PPC for Lawyers: How to Get a Lot of Clients for Law Firms Through Pay-per-Click Marketing

PPC marketing, also called pay-per-click, is an online advertising strategy in which you only pay when prospective clients click on your ad. It’s highly regarded by online advertisers due to its measurability and cost-effectiveness. If you’ve noticed ads on Google, then you’ve seen PPC campaigns at work. And according to Tech Jury, more than 50% of consumers click on PPC ads.

2022 edition

How to Get More Clients For Your Law Firm

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There’s a lot that goes into crafting targeted and result-driven PPC advertising campaigns. Like the analogy of the committed student who studies hard but not smartly, and fails a test, online marketing efforts need to be executed correctly to yield positive results.

PPC for lawyers uses the same ranking criteria as PPC ad campaigns across all industries: PPC engines, including Google Ads, score your ads based on relevance to your audience and helpfulness. In order to rank your ad, Google uses a Quality Score based on how relevant your ad copy is to your bidding keywords.

To save you time and ad spend, we’ll go through the following:

• What PPC for lawyers is
• Advantages of PPC for lawyers
• The biggest challenges faced by law firms doing PPC
• Tips on how to get the most out of PPC for law firms
• Crucial PPC mistakes a lot of lawyers make
• Bonus: how to set up a lawyer call-only campaign
• Answer FAQs

The Main Question: is PPC for Attorneys Worth It?

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites where an advertiser only pays a publisher like Google, Bing, Amazon, or social media platforms when the advertisement is clicked. PPC campaigns for lawyers can be extraordinarily effective when run correctly. There are many PPC advantages for law firms, namely that it can help them stand out and achieve instant results in a competitive online market. While effective marketing strategies incorporate organic traffic and paid ads, the former generally takes more time to gain traction, whereas PPC trumps.

PPC Advantages for Law Firms

PPC can yield many benefits for advantages for law firms, such as described below:

Targeted Marketing

With traditional advertising in newspapers and magazines, companies pay for a general targeted audience to view their advertisement. Targeted marketing involves breaking a market into segments and concentrating marketing efforts to encourage users within those segments further down the buyers’ funnel. 

One of the biggest PPC advantages for lawyers is the integration of search engine optimization (SEO), enabling law firms to use specific keywords that their ideal target market searches for. This makes the promotion, pricing, and distribution of your services cost-effective because your advert will only appear to those searching for your legal services. 

High Flexibility

The ecosystem of digital marketing is such that there is a symbiotic relationship between search engines and users. PPC campaigns are designed to appeal to specific users based on their online habits. Search engine algorithms cater to their behavior; however, the two can change as new trends and technology emerge.

The good news is you can tweak the PPC campaign immediately to adjust to clients’ changing needs. PPC advertising allows marketers to implement swift and decisive changes to stop wasteful spending on campaigns that aren’t working or to leverage initial signs of success which are significant PPC advantages for attorneys. Nothing is set in stone, so poor keywords can be replaced with better ones to work more effectively on target audiences. 

A Lot of Data

In the age of data-backed decisions, PPC offers an abundance of information to optimize campaigns for maximum ROI. When it comes to impressions, clicks, and conversions, the data gathered from PPC advertising analytics can provide insightful direction on how to reach digital marketing KPIs. 

For instance, A/B testing allows advertisers to experiment with two or more variants of a landing page to determine which one has more conversions. This may entail using marginally altered keywords and images or posting at a different time of day, for example. With PPC campaigns, law firms receive constant feedback and continuously refine their ads until they reach peak performance.

Why High Costs Don’t Really Matter for Lawyer PPC

Like hairdressers and barbers, the services that lawyers provide will always be needed by individuals and companies. Even though PPC can be expensive, the cost per acquisition (CPA) is lower than the total possible revenue a firm can make. 

Law firms provide a specialized service, and most individuals will have to Google to find an appropriate one to help them. Essentially, if your PPC campaigns are optimized, they will more than likely bring in new clients whose spending will outweigh initial advertising costs.

