5 PPC Tips to Help You Save Money & Drive Leads to Your Law Firm

In the ultra-competitive world of law firm digital marketing, Google pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a powerful way to reach your clients. They allow you to reach people that are searching for the exact kind of help that your law firm provides. 

Even better, with PPC ads, you don’t need to have been a long player in the game. Regardless of whether you set up your law firm last week, last month or last year, you can achieve instant results with Google Ads. 

But just as it is competitive, law firm digital marketing can be very expensive. In fact, PPC ad campaigns are some of the most expensive when it comes to law firms. 

Despite this, your law firm can make the most of Google Ads, even on a shoestring budget and while competing against larger firms with deeper pockets. You can reach your targets and reap massive ROI so long as your campaign is set up correctly. 

To help you do that, we’ve put together this list of 5 tips you can implement today to save your law firm money and drive leads. Let’s get in. 

#1: Carefully Select Your Keywords

Since you’re basically paying for keywords that let your firm show up for someone’s query, it makes sense to think carefully about this one. You have to ensure that you’re targeting the right keywords. If you’re not, you could be trying to get in on an oversaturated market for keywords you will never rank for. 

It’s best to start out searching out the best keywords for your campaign by using Google’s Keyword Planner. With this tool, you can find keywords that are relevant to your firm. It also gives you suggested starting bids for each keyword so you can plan within your budget.

There are some things you should keep in mind when choosing and optimizing your keywords:

• Go for long tail keywords. Compared to single-word keywords like “attorney” or “lawyer”, search volumes for long tail keywords are lower. But they can also convert better because they are highly specific. With these keywords, anyone searching for those terms will be more likely to make a buying decision. Besides, they’re cheaper. Example: “Arizona Medical Malpractice Lawyer” or “Detroit Criminal Defense Attorney“
• Optimize your keywords for local search. Even if you wanted to, you cannot possibly service the entire world. By limiting your keywords to a specific region, you make it more likely that whoever sees your ad will be willing to buy. And you save money on all those clicks from someone all the way on the other side of the world. 
• To further refine the specificity of your keywords, it makes sense to implement negative keywords. These are set of keywords that you really don’t want to rank for. Using a negative keyword generator like Kparser or Negative Keyword Pro can show you the negative keywords that you could rank for based on your chosen keyword. You can then add these as no-go areas for the campaign. You especially want to target the names of competing attorneys in your area.

#2: Segment Your Campaigns

The greatest benefit of a Google Ads campaign is it matches you exactly with your preferred client. But it won’t do that all by itself. By segmenting your campaign to be as specific as possible, you can increase the relevance and quality or your ad. 

First thing you can do here is to create a Single Keyword Ad Group (SKAG). This allows you target exact, broad and phrase matches for the keyword you wish to rank for. For instance, if you were targeting “family divorce lawyer”, the exact, phrase and broad matches will be as follows: 

• Exact match: Ranks your ad when the query is exactly “family lawyer Boston”. 
• Phrase match: Ranks your ad when the query contains the phrase “family lawyer Boston”. 
• Broad match: Ranks your ad when the query contains variations of the words “family” + “lawyer” + “Boston”.  *You have to be very careful with braod match because google will match any search that has one of your words in it. For example: “What is the best day for a “family” dinner?”. Google will see the word “family” and try to match it up to the searcher.

This ensures that your ad can rank across these variations of the keyword. But to really make this work, you need to have different ad groups for specific keywords. This also enables you track conversion statistics easier and tweak things where necessary. 

Second thing you can do here is segment your campaign by practice area. This works especially well if you offer several practice areas or work in several fields within one practice area. For instance, if your practice area is criminal law, you can have ad groups for white collar crimes, sexual crimes, robbery etc. 

#3: Speak To The Searcher – “Be the Solution to Their Problem” 

No matter how well-set up your ads are, you won’t get much success if you’re not speaking to a specific need. You need to engage your prospects by touching directly on their symptoms, needs or pain points. When the prospect reads your ad, they should be able to see immediately that you can solve their problems. 

How do you do this? If you have done your keyword research well enough, you’ll know what people want and why they want them. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and identify yourself as the solution that they need. Do this and you can rest assured that those who need will find you. 

It’s just as important to be consistent in your value proposition. Don’t let your ad promise “Contingency fee basis – No fees unless you win!” and then have that go missing on your landing pages. If it’s in your ad, then your prospects should be able to find it within 2-3 seconds of getting on to your landing page. And speaking about landing pages… 

#4: Create and Optimize Dedicated Landing Pages 

Too many times, we have seen law firms make the error of linking their Google Ads to their website homepage. Don’t do it. That’s a very bad idea. 

Here’s why. Google Ads functions as the very tip of your sales funnel as a law firm. It helps you bring in people that are interested in what you’re doing and might be willing to hire you. That’s why Google Ads on search results pages are called intent marketing.

When they click your ad, they should ideally be going deeper into your already carefully created sales tunnel. They should see a dedicated landing page that improves and expands on the message in the ad, with every single piece of copy pulling the prospect towards a conversion. 

But leaving just your homepage as the link on your ad operates more like a sales wall, because those prospects will be bouncing off faster than you can count. To ensure that prospects make the right decision and move deeper into your sales funnel, make sure you have landing pages primed to accomplish this. 

Important tip: Do not maintain a single landing page for all your ads. That’s extremely wrong. Have dedicated landing pages for all your ad groups and optimize these based on location as well. 

#5: Solve Local Needs with Geo-Targeting

You need to recognize that online search is going local. Almost half of all Google’s 3.5 billion a day searches are local and 74% of those that make a local search buy something that same day. 

Refining your Google Ad campaign to be location-specific ensures that you can make the most on queries within your immediate vicinity. To set up geo-targeting on your campaign, go to “Settings” on your Google Ads dashboard. Select the campaign you wish to modify and then click on “Locations”. You’ll be able to set a radius within which your ad will operate. 

This will eventually save you money on your overall ad spend and ensure that only the highest quality leads find their way to your website. 

Conclusion

Done right, your Google Ads campaign can make a significant difference in your law firm’s bottom line. But to ensure this is the case, you need to make sure you’re constantly refining and optimizing for best results. If you have any questions regarding your Google Ads PPC Campaigns please give me a shout.

Client Testimonial about Google PPC

“Without the help of Bill, I can safely say that my firm wouldn’t be where it is today. I’m thrilled that my phones are starting to ring with possible new cases and my rankings are up across Google. One area Bill helped with immensely was with my Google Ads account. It’s so easy to spend money on Google Ads and not get the return you hope for, but Bill has helped me create Ad campaigns that are generating good traffic to my website without blowing a hole in my budget. I look forward to working with Bill and continuing to grow my firm. I can’t recommend him and his services enough.”

–Sam Bennett (The Bennett Law Firm, Metro Detroit Criminal Defense Attorney)