A properly executed law firm PPC campaign is a great way to generate leads for your firm. In fact, it is the gold standard when it comes to client acquisition. Are you ready to start seeing real ROI from your paid campaigns? Here are some tips from our PPC management experts to help you get the kind of results that you’re looking for.
PPC Advertising for Law Firms: 14 Tips to Ensure Maximum Results
1. Stand Out From The Crowd
With the extremely tight competition, you need to stand above the rest of the crowd to get the most return from Google Ads. While this may seem like an extremely tall order, given the complicated nature of the industry, you can actually pull it through by following these simple suggestions:
- Highlight your best qualities. Why should searchers choose you? What makes you better than the other lawyers in your area? Whether you have a stellar reputation or offer a free consultation or 24-hour customer service, make sure searchers know what separates you from the rest of the pack. Highlight your best assets and use them to your advantage.
- Use a clear and engaging call-to-action. Use a relevant and actionable call-to-action to let your searchers know what you want them to do. Don’t forget to give them a valid reason why they should take the desired action, and use words that provoke emotion.
- Build a memorable brand. Most law firms often overlook the importance of creating a memorable brand. This is quite unfortunate, since it can help you outshine the competition. To create a stand-out brand, you need to thoroughly understand the market you are serving, develop a strong positioning statement, craft a unique brand message, and use the display network to gain brand recognition.
2. Hit The Right Target
PPC advertising for law firms can be extremely profitable if all the geo-targeting parameters are set correctly. Law-related keywords can cost a whole bunch of money, so instead of targeting the whole state or city, decide on a radius that makes the most sense to you and your potential clients. If you have multiple offices, create separate campaigns for each location and target zip codes and postal codes to ensure more accurate audience selection. For best results, focus on searches near you and never waste your ad spend on people who are not likely to head to your office.
In setting up the geo-targeting feature in Google Ads, go to “Settings” (you can find this on the lower left-hand menu of your Google Ads dashboard). Select your campaign, click on “Locations” and select your target location (city, region, zip code, postal code, etc.). You can also click on “Advanced Search” and select the radius option to make sure your ads show up on the right regions.
3. Harness The Power of Keywords
Target people who are ready to hire a lawyer by using the right keywords. Here are some tips that can help keep you on track.
- Use body terms (two- to three-word phrases with good search volume, but which are more specific than head keywords) and long tail keywords (very specific three- to four-word phrases with low search volume) to avoid getting caught up in a costly bidding war. Forget the terms “lawyer” and “attorney,” since these are among the priciest keywords in the search engines.
- Use online tools like the Google Keyword Planner to uncover the most relevant keywords in your niche that are within your budget.
- Set your negative keywords list (search terms that are not relevant to your audience) to further improve your conversion rates and prevent your ads from showing on irrelevant queries. You can identify negative keywords by doing a manual search with the help of Google Suggest, or by using an online keyword tool..
4. Ensure Relevancy
Not all people who are searching for an attorney are on the same part of their journey. Some are still on the research phase, while others are already searching for an immediate solution and are ready to make the call. Make sure your keywords, ads, and landing pages match your searchers’ intent.
5. Focus on Your Ad Creative
Creating compelling ad copy requires a knowledge of the basic principles of copywriting. Here are some tips to compel prospects to click on your ads.
- Grab attention and boost social proof by incorporating numbers (e.g., your law firm’s average win rate, number of cases won, years in business, number of clients, etc.) in your headlines.
- Increase quality score by optimizing your headlines. Including your keyword and target location in the headline, keeping your ad up-to-date, and using punctuation marks will not only improve your quality score, it can also lower your CPC and increase your CTR.
- Use questions your prospects want to ask.
- Use emotional triggers (e.g., trust, value, hope, fear, etc.) to grab your prospects’ attention.
- Create ad variations. Head to the “Ads & extensions” section in your campaign and click on the pencil icon next to the highest performing ad copy to create a new ad variation. Go to the “Drafts and experiments” section (you can find this on the bottom of the left-hand menu) and click on “New Ad Variation” under the “Ad Variations” tab. Here you can change the ad copy’s headline, text, call-to-action, or display URL. Test different versions of the ads against each other to determine which produces the best results.
