As a law firm or independent lawyer, determining where to spend you online marketing budget can be a daunting task. You have so many options, and are competing in a very competitive field. Each click could possibly be a new client eventually worth thousands or hundreds of thousands to the firm. With that kind of value on the line you can bet that firms are willing to pay whatever they have to, to be seen. Is there anything you can do to get the edge?
Yes! All you have to do is be better than everyone else. Or higher someone who is better than everyone else to do it for you. Most law firms do there online marketing for themselves. Usually someone in the office mention Pay Per Click or google and the next thing you know the firm is pouring money down the adsense drain. Here is why.
Would you ever even consider telling a client to represent themselves in a court of law? Of course not. Forget about the fact the your law firm would not get paid and focus simply on the fact that they do not know what they are doing. When they go up against an experienced prosecutor, they do not stand a chance. Even a Neurosurgeon, as smart as they are, does not have the necessary skills or experience to compete in the at realm.
By now I am sure you have figured out the important point that I am getting at. You need to have someone on your team that specializes in Pay Per Click advertising running you campaign. The reason is that it works. Specialist devote years perfecting strategies to get the maximum return and effectiveness out of a Pay Per Click campaign. While you were in law school, they were in PPC school, or the school of hard knocks learn by trial. The industry standard for a service such as PPC management is about 15% of your total ad budget, and a set hourly fee to create, manage, and tweak the campaign. It is not always structured like this, but this gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect when looking for Law PPC help.
Why is that worth 15%? A good firm or specialist will know what keywords to target, and which ones waste your money. They now all the tricks to get you more relevancy so your ads cost less, and they know how to right ads that attract the right people, and get the wrong people to ignore them.
This translates in to higher conversions per clicks, and only paying for the clicks that are getting conversions. Sounds like a good thing right. Because it is. A very good thing. Imagine what would happen if you were spending $5000 a month in PPC advertising online, and you could increase your conversion from getting leads from 10 clients a month, to getting leads from 20 clients per month. That is huge.
That means that you can pay more for successful clicks, and possible even increase your advertising budget because it is so successful. Below are several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns. If you are outsourcing to a firm or specialist, they should know these facts inside and out.
Optimized landing pages are key when it comes to ppc. Instead of sending a client to your main website, send them to a page designed specifically to target them. If your are targeting motorcycle injury clients, have a page of information related to that topic, and ask for their information there. You will get a higher relevancy rank. More on that in a minute
Testing is crucial to the long term success of a PPC campaign. Almost no campaign is successful right off the back. You have to test parameters against one another to see what is effective and what isn’t. It is different every time. In general a PPC campaign should become more and more successful as time goes by.
Analytics is the most important piece of any internet marketing. Without it you do not know who is click where, or where your conversions are coming from. This is how you find out which words are being effective and which ones are not. This will let you know where to spend your money.
Keyword Research: You want to find out what your target market is searching for, and how much competition there is. You also want to know the strength of the keywords commercial intent. This means is the person using that word in the discovery phase of the decision cycle, the comparison phase, or the action phase. Start by marketing to the action phased words first. That way you can save on clicks from 15 year old mesothelioma research reports.