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Tag: AdWords

Does PPC Work for Law Firms? Yes (If Done Correctly)
Whether you are brand new to PPC marketing or currently running ad campaigns, it’s important to know what you are investing your money into is creating a positive return on investment. We will discuss everything you need to know about PPC, how it differs from SEO, why both can work for law firms, and how a PPC agency could help.

What is PPC?

We need to start by explaining what PPC is. PPC stands for pay-per-click and is a form of internet marketing. The most popular form of PPC is Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords). With Google Ads, you do not pay for an ad unless a user clicks on it

When someone searches for a keyword such as “divorce lawyer near me”, multiple text ads will show up. The order in which the ads show on the page is determined by ad rank. There are a lot of factors that go into ad rank, but ultimately, it’s important for an ad to show up on the first page above the organic results.

With the ad preview below, you can see that this ad appears above the organic search results and Google Maps. Organic search results are search results that are not paid for. They can, however, be improved by search engine optimization (SEO).

It Does Not Need to Be an Either-Or with PPC and SEO

A lot of law firms look at PPC and SEO as an either-or decision. It doesn’t need to be that way. They are two different online marketing techniques with different results and timing.

The main difference between PPC and SEO is that PPC is paid advertising while SEO impacts organic search results. They both are used to reach potential clients when they search for a term relevant to your law firm. A law firm doesn’t pay when someone clicks an organic listing. They do pay for any SEO services that resulted in the organic listing showing up on page one.

PPC is considered a faster way to generate high-quality leads because you can start showing up at the top of the page almost immediately. SEO can take several months to a couple of years to reflect major changes in organic results. Therefore, a marketing strategy should not be an either-or between PPC and SEO. A law firm needs to take a holistic approach to their overall marketing strategy and determine how to best combine their PPC and SEO efforts.

Why PPC Works for Law Firms

Increasingly more people are going online to find a law firm to help them with their legal matters. They are less likely to ask family & friends for referrals. This is especially true with more private legal matters such as divorce and child custody.

Most people searching for their first lawyer will not know about sites like Avvo or Super Lawyers. That means, they will go to Google or another search engine to find the type of lawyer they need. According to Google Trends, in the last five years the search term “lawyer near me” has had about a 400% increase in interest and the search term “attorney near me” has had about a 690% increase in interest.

People using terms like “lawyer” and “attorney” in their search query are usually at the “bottom of the funnel.” That means they are beyond the information gathering and decision stage and are ready to hire a lawyer. The only question is, who to hire? It is your job to show up so you can be in the mix and put your best foot forward, so you stand out from your competitors.

Oftentimes, the organic search results display websites to find a law firm rather than for a specific law firm. As you can see in the image below, a preview of search results for “custody lawyer near me” shows results for FindLaw, Legal Match, and Yelp. This means someone searching for a child custody lawyer would have to sort through multiple results before finding a law firm.

By running PPC, a law firm can have their ad listed at the top of the search results. This gets their name and information prominently displayed exactly when someone needs it. Even if they are not ready to hire a lawyer at that moment, they are still exposed to your firm’s name and are more likely to remember it when they are ready to hire.

PPC for Lawyers – Keys to Success

Legal PPC can be highly competitive and expensive. If a law firm does not properly set up ad campaigns with the appropriate settings and target audience, it will quickly result in wasted money with no new clients in return.

There are many critical components of running a successful PPC campaign. Some of the most critical elements are:
- Keywords
- Match types
- Demographic targeting
- Geographic targeting
- Ad copy
- Bidding
- Budget management
- Conversion tracking
- Landing pages & Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
For example, if a law firm does not have the correct match type keyword or are unfamiliar with Google’s close variants, it could quickly waste thousands of dollars. Close variants are terms that Google has determined are similar enough to have the same meaning. For example, the terms “lawyer” and “attorney” are considered close variants; however, so are “family court lawyer” and “family court”. While the terms lawyer and attorney are used interchangeably, the terms family court lawyer and family court have significantly different meanings. People searching for “family court” are often looking to call the courthouse. If your ad shows at the top of the page with a big “Click to call” button, you will be paying to have people call you to get the number for the courthouse. Fun!

If geographic targeting is not optimized, a law firm could be paying for clicks from users who live outside of their targeted area. If demographics are not considered, a law firm that only represents women will show ads to men (Google Ads currently allows gender, age, and household income targeting).

A good PPC program will have a strong process for reviewing, maintaining, and improving campaigns. If all of this is in place, a law firm will exponentially increase their chances of PPC success.