Additional tips:
- Your landing page should use the same target keyword and match the look and tone of your ad copy. It should focus on your prospects’ needs and pains and the benefits they can get by hiring your services.
- Consistency plays a significant role in increasing brand awareness, promoting trust, and cultivating client loyalty, so make sure everything matches.
6. Design Landing Pages For Conversion
If your landing page doesn’t convince prospects to take the desired action, you are simply throwing good money away. To ensure maximum conversion rates, remove all distractions from your landing page – including the navigation pane. You don’t want your prospects to browse your website, you want to guide them toward a specific action. Here are some other elements that can help improve your landing page’s conversion rate.
- Video: This builds trust and highlights your company’s personality.
- Call-to-action: Your landing page should include no more than one CTA. Don’t ask your prospects to fill in too many details if you want them to complete the desired action.
- Social proof: Ask satisfied clients for testimonials and put them up on your landing page. Include the client’s full name and a headshot to prove the validity of the testimonial.
7. Bid Smart
The success of your law firm PPC campaign largely depends on your keyword bidding strategy, so if you want to maximize your daily budget, you need to know what you are doing. In keyword bidding, you can target a position (bid is altered to gain a top spot in the search results), target CPA (bid is altered to satisfy stated cost per lead acquisition), get clicks that are most likely to convert, or get the maximum clicks for your budget. Here are some additional tips to further enhance the performance of your law firm PPC campaign.
- Bid on your branded terms to prevent the competition from using them to attract your customers.
- Use device bid adjustments to increase or limit your ads’ exposure on certain devices. If you notice that your ad is performing better on mobile, you can increase the bid for mobile searches to get even more views from customers who are using their smartphones. You can also use this feature to limit your ads’ exposure on particular devices that fail to produce the desired results.
8. Be Mobile-Friendly
No matter what industry you are in, there is no way you can ignore mobile searches. Industry experts claim that 70% of all internet traffic now comes from mobile searches and that this figure is expected to reach a whopping 80% by the end of 2019. So, throw all your excuses down the drain and start optimizing for mobile. You wouldn’t want to lose potential clients just because your landing page wouldn’t show up properly on their device, right?
9. Recognize The Value of Calls
When doing PPC advertising for law firms, focus on driving more phone calls to your office. Expert marketers agree that a phone call is worth more than a click to your website; prospects who have the courage to dial your number are more likely to hire your services right away.
10. Use Ad Extensions to Enhance Your Ads
There’s no reason why you shouldn’t use ad extensions. After all, they increase your ads’ visibility and click-through rates. You have several options when using ad extensions. You can use “sitelinks” to add links, “callouts” to promote offers or features, “call extensions” to include your phone numbers, and “location extensions” to display your office address in the ads.
11. Have an Online Chat System
Having an online chat system in place can help answer case-specific questions that were not discussed in your FAQs. It also helps potential clients warm up to the idea of setting up an appointment. Some people just don’t like the idea of calling someone they are not familiar with, especially when dealing with legal matters, so the anonymity of live chat can help break the ice and send potential clients your way.
12. Track, Measure, And Optimize
You are spending a good amount of money on your law firm PPC campaign, so track everything you are doing to see which strategies are bringing in the results. You may be getting a lot of clicks – but are they translating into qualified leads?
For a more accurate determination of your ROI, run A/B tests, set up conversion tracking for your landing pages, use a call-tracking platform and integrate it with Google Analytics, keep a record of where your leads came from, and monitor the revenue generated from converted leads. If something is not working, optimize. Don’t get tired of trying new strategies and ideas until you find what’s working for you.
13. Don’t Underestimate The Power of Bing
Google may be the undisputed frontrunner when it comes to online search services, but you shouldn’t overlook the potentials of Bing when it comes to finding new leads. After all, Bing is now the second largest search engine in the U.S. and ranks 41st in global internet engagement, according to Alexa.com.
14. Monitor and Optimize
Monitoring your law firm PPC campaign can be a tedious task, so determine which tasks require the most time and attention and find tools to automate them. By using Google Ads’ automation tools, you can free up a lot of your time and focus on tasks that matter most to your business.
Want to get started maximizing your law firm’s PPC strategy? Contact SevenAtoms today and let us help you achieve the kind of success you’ve only dreamed of.