8 Biggest Problems (and Tips) for Lawyers doing PPC Advertising

1. Lawyers Don’t understand What PPC Ads Are, so They Don’t Work

Legal marketing campaigns often overlook and underutilize the importance of Pay-per-click (PPC). This is a form of online advertising whereby a host is paid when a potential customer clicks on an ad. Business ads are charged by the click – without a click, your ad is free.

Law firms and other companies rely on Google Ads the most frequently when it comes to PPC advertising. Almost nine out of ten people search the web through Google.

PPC for lawyers targets specific search interests with their ads. Engaging potential clients online and driving them to your services is the objective of guiding them through the marketing funnel.

The formula is:

Properly-Picked Keywords + Matching Landing Pages + High-Performance Website = Strong New Case Flow

Real-time results are possible with a successful PPC campaign. By doing this, law firms can discover how potential clients engage with the advertisement. Ads and other online marketing efforts can benefit from an initial campaign as a valuable foundation.

In order to succeed online, you must cut through the clutter of competition. By strategically directing consumers to your website or app, PPC campaigns can help you reach your target audience.

Keywords and Key Phrases

Building your campaigns on the relevant keywords and key phrases can make a massive difference in how many leads you get and how much they cost you. Google Adwords and other pay-per-click engines score your ad based on audience relevance and helpfulness. Google uses Quality Score to rank your ad, in part because the relevance of the ad copy to the keywords you’re bidding on is higher. Ad placement and cost are calculated based on this.

1. More leads. The way PPC works is Google auctions the top 3 positions in the search results for certain keywords. Because the space they have to sell is limited — just 3 positions — and because they only get paid when someone clicks on your ad, to Google, it’s extremely important that your ad is well-targeted and click-a-licious. In fact, it’s so important, that the more clicks you get (expressed as a ratio of views to clicks), the lower your cost-per-click (or CPC, in marketing terms).
2. The way PPC works is Google auctions the top 3 positions in the search results for certain keywords. Because the space they have to sell is limited — just 3 positions — and because they only get paid when someone clicks on your ad, to Google, it’s extremely important that your ad is well-targeted and click-a-licious. In fact, it’s so important, that the more clicks you get (expressed as a ratio of views to clicks), the lower your cost-per-click (or CPC, in marketing terms).
   
3. Low costs. Talking about CPC, pay-per-click advertising could get extremely expensive in the legal industry. It really depends where your law firm is based, but if you’re in a competitive area like Chicago, for example, you could easily be paying as much as $100 per click. So if you’re advertising for certain keywords, but then the page you’re leading your potential clients to is confusing and they hit the back button, congrats! You just paid $100 for nothing. Not only that, but because of your high bounce rate (that’s people who visit your page and immediately leave), now your cost per click is even higher. If you want to keep CPC low, always invest time in choosing the right keywords and phrases.

Landing Pages

Speaking of bounce rate, what PPC newbies often do is design the perfect ad and then lead potential clients to the home page of a website. This is a sure-fire way to increase your bounce rate.

Put yourself in the shoes of your prospects. They have a specific problem, they’re looking for a specific solution — say, elderly law lawyer in Mississippi, and just when they think they’ve found it, they land on a page that talks about criminal defense lawyers and personal injury lawyers, and corporate lawyers, and, yeah, elder law…

It’s great that your law firm is multidisciplinary, but when it comes to PPC marketing for lawyers, it’s essential that you keep things simple. You should create a landing page for each of your ads and its content should answer your potential client’s question as clearly as possible.

High-Performance Website

A great way to increase the effectiveness of your PPC marketing even further is to make sure that the people who land on your page take action. This requires effective calls to action — at least one per page, but in most cases we recommend two.

People clicking on PPC ads are usually people who are ready to talk to an attorney, so, from the landing page that answers their question, show them a call to action that takes them to a contact page where they can take the next step.

Our end goal is for your clients to pick up the phone and call you, or to fill out a contact form. Once they do that, you’ve “converted” them from a website visitor to a warm lead.

So let’s put his into perspective. If 10,000 people see your ad and say 2.4% click on it, that’s 240 people. Out of these 240 people that land on your website, on average about 2,35% will contact you — that’s 5-6 people. And out of these 5-6 people, how many will become paying clients?