Your Time Is Valuable. Having an Agency Can Help

Do you find yourself thinking, “It seems like a lot goes into running and managing a successful PPC campaign, why even try”? The truth is it can be overwhelming to manage a PPC account on your own. That’s why it is important to take the time to think about the ultimate goal for your law firm now and in the future and carefully plan how you want to execute your goals.

Your time is valuable. Spending time managing PPC is not the type of thing successful attorneys spend their time doing. By working with the right agency, you get the benefits of working with an expert.

When executed properly, PPC works for law firms. All it takes is a little planning and working with the experts to make sure everything is set up correctly and running smoothly.
August 2, 2021
Why Hire a PPC Agency

5 REASONS YOU SHOULD HIRE A PPC AGENCY

#1 – Confusing PPC Terminology

Do you know what these common PPC terms mean: Impressions, CTR, CPC, CPA, search impression share, quality scores? Depending on your experience with PPC, you likely know a few. Learning the terminology is just the beginning. You need to understand how changes you make can impact each of these metrics. Minor changes can have huge impacts which ultimately affect how much you pay per click. Our agency takes the guesswork out of the terminology and provides new clients with a terminology cheat sheet and include a key within our reports.

#2 – Complicated Keyword Research

You know what services you provide to your clients, so finding the right keywords isn’t that complicated, right? It’s not quite that simple. With PPC, there are different match types and various other factors to consider when choosing the right keywords. Pick the wrong match type and your client may not see your ad. Have too many keywords in an ad group and your quality scores may suffer. We continuously monitor your account to make sure the keywords are generating leads and remove those that are not. We regularly perform keyword research to expand keywords and remove irrelevant search queries.

#3 – Complex Campaign Set-up

Setting up a brand-new campaign can be complicated. You know the services you want to advertise, who you want to advertise to, and where you want your ads to show. You still need to know what bidding strategy to use, how to track conversions (aka leads), ad rotations, and if you should use dynamic search ads. All we need to know is what services to advertise, who your ideal client is, and how much you want to spend. We take care of the rest and handle all aspects of building a new campaign, so you have nothing to worry about.

#4 – Troubleshooting Low Conversion Rates

You have a campaign set up and ads are running, but you are not seeing conversions (aka leads) and you do not know why. The first thing to consider is if you have conversion tracking set up properly. Tracking conversions is complex and takes technical expertise to make sure you are capturing the correct data. After that, you would want to check click-through-rates, landing page experience, and ad relevance. You can identify potential problems, but you would need to know what do to fix it. Sure, you could search online for how to improve CTR or landing page experience, but you likely do not have time for that. Our PPC agency strives for high conversion rates, so that you get more leads. We work with you and your web developers to ensure that once someone clicks on your ad, they are more likely to become a lead when they get to your website.

#5 – Better Use of Your Time

And last but not least, your time is better spent on something else. Think about how much time your law firm spends reviewing and optimizing campaigns. Now think about what else you could do with that time to grow your business. Your business is your bread and butter. Wouldn’t you rather spend time deepening client relationships, networking, and creating new blog & video content? Our PPC Agency gives you the freedom to not worry about generating new leads and focus on what matters to you most.

STILL NOT SURE YOU NEED A PPC AGENCY?

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December 3, 2020
New Google Ads Feature for Lawyers – Lead Forms

Google is rolling out a new ad extension to help generate leads directly from ads. It’s called “Lead Forms,” and it’s an awesome feature that lawyers should implement ASAP!

The extension adds a call to action button to your ad, which you can customize.

When the user clicks the extension, they are taken to a lead form which you can customize with your business name, a 30 character headline, and a 200 character description. A background image is also required. This is essentially a Google hosted landing page.

Once the user fills out the form, they are taken to a “Thank You” page and it is counted as a conversion.

In order to receive the leads you either have to download them manually in the Google Ads interface, or you can have them delivered to your CRM via webhook. You could also use a service like Zapier to have them delivered via email, using Zapier’s webhook integration.

Lead form extensions are currently in beta and are not yet available to all advertisers. However, we are seeing them in most of our accounts, and they should be rolling out to everyone soon.

November 4, 2019
Why PPC Can be Perfect for Lawyers

Going beyond referrals- it’s a challenge most growing law firms face on their path to greatness. Referrals are fantastic, but they are not very scalable. There are many ways to go about scaling up your lead flow, and it can be difficult to decide how to go about it. So what’s an attorney to do?

With so many marketing channels, it can be hard to decide what is right for your law firm. Facebook, Google Ads, SEO, radio, TV… there is just so much to choose from. So, here’s my opinion on the best ways to use marketing to scale up your law firm.

