8 Tips for Maximizing Your Law Firm’s Pay-Per-Click Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a powerful way to reach clients who are searching for exactly the kind of help your law firm provides.

But to play off a popular quote: With great targeting power comes great responsibility.

You need to think very carefully about the experience your potential client has online. After they click, you must lead them seamlessly down a path where they wanted – and expected – to go.

That’s when you turn them from potential clients into actual clients.

But how do you do that?

Firmidable gathered the latest insights from the 2017 Hero Conference in Los Angeles, a gathering of more than 500 digital advertising professionals. They shared statistics, tools and strategies for getting the most out of your PPC campaigns.

Here are 8 of the top PPC tips:

1. Keep the path to conversion clear. When your ad successfully catches their eye, your potential clients follow you to your landing page. On your landing page, you should tell them a compelling story. But always give them a direct path to contacting you.

Do you like to dig endlessly for simple answers and help online? No. Your clients don’t either. Make your form and phone number prominent, clear, and concise. Don’t let your contact information get lost in all the words on the page.

2. Optimize for mobile. No excuses. With the rise of mobile internet searches — including voice searches — your website and paid search landing pages need to be mobile responsive, or at least very mobile-friendly.

All the experts at the Hero Conference — marketing agencies, digital vendors, Google, Bing and Facebook — agreed on one thing: Mobile optimization is essential for growing your firm.

Not optimized for mobile? Your potential client just hit the back button on their phone because your landing page didn’t effortlessly scale to their device.

3. Empathize, then optimize. One thing PPC ads have in common with every other form of marketing is that you engage your clients by echoing their needs, symptoms and pain points. You do this through your copy and photos.

Put yourself in their shoes. Then identify yourself as the solution they need. If you have any pages with a low conversion rate, a high rate of people bouncing away or content that’s just overwhelming or confusing, revise the copy.

4. Coordinate marketing channels with cohesive writing and design. Your paid search ad copy must match your paid search landing page. Check your wording carefully.

And review your photography and visual theme across all forms of marketing. Does your firm come across as a consistent brand? Your TV ads should match your website. Are the look and tone the same?

It’s all about consistency. You want potential clients to easily recognize that you are the same lawyer they saw somewhere else.

5. Link to Google Maps using Google My Business. Google Maps are a great, free way to promote your law firm. You can greatly increase your chance of showing up in the maps that appear on top of search results — giving extra prominence to the fortunate firms that make the cut — using the Google My Business platform to link to Google Maps.

Have your digital account manager review your location settings in Google AdWords —the platform for managing your PPC ads on Google — to make sure you’re taking advantage of this.

6. Don’t discount Bing. We all hear a lot about Google. But we learned at the Hero Conference that one out of every three internet searches takes place on Bing — the search engine run by Microsoft.

If you’re only running a Google Paid Search campaign now, test out Bing Paid Search by starting a three-month campaign with them. If the results are good, keep going and capturing new leads.

7. Help solve the need “near you.” Many people now search for services “near me.” Or they search for services by naming a particular location.

Voice searches — on platforms like Google, Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana or Amazon’s Alexa — are helping increase the popularity of location-based searches. So make sure you optimize for your location.

One way is to take advantage of radius targeting in Google AdWords. You can deliver a direct message to a certain designated area with targeted ad copy.

If you’re a local law firm, bid on keywords including geographic indicators such as neighborhoods, cities and even zip codes.

Examples: Uptown New Orleans personal injury law firm, Cook County disability lawyer, worker’s comp attorney 40509.

This way you help people who are near you — find you.

8. Get social. A huge segment of digital users are in one place: Facebook. In fact, 25% of all the time people spend online is spent on Facebook’s platforms. So try out Facebook ads, which can drive people to your website.

Better yet, build a strategy that combines paid search ads, social media ads like on Facebook and search engine optimization techniques. That mix produces the best results, according to recent studies discussed at the Hero Conference.

While you’re at it, you can also beef up your social media presence. At a law firm, you could promote your firm’s community involvement, high-profile legal wins, staff accomplishments and more.
It takes a lot of time and expertise to implement digital strategies like these. At Firmidable, our skilled team is ready to help you secure your place as a leading law firm online.

Firmidable is a multi-channel marketing agency and consultancy for law firms. We know more than anyone else about how Americans choose their lawyers. If you’d like to grow your legal practice, call (504) 525-0932 or contact us via e-mail.