A highly converting attorney website should convert in the high single digits or low double digits — so between 8%-15% of visitors. Most of our client’s websites convert at that level.

Let’s put these numbers in the example above. If 240 people click on your ad and, say, 10% of them contact you, that’s 24 people. If historically, one out of three or four becomes a client, you get great results off such a PPC campaign.

Tip 1: Pay-per-click advertising is a great way for you to get clients fast, but in order for it to work, you should always consider your end goals, your budget and choose a top marketing agency to manage your ads for optimum results.

2. Lawyers Invest a lot of Money into PPC Campaigns but Get Zero ROI

Pay-per-click advertising uses audience targeting to ensure your ads land up in front of relevant prospects. This involves separating your client base into different segments depending on their needs, and other demographic data. The more specific your ads are, the higher their engagement rate will be.

Remember, law firm PPC campaigns can vary according to their objectives. It could be that one ad is about divorce and the other about wills. These will likely appeal to different clients. So, as a first step, you have to know your law firm’s specialties and your target market.

You also need to know what metrics to pay attention to. PPC advertising platforms provide access to real-time data, so you can tweak campaigns, but to do so effectively, you need to be familiar with the metrics below:

ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is the ratio of your net profit to your total costs. When advertisers speak about ROI in the context of PPC, they’re actually referring to ROAS, which is the return on ad span. To work it out, divide your revenue by your PPC ad spend.

LTV

The lifetime value or LTV is the average revenue estimate a client will generate throughout their lifespan as a client. A client’s worth can help determine legal marketing acquisition strategies and marketing budget spend.

CPC (click)

Cost-per-click (CPC) is the price paid for each click in a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign. For CPC bidding campaigns, law firms can set a maximum cost-per-click bid (the highest they’re willing to pay for a potential client to click on their ad).

CPC (Conversion)

Cost-per-conversion is the metric used to identify how much it costs to acquire a client that pays for your services. The cost includes all the traffic for the duration of a PPC campaign.

MQL to SQL Conversion

The MQL to SQL conversion rate measures the percentage of qualified marketing leads that become sales qualified leads. It helps determine how effectively the marketing team is stocking the sales pipeline with high-quality leads.

Tip 2: Use SMART. Developed by Austrian-American management consultant Peter Drucker in the 1980s, SMART is a mnemonic acronym and established tool used to guide goal-setting that is applicable to PPC advertising. To make sure your law firm’s PPC campaigns are achievable and that you’re spending PPC budget effectively, each one should be:
Specific / Measurable / Achievable / Relevant / Time-bound

3. Lawyers Don’t Know How to Work with Expensive Clicks

A successful PPC campaign bids on relevant keywords. A bid represents the amount of money you are willing to spend for a single click on a given keyword in Google Adwords. Your bidding amount will dictate where your PPC ads show up in Google search engine results. The process is similar to an auction, except it’s for placement in Google search rankings for a search term or keyword that is queried.

Every time a search is made in Google, it runs results through its algorithm and ranks an ad according to how high the bidding price is and what the quality score for that term is. Unfortunately, some industries don’t have relative affordability of average-costing CPCs. Wordstream notes “attorney” is the 4th most expensive keyword for PPC and costs $47.07 per click, followed by “lawyer” in 6th place at $42.51.

So, an expensive long-tail keyword like “Personal injury lawyer Chicago” might cost $150 per single click. Now, imagine if there are twenty clicks per day? It’s not inherently incorrect to bid on this keyword, but it’s only really advisable if you know how to convert every lead. “Attorney” and “lawyer” are high volume, high competition keywords, and while high volume is good because it will bring in traffic to a law firm’s website, you ideally want low competition keywords because they’re cheaper.

However, the cheapest bids may rake up wasteful spending because users clicking on them may not be your target audience. They could be searching for “how to open a law firm?” for example. Therefore, to succeed at PPC, you need to bid on the right keywords to increase clicks conversions to your website.