Make Sure Your House is in Order Before You Invite People In

First of all, I believe the most important thing for law firms to do (as pertains to online marketing) is to get your basic SEO in order. You need to make sure your local citations are in order. Your name, address, phone number, and website URL should be consistent across the internet. You need to make sure your website is set up properly to be crawled and indexed by Google (this is known at technical SEO). These things will help ensure that you appear at the top of the search results when someone searches for your brand and will help you show up in organic search results (especially Google Maps.) These are the basics (let me know if you want me to audit your web presence for those factors). But once you’ve got your citations in order and have ensured that your website is technically sound, I believe the best way to quickly drive relevant leads for your law firm is through PPC.

PPC & The “Zero Moment of Truth”

The primary reason I decided to focus on PPC for law firms is that I’ve always known that PPC and law firms go together like peanut butter and jelly! As an example, when someone searches for “personal injury lawyers near me,” they are clearly looking for a personal injury lawyer. There is no better indicator of commercial intent than that. With Facebook, you can target things such as demographics, psychographics, online behaviors, heck, maybe even people who are (supposedly) in the market for the service you provide. But at the end of the day, you are interrupting them with an ad. They are on Facebook to browse their timelines, look at cute puppies, post baby pictures, etc. Even if they are in the market for the legal services you offer, they are most likely not in that mindset at that precise moment. Google AdWords revolutionized the advertising industry by giving you the ability to reach people looking for exactly what you offer at the exact moment that they are in the buying mindset. It’s called the “zero moment of truth.” “Zero moment of truth” is a term that was coined by Google back in the stone ages (like 2011 or so), but it remains as true now as ever. When people need a product or service, they go on the internet to conduct research. PPC enables you to reach those people during their research. It’s how Google got rich.

Facebook can be amazing for some businesses. For example, let’s say you own a gym. It makes a lot of sense to use Facebook to advertise a gym. Fitness and health are things we are thinking about all of the time- it’s not a one time life event. You can serve me with multiple ads offering a free trial at your gym and I may just take you up on that. But what if you served me with ads for divorce lawyers? Unless I happen to be in a situation where I need a divorce lawyer, this ad is going to be completely irrelevant to me. It may even trigger anger if I am going through relationship problems and believe that Facebook is serving me these ads because they are “spying” on me. But if I am Googling “divorce lawyers near me,” I’m not going to get annoyed by an ad for divorce lawyers. As my search suggests, I am clearly looking for divorce lawyers and Google is helping me solve my problem.

Now, it’s not quite as simple as that. Cost per click in the legal industry is high for a reason – it works! PPC ads are an auction, and when there are more people bidding the price goes up. You need to make sure that your landing page is optimized to capture the lead once you’ve paid for the click. You need to make sure that your copy is tailored to appeal to your target market. You need to use negative keywords to avoid paying for clicks from people who can’t afford you who are searching for things like “pro bono” or “cheap lawyers.” You can use things like income targeting. Yes, there are many factors that go into running a successful PPC campaign, but my point is, there is not another advertising channel I know of that gets you in front of your potential customers at the exact moment they are ready to receive your message like PPC does. SEO can work for this, but it is extremely difficult to rank ahead of the Findlaw’s and Justia’s of the world for generic commercial queries like “divorce lawyer.”

By no means am I saying that marketing channels such as Facebook can’t work for lawyers. It absolutely can! However, there is not a better, more scalable advertising channel than PPC for law firms. It is not magic, and it does not relieve one of the need to produce great content and build an audience. However, if you have a marketing budget and are looking for rocket fuel to fill your funnel with potential clients, there is no better solution than paid search.

February 6, 2019
State Name & Abbreviations – Negative Keyword Lists for Google Ads
TL;DR: get a spreadsheet with state names and abbreviations for your shared negative keyword list here.

Are you looking for a ready-made list of geographical negative keywords to add to your Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords) account? You’ve come to the right place! Adding shared negative keyword lists to your Google Ads account will help prevent you from wasting money on people who are searching for things that are irrelevant to your business, without having to wait for the queries to show up in the search query report (after you’ve already paid for them). Shared negative keyword lists are fantastic for blocking all sorts of clicks that you may not want to pay for (like job seekers and people looking for free stuff). In this case, we are looking to minimize clicks from people who are using search queries that contain the names or abbreviations of states which are not relevant to your business.

However, you do need to proceed with caution. While you do you need to remove irrelevant state names and abbreviations, you also need to be careful not to block searches which actually are relevant and valuable to your business. Let me explain.

