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

If you want to extend your brand reach and bolster your SEO efforts, we recommend using the PPC service for lawyers. Paid search ads or pay-per-click ads are pretty much what they sound like: they are ads you pay for when someone clicks on them. With that being said, getting those clicks and turning them into actual paying clients isn’t always easy. As one of the top Chicago legal marketing agencies, we use the right tools to help you target your ideal clients and create a strong advertising message, which will communicate your expertise, credibility, and previous results that in return will inspire future clients to act.

How PPC Marketing for Law Firms Works

The formula is:

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

Keywords and Key Phrases

Building your campaigns on the correct keywords and key phrases can make a massive difference in how they perform and how much they cost you.

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).
   
   Let’s explain that with an example. If your competitor’s ad gets X amount of clicks and your ad gets 2X amount of clicks, Google will slowly start to adjust the CPC of both ads until your competitor pays twice the price per click that you pay. Because Google always finds a way to take the money for that top position they auctioned, one way or another. So now you and your competitor have the same overall PPC cost, only you have twice as many leads as he does.
2. 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 they 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.

How many clients you can convert — or your conversion rate — depends mainly on the effectiveness of your website. Most websites for lawyers convert about 2.09% of visitors, and most PPC ads get 2.2% – 2.4% click-through-rate, or CTR, which is a ratio of how many of the people who have seen your ad have clicked on it.

So let’s put these percentages in an example. 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.

Retargeting

Let’s say a potential client visits your page, reads it and leaves. Does it mean he or she is lost forever? No, it doesn’t. In fact, most people don’t take action right away. This is why we re-target them — this means that, for a while, they’ll see banner ads of your company all over the internet: various websites, Facebook and other social media platforms, you name it.

This keeps your company on the top of their mind so that when they are ready to take action, they contact you.

A huge benefit of retargeting is that the clicks on retargeting ads cost a small fraction of what the initial click costs. So if you’ve paid $100 for the first click, you could be paying $0.15 per click on retargeting campaigns.

Of course, you don’t retarget people forever. The best way to decide how long your retargeting campaigns should run is to base it on the specific service you offer. If someone is looking for elderly law, for example, it could take them a while to take action, so you could set up your campaigns to 90 days. If someone needs a criminal defense lawyer, however, it’s probably a more pressing issue, so you could set the time frame to 30 days or even 2 weeks.

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.

Comrade is a Chicago-based digital marketing company that specializes in website design and marketing for attorneys. Reach out for a free no-obligation consultation, and we can start customizing the ideal PPC strategy for your law firm.