Tip 3: Find a Middle Ground. It might be naive to compete with large legal firms for the top three keywords with a CPC of $150, if there are twenty smaller keywords with smilair quality but only cost $30 per-click, for instance. Legal services keywords will naturally be expensive, so you have to weigh money vs time spend and settle on a bidding price range that’s worthwhile.

4. Lawyers Can’t Get Clicks From the Right Audience

No digital advertising should take place without keyword research and the development of buyer personas. Keyword research is the practice of finding the search terms or keyword phrases that potential clients enter into search engines when looking for legal services. “Personal injury law firm” can be a keyword, for example.

You need to know what keywords your clients do and don’t use and where they search. Knowing if they use Google, attorney directories, or Google Maps, will determine where to place your ideal PPC campaign. The purpose of keyword research is to gain a more profound insight into your audience, so you can effectively market to them. Keyword research is also the cornerstone for content marketing and can guide which topics and themes to generate content about.

Once you’ve done keyword research, you’ll want to develop buyer personas. In digital marketing, buyer personas are fictional representations of an ideal client or target audience. These research-based profiles describe the demographics, challenges, and decision-making processes of each client segment. Most businesses, and law firms, for that matter, will have multiple buyer personas.

Each persona will have different criteria for evaluating your product, and you’ll need different strategies to address their needs and nudge them down the marketing funnel. When you have a clear idea of whom you’re marketing to, it’s easier to develop effective search ads, whether display ads or video ads, that speak to their personal narrative.

Tip 4: Check if your PPC campaign is optimised for the right audience. If not, make the necessary tweaks, and remember that you can run multiple campaigns with different ad groups to target specific personas.

5. Clients Click on Competitor Ads Instead

Different ads appeal to different audiences. If your competitors’ social media and Google Ads are better than yours, you may have to invest more time in crafting the right message in the right medium. Producing PPC ad copy and selecting accompanying visual material that’s search engine optimized and appealing to your audience is an art.

In fact, it’s probably a good idea to research what your competitors are doing not to copy but to understand where and how your marketing efforts fit into the greater scheme of things, as well as what you can build upon and improve.

A diverse ad approach enhances brand perception, increases effectiveness, boosts purchase intent, and grows customer trust and loyalty. You might consider the following types of PPC ads on social media, email, and search engines other than Google, for example:

• Search ads
• display ads
• remarketing ads
• video ads
• paid social ads
• shopping ads
• Gmail sponsored ads

Tip 5: Diversify your ad approach to reach different audience segments in a way that meets them where they are, and appeals to their online habits and buying persona narratives. Baby boomers, for example, are 19% more likely to share content than any other generation, and 58% more likely than millenials to click through to a business’ website from a social media post. Understanding your clients’ habits reveals what types ads to use and where to place them.

6. Law firms Can’t Convert Clicks They Get into New Leads

User experience design is rooted in cognitive and behavioral psychology. Every business website and landing page with a solid user experience design achieves two main purposes; clearly relays to visitors what services or products they offer and convinces visitors to do business with them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a home page or blog; every page must encourage visitors to act.

Your law firm website should also be aesthetically pleasing and offer a positive user experience. Nearly 60% of internet searches are conducted on mobile devices, so the site needs to be optimized to work across all devices. Site speed is also important to get right as it affects your Google search results ranking. We’ve all abandoned websites that take too long to load, and you don’t want yours to fall into that category.

There’s no use in having a website that no one can find, which is where search engine optimization (SEO) plays a massive role. Digital marketing contemporary Neil Patel defines SEO as “the process of taking steps to help a website rank high on Google,” so it shows at the top of the page when users search online. This incorporates keyword research and optimizing on-page, off-page, and technical elements to make it easy for search engines to index your website.

Tip 6: Ensure you have a compelling website that’s correctly optimised. At Comrade Web, we have a full development team that can design your perfect website. Because websites are often a clients’ first-port-of-call, it’s crucial to leave a good impression, and sometimes that means hiring experts to help you get it done.

7. Lawyers Get Leads but Fail to Turn Them into Clients

If you’re getting leads from your PPC campaign, but they’re not converting into clients, it could be one of two problems; either they’re not qualified, or your sales team isn’t performing. Some organizations even divide their sales team in two; one part handles existing clients, and another takes care of new business to better manage the sales pipeline.

