PPC Advertising for Law Firms | Pay-Per-Click

Importance of PPC Advertising

Steve Long here from Precision Legal Marketing. Today we’re going to talk about PPC or Pay-Per-Click Marketing for Law Firms. For one, it drives general traffic to your website when you put up a brand new website. For two, it’s probably one of the number one sources of lead generation you can do as an attorney to bring new clients into your law firm.

Let’s first talk about your website. Many people don’t know but building a website is like building a building in the middle of a forest. It has no roads to it, you can’t see it from the main road. So PPC or Pay-Per-Click Marketing is a really good way to drive traffic to it when you first put it live.

Google, Bing and Yahoo

As far as lead generation goes it doesn’t get much better than PPC. You can target your audience, you can target your geography and you can set a budget so that you don’t go over it. So you’re asking yourself where is PPC Marketing? Well I want you to go to Google, Yahoo, Bing, or your favorite search engine and go ahead and type in a phrase like active voice lawyers or attorney or lawyers and take a look at what you see.

Market Share

The ads on the top and the right side are PPC. Those are ads that you can place again in any geography looking for any audience with any set budget. As far as which one of those three are better, well Google has the lion share of the marketing with about 70% of all search traffic. As far as Yahoo or Bing they’ve got about 30% combine.

What most people don’t know is when you place ads with Yahoo and Bing you’re actually using one source to do so. With Google being more expensive as a solution, Yahoo or Bing is a good way to hit a large target market without breaking the bank. So cost differences, let’s tackle that.

How Much Does PPC Cost?

Google is going to cost you about 30% more to run ads on, but there are tons of tricks even if you have a small budget. Yahoo and Bing really is a good place to start if you have a smaller budget. But let’s not leave out Google. Let’s say you’re really ready to go for it and you want to capture the most search traffic that you possibly can to your website. The single place to start is Google AdWords.

How to Setup Your PPC Campaign

No matter whether it’s Google, Yahoo or Bing when you set up your campaign I want you to start using tightly controlled geography settings. Do not use regions around cities because that really doesn’t give you the type of control that you’re looking for. What I want you to think about doing is going in and set up actual city zip codes.

When it comes to setting a bidding parameters, no matter how tempting it maybe do not use manual bidding. Set everything up for automatic, this is really important. When selecting keywords, make sure you use the ones called Broad Match. They have quotations one either side of them. That’s going to tightly control where your money is spent. Let’s talk about expectations guys.

Expectations

You’re never going to see your ads at the top of the searches all of the time. It’s just not going to happen, it’s not possible. The other big thing to note is it’s probably going to take between five and ten clicks to actually get a case or an intake in your door. The other thing I want you to realize is you’re going to need to get very good at reading reports and using the AdWord system. That includes looking at things like click through ratios, keyword reports, search general reports and a whole other host of reports that are going to help you run your campaign. That’s it for now. Steve Long from Precision Legal Marketing. (757) 561-6811 or leave me some comments below and let me know what you think.