Examples of Shared Negative Keyword Lists Blocking Valuable Clicks & Conversions

Here’s an example. You are a family lawyer in Portland. You want to advertise to the city of Portland and the surrounding areas. However, you want to avoid people who are searching for lawyers in the nearby state of Washington. So you add “Washington” to your shared negative keyword list, thereby blocking any search query that contains the word “Washington.” However, there is a suburb just to the west of Portland called Beaverton. In this town, there is the headquarters of a company called Nike. This town of Beaverton is located in Washington County. There is also a big Intel campus in Washington County. Some of these people may search for things like “best divorce lawyers in Washington County.” You get my point: you don’t want to inadvertently block any highly relevant searches by adding state names as negative keywords that also apply to local counties, cities, etc.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you are a female immigration attorney in Georgia. You add Louisiana and its abbreviation “LA” to your negative keyword list. However, “la” is a common Spanish word, and Spanish speaking people represent the lion’s share of your business. By adding “LA” as a negative keyword at the account level, you have blocked people who are searching for things like “la mejor abogada de inmigración en Georgia,” which loosely translates to “the best female immigration lawyer in Georgia.” Particularly astute readers may have noticed that that Spanish sentence also contains the word “de,” which is the abbreviation for Deleware. So, if you want to show up for Spanish searches, you want to avoid blocking “la” and “de.”

Other examples:
- “NE” blocks searches for “best dentists in NE Portland.”
- “CO” blocks “co-working spaces near me.”
The point is, be careful with which negative keywords you add to the shared negative keyword list because you do not want to block search queries from people who have a high likelihood of becoming a valuable customer. We created a Google Sheet which contains all of the state names and abbreviations. We have removed some state abbreviations that you should never add because they are common English words (I’m looking at you IN and OR!) However, there may be others that you need to remove. I have added some comments and notes in the spreadsheet pointing out potential conflicts I discovered while writing this article. I also enabled comments in the spreadsheet, so please, leave comments with any conflicts that you find as well. Maybe this can become a valuable crowd-sourced resource that you can return to each time you create or take over a new account! That would be pretty sweet. Access the spreadsheet here.

Negative Keyword Lists are Awesome

I love negative keyword lists because they help me save my client’s money by blocking searches that they don’t want to pay for. Most attorneys don’t want to pay for a search that contains the term “pro-bono.” Many businesses want to avoid searches for “cheap” and “free” because they are not a discount firm. Shared negative keywords lists are a great way to save time and money by applying negative keywords to multiple campaigns with just one list. Blocking state names and abbreviations for multiple campaigns from one list is a great way to save money from the get-go, but you have to be careful not to inadvertently block relevant queries. So build those lists, but take time to think it through first!

List of State Names & Abbreviations For Negative Keyword List

Hey, maybe you don’t want to open the spreadsheet? That’s okay. Here is a list you can just copy/paste.

State Names

*Note: keep the “quotation marks” for the two-word states. You only want to block searches which contain the phrase in that order. This is called “phrase match.”

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
“New Hampshire”
“New Jersey”
“New Mexico”
“New York”
“North Carolina”
“North Dakota”
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
“Rhode Island”
“South Carolina”
“South Dakota”
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
“West Virginia”
Wisconsin
Wyoming

State Abbreviations

*Note: “IN” and “OR” have been removed because they are common English words.

AL
AK
AZ
AR
CA
CO
CT
DE
FL
GA
HI
ID
IL
IA
KS
KY
LA
ME
MD
MA
MI
MN
MS
MO
MT
NE
NV
NH
NJ
NM
NY
NC
ND
OH
PA
RI
SC
SD
TN
TX
UT
VT
VA
WA
WV
WI
WY
October 12, 2018
New AdWords Compare Mortgages Ad Format

In Google AdWords’ 2015 Annual Livestream on April 5th, advertisers were introduced to a plethora of new features coming soon to the AdWords platform. One of these is Google Compare for mortgage providers. This feature will give potential customers an easy way to quickly compare providers in terms of cost, ratings, and key differentiators that the advertiser provides (such as being local, etc.)

Google already launched this service for insurance a few months ago, and they are ready to expand to different markets. The service has been somewhat controversial, with large insurers such as Progressive, State Farm, GEICO, and Allstate apparently refusing to participate. Some see the service as a “price-only comparison platform”, but Google is incorporating detailed ratings and the ability to include key differentiators in your ad copy to offset this.

According to Google, Comparison Ads offer advertisers the ability to target their offers on a granular level with a flexible cost per lead format. This feature will be rolling out for mortgage providers in the coming months. You can read more about Comparison Ads here.

May 5, 2015