Of course, because law firms provide specific services, it’s not quite the same, but the point is that you need a sales team that knows how to move quickly and keep leads warm. You may need to review how your team talks to leads and initiate a sales script, as well as integrate a call tracking system like Call Rail so you or your marketing team can track calls.

When reviewing your internal process, think about the following:

• How do you initiate contact after capturing a lead? Through email or phone?
• How do you keep track of lead data?
• Do you keep leads warm through content marketing?

Creating the right processes, so your sales team can move rapidly, is paramount. This applies to all stages of the sales process. While your lead may not be ready to hire your services, you can still follow up with them and ask if they want to be part of your mailing list, which displays good customer service and helps nurture them too. Excellent customer service extracts more value from clients and recoups client acquisition costs through building a loyal client base who recommends your services to others.

Tip 7: Assess and review your sales team’s tactics and operations. Using customer relationship management (CRM) platforms can help automate the processes and optimiste your sales funnel.

8. Attorneys Don’t Know How to Interpret Analytics Correctly to Adjust their PPC Campaigns

When it comes to lawyers PPC analytics, you want to review three mission-critical analytics; click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per conversion to your PPC advertising success. But, while these are important to understand, the real crux is whether you have the time and resources to execute PPC advertising yourself, and do you really want to?

It’s easier and way more effective to outsource PPC to a marketing agency that has specialists who know what they’re doing. It then becomes their job to interpret the data and report back the following:

• Overall ROI or ROAS from the campaign
• Number of clicks
• Number of conversion MQL’s
• Number of sales conversions SQL’s
• What does and doesn’t work
• Website performance, including weak areas that need improvement
• Strategies they’re going to implement to move your law firm closer to its digital marketing goals

Remember, it’s your digital marketing team’s job to lead your law firm towards its business objective and not the other way around!

Tip 8: Learn exactly what you need to look at in analytics, as aimless analysis won’t get you anywhere. While you don’t need to know everything, having a basic understanding can help, and also ensures your marketing team can’t bamboozle you.

Top 5 PPC Mistakes Lawyers Make

Using Ineffective Keywords

When it comes to PPC for law firms, it’s important to realize that the most expensive keywords don’t always perform the best. Audits should be done on keywords older than six months so underperforming ones can be updated and negative keywords can be implemented.

Sometimes you have the right keywords, yet they appear in incorrect searches. For example, you might have “criminal lawyer,” but your ads appear in searches related to “famous criminal lawyers.” To eliminate this, you can add words like “famous” as a negative keyword to your ad group. This alerts Google to not show your ad in any search that has “famous.” 

Neglecting Your Attorney PPC Campaigns

Common attorney PPC mistakes include not monitoring PPC campaigns daily. PPC should be constantly tweaked to improve performance, so it’s best to check frequently and adjust accordingly. This applies to poor and well-performing campaigns to prevent over or underspending.

Another Attorney PPC problem that results in poor campaign performance is the lack of striking visuals. Clients are first drawn to powerful visuals before reading the text, especially if you are creating image ads.

Disregarding Huge Media Platforms for Lawyer PPC Campaigns

85% of internet users in the United States watch online video content. If you’re struggling to convert leads, know that video increases conversion by 80%. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter offer a myriad of online marketing possibilities.

It’s advisable to run campaigns on multiple platforms to increase audience reach and test which PPC campaigns work best on each one. Despite fierce competition on massive media platforms, PPC campaigns can still be effective if targeted correctly. 

Using Irrelevant Landing Pages

Ensure your landing page is optimized for conversions. There’s nothing worse than a warm lead clicking on a landing page that doesn’t provide the information they are searching for.  All landing pages should have a clear CTA and creative and useful content related to the service provided by the lawyers. PPC problems can be exacerbated if search engines penalize your landing pages because their content is irrelevant to your ad. 

Furthermore, instead of sending all your leads to one page, it’s better to create multiple landing pages that appeal to different target markets. These landing pages should direct clients to relevant sections on your website. Research shows that websites with over 40 landing pages increase leads by 500%. 

