Law firm PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is often overlooked and underutilized in legal practices. But when people look for reliable legal services, they often rely on search engines. Google gets around 8.5 billion searches per day. Imagine how many leads your law firm can get if you double down on this online marketing strategy.
2023 is a great year to start with your PPC campaign. However, it won’t succeed with a set-it-and-forget-it attitude: you’ll need to find the balance between ad spend and getting results—in this case, new clients.
If you’re planning to devise a PPC campaign, we have some of the best tips to lead you to success.
Why Should Lawyers Run a PPC Advertising Campaign?
There are three main reasons why pay-per-click for law firms should be utilized:
- Intentional Targeting: Traditional advertising allows you to reach a broad audience. But with PPC ads, you can target audiences looking specifically for your services.
- Immediate Results: Results are almost instant once you launch your PPC campaign, unlike with organic SEO traffic, which takes time to build up.
Measurable: PPC can give you key metrics to ensure that your campaigns are effective. This way, you can devise different strategies to tweak ineffective campaigns.
PPC Advertising Strategies for Lawyers
There are several ways PPC for lawyers can be successful. Planning and the right strategies are the keys to an effective campaign. Here are some of the best tactics you can consider for your law firm’s PPC campaign.
Bid on Relevant Keywords and Key Phrases
One main reason to do PPC is for your legal practice to appear on top of the search engine results page (SERP). Landing on the top spot gives your business credibility and significantly increases traffic to your web page. To appear on top of the SERPs, you need to bid on keywords and phrases that potential clients search for.
Proper keyword research can help optimize well-written ads to ensure you stand out. For example, keywords like “personal injury lawyer” or “divorce attorney” will help improve your search ranking.
Another strategy you can do is to bid on your competitor’s keywords. By doing this, you are essentially stealing your competitor’s traffic and leading clients to your business. If your competitors are well-known and bigger than you, bidding on their keywords can work wonders for your business.
Direct Ads to a Local Audience
Don’t focus on people across the country and outside your reach. Targeting people outside of your service location might render your PPC campaign useless because most clients prefer legal services within their area.
Direct your ads to potential clients in your geographical area. Doing this will generate more leads. You can target people in a specific city or zip code or include your location in your PPC keywords (e.g., “legal services miami fl”) to ensure you reach those who can use your service.
Optimize Landing Pages and Calls to Action
Your landing page should be related to your ads and designed to convert visitors into leads. Using persuasive language in your landing page copy is an excellent way to increase conversions. Furthermore, include a form where clients can easily submit their information to complete the conversion.
Calls to action (CTAs) are another essential element to complete leads and conversions. Your CTAs should be concise and clear, encouraging potential customers to take action by telling them exactly what to do next. Common calls to action include “schedule a consultation,” “book a free call,” or “learn more.”
Maximize Google Ads for Law Firm PPC
You don’t need to look far for a platform on which to launch your PPC ad campaign. Google remains the biggest search engine globally—the majority of Internet users use it to search for anything online. Therefore, maximize Google ads for your legal practice.
Google provides a competitive environment for legal searches—as we’ve mentioned, Google gets billions of searches per day. Choosing high-ranking keywords for your Google ads has a good chance of yielding leads, giving you a high return on investment.
Optimize Various Match Types
Keywords are used to match your ads with the search terms people use. Search engines like Google have keyword match types to see how close a search term has to be before an ad appears on the search results.
To control where your ads appear, maximize the different keyword match types. Keep these in mind.
Broad Match
Broad type is the most common match type. It prompts the search engine to display your ads to the user even without typing in the exact keywords and using synonyms and related keywords. For example, if you set the keyword “personal injury lawyers” to be a broad match and a user searches for the term “injury attorneys,” your ad will be included in their search results.
The advantage of the broad match type is that you reach a wide audience. But since the keywords are relatively general, some of the audience that sees your ads may not be the ones you intend to target.
Phrase Match
A phrase match can display ads that include the context of your keywords or a part contained in the search. For example, if your ads contain the keyword “personal injury law firm,” it can be included in searches like “best personal injury law firm” or “personal injury law firm near me.”
Exact Match
The exact match type only shows your ads to users who type in the same keywords you have in your ads. This match type narrows your audience down to the people specifically searching for your service. Though you reach a much smaller audience with this keyword match type, it yields a higher conversion rate compared to the two other types.
Extend Advertisements on Mobile
If you’re not optimizing your advertising campaigns for mobile, you’re missing out on a majority of Internet searches. At the end of 2022, almost 60% of website traffic originated from mobile devices.
To guarantee that your law firm’s PPC ads reach the largest crowd, you should create ads with the mobile experience in mind. For example, there are keywords that work best on mobile devices. Mobile users tend to make typographical errors, so keyword research for mobile SEO should take into account both erroneous and error-free queries.
Google has a checklist for mobile advertising so you can make the most out of your PPC campaigns. Once your campaign is optimized for mobile searches, you can drive more visits to your website and, ultimately, generate more leads.
Get Your Law Firm Seen Online With Local Business Marketing Solutions
Rather than spending your time handing out flyers or waiting for a referral to ring you, focus on digital marketing for law firms to get more eyes on your services. With the help of Local Business Marketing Solutions, you can get your legal practice online and generate lead after lead.
LBMS has perfected Google pay-per-click for lawyers to ensure your firm lands at the top of search results, generates leads, and gets new clients. LBMS also offers other digital marketing services such as local SEO, website design, Facebook advertising, and multichannel marketing to help your firm cultivate a well-rounded online presence.
Schedule a discovery call with us today and get your legal services online!