Advertising a law firm can be expensive and you are certainly not going to find a lack of competition. Some of the most expensive words to advertise for through pay per click marketing are law related. As a matter of “Attorney” is ranked number four out of the top 20 most expensive PPC keywords with “Lawyer” coming in at number six. On the bright side, the ROI on these keywords is also extremely high when you have a properly optimized campaign. Aside from using paid advertising, your law firm internet marketing strategy should also include search engine optimization. In order to help you make a well-informed decision, we are going to look a little closer at paid and organic search engine marketing.
Marketing Your Law Firm through PPC
Pay per click advertising offers the unparalleled ability to drive an unlimited amount of instant traffic to your website or social profiles. PPC is the online equivalent of having billboards, phone book listing, radio, and TV commercials for your business. The only difference, you are only paying to advertise to interested consumers and thereby saving a ton of money over traditional marketing methods. While several options exist for pay per click marketing, we are going to cover some of the most popular below.
Adwords and Adcenter
If you have been exposed to online marketing before, you have most likely heard of Google Adwords or the Bing/Yahoo shared platform called Adcenter. While the advertising network is different for these two PPC giants, you will find that the platform is very similar.
Regardless of which one of these two platforms you may elect to use, you will be asked to setup your campaign. This will consist of answering various questions about who you want to reach and where you want to reach them at. You will also be asked to set a daily budget and you are given the chance to select ad extensions as well.
Creating your Law Firm Ads
Once you have setup the basic campaign rules, you are ready to make your ad. Whenever making your ad text, you should already know what keywords you want to target. Include your keyword into the ad whenever possible. You should also make a couple different ads so you can see which one works best for you.
After the ad has been made, you are going to enter the keyword or keyword (s) that you want to trigger your ads. Whenever someone searches for keyword you have selected, your ad will be displayed if you have money to display and your ad score gets it placed. Whenever someone clicks on your ad, you will pay the price decided upon by the platforms competitive bidding model or advanced users can customize the maximum cost per click. Either way, the budget you set limits the daily clicks you can receive.
Fine Tuning Your Landing Pages
In order to decrease the cost per click and increase your click through rate and ad quality score, you will need to make sure your landing page has been optimized. Landing page is just another way of saying the page your ad will take people too when they click. As a rule of thumb, you should include the keyword from your ad into the landing page the ad points to. You should also be sure to fulfill any statements made in the ad. Let’s say you offered a free injury case consultation, your landing page should tell how to sign up or schedule and appointment. While there are several factors that go into optimizing a landing page, those mentioned above are a good way to get started.
Analyzing and Improving Your PPC Campaign
Once your campaign has been running for a month or so, you need to take some time to analyze the data provided in the campaign dashboard. You should be looking for things like click through rates, displays, and average cost per click. Do you have one ad performing better than the rest? Why is it doing better? Making sense of all the data is often the hardest part form novice users, so we offer tracking and analysis services to help you maximize your campaign and boost your ROI through decreased cost per clicks and increased conversions.
Social Media PPC Advertising
In addition to Adwords and Adcenter, you also have the option to display ads on specific websites. This could be a very niche website or could be used to advertise on social platforms. Since the platforms for niche sites vary so greatly, we are going to focus on the big three in social media.
A giant in its own right, Facebook is one of the most used websites in the world and they offer a solid pay per click advertising platform. When you setup an ad with Facebook, you are given several options to target your campaigns, then you create an ad much like with Adwords. While creating your ad, you are giving some choices, to include where you want people to go when an ad is clicked. You can send them to your Facebook page or your website. You can also focus your ad on getting people to “like” your FB page of website as well. Both methods are effective, but do not forget to optimize your landing pages!
LinkedIn is known for connecting professionals, and as a law firm, you are certainly professionals. Lawyers are essential to business functions and personal conflicts as well, so naturally LinkedIn is a great place to advertise. You can narrow down you target audience on LinkedIn by several factors including the company they work for, there geographic location, or age, just to name a few. As with the other platforms, you can set a daily budget and ads will display until the limit is met. If you have never advertised on LinkedIn before, it is certainly worth giving it a try.