Pay Per Click For Lawyers – How To Set Up A Profitable Campaign

This is a two part blog on the subject of setting up a successful Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign for lawyers.

The legal industry is facing huge challenges; the Jackson reforms ban on referral fees, the introduction of alternative business structures, pressures on hourly rates and the growing commoditization of certain legal services.

However, where there are changes, there are also huge opportunities.

Law firms are beginning to realise that the good ole days of simply relying on referrals and repeat business is no longer enough to attract new clients.

Instead, those savvy law firms who want to stay ahead of their competitors are now looking at online marketing as a highly cost effective method in gaining more client instructions and building up their practices.

There are a variety of different ways to successfully market a law firm and its services online, including implementing such strategies as general search engine optimization (getting a law firm’s website highly ranked by the search engines), paid advertising, video marketing and creating engagement through the various social media platforms.

Using Google AdWords (PPC) advertising can provide a tremendous opportunity for law firms to gain new clients and can be set up very quickly.

However, PPC is highly complex (despite seemingly looking relatively easy on the surface) and, irrespective of whether you engage an external PPC agency or run your own PPC campaigns in-house, there are a number of issues you should consider before starting the process.

You Need A Great Landing Page 

You can have the best targeted ad and perfectly written advertising copy, but if you send those visitors who click on your ad to an irrelevant and/or uninspiring part of your website or a really bad landing page, then you are just throwing your marketing budget down the drain.

We see it so many times where a law firm advertises part of its services, for example, family law, but then sends the user who clicks on their ad to the home page of their website which details all of their different legal services with the family section hidden under the services tab! That person who is looking online for a family lawyer is not all of a sudden going to have a need for a criminal lawyer (we hope), an immigration lawyer or a commercial lawyer! That user will bounce straight off your website and into the open online arms of your competitors!

So…. think about your user’s online journey and experience! Help them to find you and take that call to action….

Set Up A Call To Action

The number one goal of any lead generation website (or landing page set up specifically for a PPC campaign) is for visitors to contact you. That’s it! Pure and simple!

Therefore, make sure it’s easy for your visitors to find your contact telephone number and be able to leave their contact details.

You want them to call you – so why do so many firms hide their phone number in the contact details tab or in very small print at the bottom of the page? Do you not want new clients?

So… have your phone number very clearly laid out – this is best in the top right hand side of your website and any web form requesting the visitor’s contact details should only ask for a minimum amount of information – name, e-mail and/or telephone number will suffice. You do not need more than this.

Your PPC Campaign and Keyword Structure

The legal PPC market is extremely competitive. Why? Because the fees generated can be huge.

A good advert and precision targeted keyword structure can result in your phone ringing very quickly with hungry buyers eager to hire your expertise.

Once they see the results of a successful PPC campaign, law firms very quickly realise how antiquated it was to consistently rely solely on repeat business and referrals – this is so “yesterday’s business model” and you had better wake up and realise that your competitors ditched this model yonks ago.

So if you want your practice to grow, start investing in it!

The real key to any PPC campaign, and particularly any law firm’s PPC campaign, is to keep it relevant. Google wants to reward its users with relevant ads in the search results. If your ads are irrelevant (i.e. a search for a “family lawyer” brings up your ad for a “criminal lawyer”), your ad will not get the necessary clicks and Google will penalize you with a low quality score and your costs per click will increase.

This is where we consistently see law firms wasting their money unnecessarily and receiving a significantly lower return on their investment.

Contrary to popular belief, the higher placed ad will often be paying significantly less on a cost per click basis than those ads placed at, say, positions 5 or 6 or even lower.

In order to achieve highly relevant ads, it is necessary to break up all the possible relevant searches (keywords) into specific ad groups containing tightly related search phrases that trigger ads specific to each ad group and links to the relevant landing pages.

Sounds simple and yet so few law firms do this exercise properly. Why is this?

Well it takes a lot of thought, time and the necessary expertise and if you get this bit right (or hire a reputable third party agency like Newshams Online Marketing!), you can steal a march on your competitors.

Our second part of this blog will dig deeper into how your ads should be correctly set up.

In the meantime, if you want to speak with a PPC consultant in London to discuss a PPC campaign for your law firm, do contact Newshams Online Marketing on +44 (0) 20 7470 8820, send us an e-mail at enquiries@newshamsonlinemarketing.com or visit our website at http://newshamsonlinemarketing.com