaigns, but this is not the way to go for every estate planning practice. More often than not, a boutique firm would run PPC ads to achieve one or more of the following goals:

• Establishing a web presence during the beginning of an SEO campaign
• Promoting a special event, such as the addition of a new partner or new office location
• Taking advantage of spikes in estate-planning search traffic
• Targeting specific practice-geographical area pairs (probate in Chicago, for example)

When we work with law offices that have large budgets or strong web presences, the priorities usually change. In addition to most of the goals above, medium-to-large firms use PPC for:

• Saturating the first search page along with SEO-driven organic results and Google My Business listings
• Increasing brand recognition
• Establishing territorial dominance

PPC can be useful and cost-effective at all levels. This is because the system is based on open market pricing. For example, highly targeted PPC ads cost less per click, while broad exposure-type ads based on common keywords cost more.

How To Write a Good PPC Ad

The best PPC ads grab the right type of attention. To do this, you need a comprehensive strategy.

You can control many things about the audience of your ads. In fact, you should do this. The more control you exercise, the lower your cost per click will probably be.

That means that you have already done some of the work by the time someone sees your ad copy. You will have identified the people who are most likely to want your services and restricted the ad to those people.

Your next task involves clear communication. In a few words, you need to persuade viewers to click on your ad and, at the same time, give them a reason to do so.

This is obviously not an exact science. Luckily, there are some tools available to make it much more data-driven, accountable, and precise. For example, you can do automatic AI-powered A-B testing to display the most effective out of multiple ad versions.

At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we are Certified Google Partners. We know exactly how to put all of the available technical tools to the best possible use for your firm. We also know how to build PPC landing pages so visitors get exactly what they need to contact you and hire your firm.

How To Lower Cost Per Click

This section touches on minimizing cost per click in several sections. To summarize, you can:

• Choose specific keywords, especially ones that other estate planning firms are not using.
• Target your ad for specific geographical areas, times of day, and so on.
• Using long keyword phrases in natural language (long-tail keywords).

Of course, it isn’t all about lowering your cost per click. It’s also about making every click have the maximum possible chance of creating a new client account for your firm.

In estate planning, more than almost any other area of legal practice, a single good lead can generate years — even generations — of predictable revenue. Sometimes, that’s worth bidding on a more competitive keyword.

Why Are Law Firm Keywords So Expensive?

How much is a good lead worth? Well, that depends on your business.

In the legal profession, the right lead could be worth millions of dollars. These types of figures are more common in personal injury than they are estate planning, but interest from your potential clients is still valuable.

Valuable clicks equal competition, which equals expensive keywords. PPC ads operate on an open market system — price is determined by demand. After all, there’s only so much space available at the top of the search results page.

This is just a cost of doing business online. However, before you shell out for an ad for “estate planning attorney”, read some of the other sections here or give us a call.

Increasing ROI For PPC For Estate Planning Lawyers

Increasing ROI is a matter of reducing the cost of your clicks while efficiently increasing visitor engagement. Here are a few things we do to achieve this:

• Perform in-depth keyword research
• Write persuasive, informative landing pages
• Match ad copy with landing page copy
• Give people plenty of contact options
• Run performance tests and acts on results
• Target specific behaviors, e.g. phone calls
• Keep administrative and human-error costs down

There’s no secret that works for every situation. Instead, we tailor our approach to the specific goals of the campaign.

How To Manage a PPC Campaign

PPC management is deceptively simple. Smooth interfaces, quick tutorials, handy tooltips, and informative how-to articles abound — you’d think the entire process was easy.

Unfortunately, effectively managing PPC campaigns for an estate planning law firm requires more than just knowing how to do things correctly. You have to know how to make the choices that will advance your business goals.

You can’t just do things right. You have to do the right thing.

Ad companies (like Google and Facebook) design approachable systems. It’s easy for you to spend money on their platforms. Managing PPC ads effectively requires knowledge of these systems, but it also requires strategy, maintenance, and experience.

Integrating PPC For Estate Planning Lawyers With Other Online Marketing

A key factor in PPC success is bringing in other law firm online marketing techniques. This helps in various ways, such as:

• Consolidating tracking and reporting for a higher level of accountability
• Pulling all of your marketing processes into one project to lower governance risk
• Accomplishing multiple goals through PPC, such as by following SEO best practices for landing pages
• Using the same web page content for different campaigns, such as social media promotion, Facebook retargeting, and search PPC

Designing Profitable PPC Campaigns

Our most profitable PPC campaigns for estate planning lawyers start with well-defined goals. Your goal might be something simple: Increasing the number of younger people coming into your office to draft their first will.

Then, we identify opportunities to match that goal. We usually do this through keyword research.

Essentially, PPC ad campaigns target specific words and phrases that people search for. We would need to identify those words, research their market value and decide which ones would present the greatest opportunity for your ad campaign.

This is usually a complex quantitative and qualitative assessment. The most promising PPC keywords have a balance of the following:

• Volume: You get more chances for exposure with keywords that people use frequently.
• Relevance: Keywords should be highly relevant to the services you offer.
• Low price: Lower price per click often (but not always) results in a higher return on your investment.

After we have all of this set up, we then draft the advertising and marketing copy. Then, finally, it’s time to publish the content, manage the campaign and drive business to your firm.

Getting the Support You Need

You don’t need to become an expert in PPC to make a profit with online ads — you need to hire an expert. FORWARD Lawyer Marketing has the certifications, experience, and focus you need to succeed.

We are available for one-off PPC campaigns, comprehensive marketing services, and everything in between. Please contact us at your earliest convenience to discuss the scope of your project.