PPC for lawyers – 12 Proven Steps to Dominate PPC and Succeed

PPC for lawyers is a powerful prospecting tool to help law firms reach new potential clients. While referrals remain a popular client acquisition method, digital advertising is quickly becoming a necessary player.

Pay-per-click (PPC) for lawyers is a paid digital marketing strategy where advertisers pay per action. In this case, when a visitor clicks on their ad. PPC marketing for lawyers often uses ad extensions like sitelinks and call extensions. The benefits of PPC advertising include targeted client acquisition, improved brand visibility, and maximizing brand reach.

In today’s digital-first world, PPC marketing for lawyers is more important than ever. Having your business appear on the search engine results page (SERP) doesn’t provide value if hidden amongst competitors. Read on to learn tips to boost your PPC for lawyers.

12 Steps to Setup the Perfect Campaign of PPC for Lawyers

1. Identify Target Audience

The first step to setting up the perfect PPC marketing for lawyers is identifying a target audience. Your target audience encompasses potential clientele likely to benefit from your product or services.

In this case, a strong target audience includes consumers searching for legal services. However, the target audience should dive even deeper than this. What is your niche?

Do you specialize in IP law for entrepreneurs, family law, or real estate law? Each of these target audiences encompasses very different client needs and expectations.

For the best ROI for your law firm’s PPC strategy, you should have a strong understanding of your target demographic. If you specialize in real estate law, you will likely include Realtors^®, brokers, and investors in your target audience.

This group shares commonalities that may benefit from your real estate law services. Serving this audience with pay-per-click advertising about family law services may see minimal returns.

2. Define Campaign Goals and KPIs

Before launching into PPC marketing for lawyers, sit down and define your campaign goals and KPIs.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) commonly tracked include the average click-through rate (CTR), quality score, and conversion rate. These KPIs help you gauge the performance of your paid search ads and optimize them for success. KPIs also help highlight any changes that may be necessary to optimize your return on investment.

However, the best KPIs align with your campaign goals and help you reach your personalized goals. For PPC for lawyers, your campaign goals may be to

3. Perform Keyword Research

Performing keyword research is an important step for PPC marketing for lawyers. This research identifies relevant keywords you should utilize to capture your target audience.  Utilize SEO tools like Semrush and SurferSEO to find the best keywords.

Your long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords help increase your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). While SEO optimizes your organic ratings, the same keyword research can benefit PPC for lawyers.

4. Analyze Competitors’ PPC Strategies

How are competitors incorporating pay-per-click advertising into their marketing strategy? An effective PPC competitive analysis answers this question.

A successful PPC marketing for lawyers strategy first identifies your competitors. The competitors are then analyzed using metrics like ad copy, keyword overlap, and ad budget.

Tools mentioned above, like Semrush, can aid in your competitor analysis.

5. Create Landing Pages Optimized for Conversion

Optimized search ads won’t convert without an optimized landing page. An optimized landing page makes it easy and efficient for prospective clients to register interest.

Registering interest can be subscribing to an email list, reaching out directly, or even following your social media accounts. General best practices for law firm web design include a clear call-to-action (CTA) and clean design.   

Ready to stand apart from competitors? Contact Mediaboom to discuss ways to optimize your website.

6. Set Up Google Ads or other PPC Platform Accounts

One of the best ways to run ads and track KPIs is through Google Ads. Google Ads is a popular online advertising platform to bid on keywords and run campaigns. Furthermore, Google Ads often utilizes other PPC platforms for a well-rounded digital advertising strategy.

Google PPC for lawyers provides valuable insight with measurable and trackable KPIs. Use Google Ads in conjunction with Google Analytics to see holistic performance details. 

With roughly three billion monthly active users, Facebook Ads are a powerful alternative to Google Ads. Facebook Ads offer robust targeting capabilities and, like Google Ads, are often used along with other ad platforms. Other PPC platform alternatives include Amazon Advertising and LinkedIn Ads.

7. Structure Campaigns and Ad Groups

While there are best practices for PPC for lawyers, there’s no cheat sheet for structuring your paid search campaign. An effective structure outlines the account, ad group, and keywords and redirects to an optimized landing page.

Ad groups are, just as they sound, a group of ads targeting the same keywords.They often highlight a similar theme and contribute to a shared conversion goal. Each campaign often includes one or more ad groups.   

A campaign structure should directly serve your ad groups and campaign goals. This means there is often not a one-size-fits-all approach.

8. Choose Targeting Options

Targeting options allow you to specify the preferred location, devices, and languages for your target clientele.

1. Location – Location targeting allows you to target specific geographical locations. If you are licensed to practice law in certain states, you’ll want to only target those specific states. This ensures you aren’t paying to target people with a low likelihood of converting to clients.

2. Devices – Device targeting allows you to target people based on the device they’re using. Popular devices include mobile, computers, and tablets. However, device targeting can also extend to TV streaming devices.

3. Language – Language barriers can be tricky. Thankfully, language targeting allows you to target one or more language groups. This way, your ad is only shown to people who frequently engage with content in that language.

Note: It is important to keep in mind that Google may place limits on certain demographic targets. For PPC for lawyers, these policy violations extend to household income targeting and other sensitive interest categories.

