Dan Hodges
The best digital marketing strategies are made up of a number of different elements to ensure you cover all bases.
We’d usually recommend starting with a well-designed law firm website followed by high-quality and SEO-optimised legal content. Once you’ve got these covered, paid advertising might be the next area of law firm digital marketing you might want to give a go.
PPC advertising is a valuable tool for those law firms who want to drive enquiries now. A robust SEO strategy is great for improving your domain rating, helping your law firm’s website to appear higher in Google and meeting the needs of customers searching for specific queries. But a lot of the time, searchers might be researching rather than ready to buy.
What is PPC for law firms?
Paid advertising or PPC is the name given to online advertising in all its forms, i.e. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and banners on websites, to name a few. PPC more accurately refers to the payment model when you only pay when someone clicks on your advert. Combining the right keywords which reflect what your law firm offers whilst targeting the right audience in the right location can improve your online visibility and generate enquiries.
To target users with a high search intent who are ready to buy your services, you want to use PPC campaigns. But what are the best practices for creating a successful PPC campaign? At Conscious, we only work with law firms, so we know a thing or two about creating a winning law firm PPC campaign, and I’m going to share my top tips in this article.
Have a PPC Audit
The first step in any law firm’s PPC campaign is to have a PPC audit. A PPC audit will be a detailed audit of your account, whether it’s running in Google Ads or Bing Ads. At Conscious, you will be given a comprehensive report with a traffic light scoring system, observations where opportunities are being missed and recommendations.
Some of the things our PPC audit will cover include what keywords are being bid on, whether any match types or negative keywords are being applied and Quality Score; whether Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are being used to full effect; ad copy quality and call to actions; whether ad extensions are set up and landing page relevance and quality.
Define Your Campaign Goals
Once you’ve completed a PPC audit, or if you aren’t currently and have never run PPC ads, you need to identify the primary objectives of your PPC campaign (e.g., lead generation, brand awareness, promoting a specific legal service). Once you have these, you can then align your goals with specific key performance indicators (KPIs), such as conversion rates, click-through rates (CTR), or cost per acquisition (CPA).
Choose the Right Platforms
At Conscious, we run lots of different types of ads for law firms, including Google Ads, Google remarketing, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Google Maps, Bing Search and YouTube. You need to identify where your target audience is and how to best advertise to them. It might also depend on the marketing collateral you are promoting.
Conduct Thorough Keyword Research
The next, and possibly most important step, is to conduct your keyword research and identify search volume and intent, competition, price and more. We use tools like Ahrefs, Google Search Console and Google Keyword Planner to help us identify keywords, but there are lots of tools out there that can be used. Your PPC campaign should focus on a mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords to cover a range of user intents.
Craft Compelling Ad Copy
Next up is the creation of ad copy. As with a service page, blog post or social media caption, you need to ensure your captions are clear and concise headlines that include relevant keywords that are easy to digest by your audience. You might choose to highlight your law firm’s unique selling propositions (USPs), such as years of experience, awards, or client testimonials. Your ad copy should also include a strong call to action (CTA), such as “book a no-obligation call with one of our experts” or “get your legal matter resolved today”.
Use Ad Extensions
Ad extensions, like call extensions, site links, location extensions, and callout extensions, can help to enhance ad visibility and provide additional information. These are an optional extra, but it might be worth testing different ad extensions to identify which ones resonate with your audience.
Optimise Landing Pages
This is something lots of law firms forget about. It’s not just about your ad, but it is about where you are sending them. If your ad looks great, is clear and concise and has a great call to action, but the users land on a page with spelling errors, too little or too much content or a difficult-to-use form, they are unlikely to convert. Your landing pages should be relevant to the ad, provide a seamless user experience, include clear CTAs, include contact information, and include a lead capture form to facilitate conversions. In addition to this, your landing page should be optimised for page load times and mobile responsiveness. It might be that you need to create new landing pages rather than using existing pages on your website.
We’ve run a webinar on paid advertising landing page user experience, which your law firm might find useful.
Implement Geographic Targeting
Depending on the types of clients you are looking to get, the services you offer and the location of your law firm, you might decide to set geographic boundaries to target users in specific regions where your law firm operates.
Monitor and Optimise Campaign Performance
One of the great things about paid advertising, is that you can use different ad graphics, keywords and copy to see what works best. Make sure to use tracking tools like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to monitor campaign performance. That way, you can regularly analyse metrics like CTR, conversion rates, and CPA to identify areas for improvement.
Implement Remarketing Campaigns
Once you have implemented a PPC campaign, you can use remarketing to re-engage users who have interacted with your website but haven’t converted. Or you can set up a follow up campaign with a different angle and see if this helps to convert instead.
Law firm PPC campaigns can be complex and expensive depending on your keywords, but they can have a great success rate. On average, the conversion rate for Google Ads is 4-6%, so if your law firm is looking for new business now or business in a specific service area, PPC could be the digital marketing strategy for your law firm.
We have over 20 years of experience helping law firms become more successful online, so if you’d like to discuss how we can help with your law firm’s paid advertising campaigns, get in touch at sales@conscious.co.uk or 0117 325 0200.