Forgetting About Targeting

For many lawyers, their locality is key. The same principle should be applied to PPC campaigns. You should only be targeting clients within your service area.  There’s no use in displaying PPC ads in California if you’re based in Chicago. When you use geo-targeting,  you target ads to users in specific geographic locations. This feature allows you to target according to zip code, city, country, status, and radius. 

Targeting isn’t just relegated to the physical location. It also applies to all stages of digital marketing. Your copy and landing pages shouldn’t be written with a one-size-fits-all approach, especially for firms that offer various services from different lawyers. PPC issues like these can be easily resolved with a comprehensive and detailed marketing approach. 

Bonus: How Can Attorneys Effectively Setup a Call-Only Campaign?

Clients who search for lawyers online are likely looking to speak directly to someone who can help them rather than reading copious amounts of text. Call-only campaigns for attorneys are easy to track but require a specialized strategy. Here are five call-only tips for law firms wanting to utilize this revenue-generating option. 

5 Tips for an Attorneys’ Call-Only Campaign

Take Advantage of Targeting

Target marketing is the process of breaking a business’s target market into segments and then concentrating marketing efforts towards those specific segments. The advent of Google AdWords allows companies to use specific keywords to reach their ideal market online. 

For example, a divorce attorney might create ads with the words “divorce lawyer in Chicago” because they know that their clients search using these keywords. By adding them, they will rank in search engine results and have a higher chance of discovery online. 

The sophistication of Google AdWords allows call-only campaigns for law firms to target not just cities but market segments with specific zip and postal codes. Some of your cities’ areas will be more densely populated or affluent than others and better suited to your legal services. Be sure to use a local number and increase bids in areas that have higher quality calls.

Focus on Call-Centric Keywords

When it comes to call-only tips for attorneys, the correct use of keywords should never be underestimated. Using words like “lawyer” or “attorney” is problematic because they are general and popular (at $42.5 per click), which can lead to wasted spending. For increased profits, focus on a combination of the head, body, and long-tail keywords. 

Head keywords are single-word general terms, body keywords contain two or three words, and long-tail keywords contain four words with greater specificity. For example, “divorce lawyer cost Chicago.”Long-tail keywords make it more likely that you’ll attract potential clients interested in specific, as opposed to general services. They may also make bidding cheaper as they’re less popular than the head keywords that most vie for.

Invest in Comfort for the Caller

To make the most out of attorney-call ads, it’s important to keep your client’s comfort in mind. Most are familiar with frustrations wrought through calling large institutions like banks, for instance. Avoid long and confusing phone menus, and be sure to direct potential clients to the right location and customer service representative. This can even be personalized based on your keyword campaigns. 

It’s also a good idea to have a 24/7 answering machine in place. It’s also worthwhile to route calls to lawyers on standby during off-hours. Any potential client that’s calling at that time obviously requires urgent help, and it would be a wasted opportunity not to accept the call as soon as possible.

Monitor Everything about Your Calls

Lawyer call ads need to be properly monitored to improve bidding and increase ROI. Each call should be tracked back to its source to learn about the location of your customers and improve targeting. Third-party software and digital marketing companies can help to measure and manage these data sets.

You’ll want to know how many calls came through AdWords versus organic traffic, as well as which of those calls converted into leads so you can forecast bidding on specific keywords. While volume is commendable, the ultimate goal is to attract high-quality leads, which is why it’s critical to know how much monetary value each call converts to.

Experiment!

Algorithms and online client behavior constantly change, and so too should your call-only campaign. By that, we mean you should be open to running experiments like A/B testing to help further optimize your call-only campaigns. Google AdWords has built-in functionality for campaign testing. For accurate results, always let your experiments run for a few weeks and monitor them carefully to track changes.

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Conclusion

Pay-per-click is one of the most rewarding digital marketing strategies that require careful planning and constant monitoring. At Comrade Web, we’ll provide you with the best PPC ROI, whether you need to fine-tune an existing campaign or start from scratch. For the past 12 years, we’ve excelled at converting leads into sales through pay-per-click advertising. Click here to receive an obligation-free PPC & retargeting assessment.