9. Set Budget and Bidding Strategy

Stastica projects that digital marketing spending worldwide will reach nearly $850 billion by 2027. Of that $850 billion, search ads make up the largest percentage at $389 billion.

With fierce competition bidding for your target audience, it is imperative to have a PPC strategy in place. The strategy includes proper budgeting.

PPC budgeting is an important step to optimize your bidding strategy without overstraining your budget. By setting a budget, you can effectively outline expectations and define your bidding strategy.

A bidding strategy focuses specifically on utilizing the allocated budget to maximize returns. Popular bidding strategies include maximizing clicks, conversions, or conversion value.

10. Implement Ad Extensions

Simply put—ad extensions quite literally extend the impact of your search ads. Ad extensions like sitelinks and call extensions are a powerful way to maximize PPC for lawyers.

Sitelinks sweeten the deal for your conversion rate. This is because sitelinks offer direct links to various pages on your website, not just your landing page. Common pages with sitelinks for law firm PPC include “Contact Us” and “Meet the Team” pages.

On the other hand, call extensions include a click-to-call link to dial. Call extensions increase your conversion rate because prospective clients don’t have to search for your contact information.

Other ad extensions include location extensions, seller rating extensions, and callout extensions. Dive into ad extensions to see how they can give you a greater bang for your buck.

11. Install Conversion Tracking and Analytics

Conversion tracking is a valuable tool for assessing overall ad performance. Thankfully, there are several tools that make conversion tracking easier than ever.

Google Tag is a popular conversion tracking tool that allows you to easily track conversion activities. These activities often include things like sign-ups and form submissions. Google Analytics or other tools receive this activity data in the form of Tags. With direct integration with Google Analytics, there is limited room for guesswork—allowing you to make informed decisions for your business.

Thanks to pay-per-click advertising, a website refresh, and SEO, Runway Growth Capital increased online leads by 136.2%. Ready to take your client prospecting to the next level? MediaBoom provides PPC services for lawyers to lead your business to success.

12. Launch PPC Campaigns

Are you ready to launch your PPC for lawyers campaign? Once you’ve defined your goals, set bids, and determined your budget, it is time to officially launch your campaign. It is important that each of these pieces is optimized.

Keep in mind launching your campaign does not mean the work is over. You should still assess real-time data, A/B tests, and more to gauge conversion and other important metrics.

5 Tips to Boost Your PPC for Lawyers

1. Optimize Quality Score

A quality score is issued by Google to rank the relevance of your ad. An optimized quality score considers your keywords, ad text, and overall ad quality. This data then determines your cost per click (CPC). Optimize your quality score by selecting keywords that align with your targeted ad group.

2. A/B Testing for Ads and Landing Pages

A/B testing ads is a great way to maximize your ROI—think of it like an experiment. Thankfully, platforms like Google Ads make it easy to effectively A/B test your search ads. A/B effectively tests your ads and landing pages, allowing you to compare two ad versions. Variables such as ad images, text, imagery, and audience differ between the ads.

3. Monitor Performance Metrics

When employing PPC marketing for lawyers, you should continuously monitor performance metrics like CTR, CPC, and conversion rate. By staying on top of these metrics, you are ready to make informed decisions and pivot to optimize performance.

CTR (click-through rate) divides the number of clicks your ad received by the impressions.

CPC (cost per click) is the monetary component to determine how much an advertiser pays based on each action. In this case, that action is when a visitor clicks on your ad. 

Finally, your conversion rate tells you how many visitors actually converted. To find the conversion rate, divide the number of visitors who took the desired action by the total impressions. 

Ready to take your performance metrics to the next level? Contact us to discuss our PPC services for lawyers.

4. Adjust Bids and Budgets to Maximize ROI

As mentioned above, monitoring performance metrics in real time is important. This is because you should be ready to adjust bids and budgets at any time to maximize ROI.

Bid adjustments allow you to simply adjust your bid at any time based on real-time performance. For instance, if your data shows that a specific campaign performs better on desktop versus mobile. Or, if a specific geographical location is seeing higher conversions. You can take this data and adjust your bid to reflect this new adjustment.

In turn, bid adjustments help to maximize ROI. By optimizing performance, you are creating powerful opportunities for conversions.

Qazi Cosmetic Clinic offers a prime example of successful strategic paid advertising campaigns. The campaign maximized ROI and saw a 207.4% increase in conversions.

5. Expand Keyword List

Similarly to bid adjustments, you can also adjust your original keyword list based on performance and opportunities. It is important to continue adding keywords to avoid stagnation and stay relevant.

By adding new keywords to a campaign, you are creating opportunities for further growth. In turn, this means better conversion rates and potentially more profit. Analyzing your competitors’ PPC strategies is a great way to expand your keyword list.

Note: Be sure to incorporate data-driven decision-making when deciding which keywords to expand upon. Free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner are a great alternative to more expensive keyword tools.

PPC Management for Lawyers

PPC management for lawyers is more important than ever. In fact, it works in tandem with an optimized website to acquire new clientele.

Ready to incorporate PPC marketing for lawyers into your digital strategy? Connect with an expert at Mediaboom to optimize your strategy.