Law PPC – Why Your Firm Hasn’t Been Successful
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?
The simple answer is to be better than your competition. Of course gaining those skills can take a PPC marketer years and a lot of money to be able to compete. Most legal firms decide to do there PPC internally. Often times someone suggested they need to start marketing online and mentioned google and everyone came to the consensus of adsense. The trouble is it doesn’t work out to be so easy, and you are wasting your firms marketing budget. This might be a solution.
Would you recommend that a defendant represent himself in court? Why not? Because no matter how smart they are, law, and being effective in a court room is something that requires years of experience and specific knowledge to become good at. A physhics professor may be smarter than you, but he does not know how to object when a prosecutor makes an unsubstantiated claim.
What your firm should be doing is getting an expert in the field of PPC to manage the campaign for you. The reason is the same reason a PPC expert should hire a lawyer for law advice. PPC marketers spend years honing their skills to stay competitive. Most likely you are competing against them right now if you are advertising online, and you are at a huge disadvantage. Normally a good PPC management firm would charge 15% of your marketing budget + an hourly rate to do the the testing, tweaking, and research. This is not set in stone and is merely an industry average of sorts. Often times other arrangements are made.
A good PPC expert can more than make up for the 15% budget fee. This is because they know what keywords to target, and which ones not to. They also know how to get higher in the rankings without paying more. They also know how to attract only those customers that you want to click on the ads.
This means several things. First, you will improve the mother of all PPC metrics, cost per conversion. The means that your ratio of clicks to conversions will most likely improve, or your cost per click will lower meaning you will have a lower cost per conversion. Usually it is both. This is very good thing. Imagine you have a budget of $10000 per month, and you are currently getting 3000 clicks to your page. That means your are paying $3.33 per click. From that you are getting 100 leads. that is $100 per lead, or 3.3% conversion. If you could make that 6.6% you will have double the leads and your cost per lead is now $50.
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.
Optimizing your landing pages for the keywords you are targeting is extremely important. If you are targeting clients for emergency room malpractice, you want to point them to a page on your site specifically about malpractice law and not your main page. The more specific and relevant you can get the page the better.
Success is all about the testing. Few campaigns are profitable right out of the gate. The key is test every variable. Test dozens of ad variations, test small groups of keywords individually. Keep the best performer through out the others, and test the best performer against a new set of ads.
Analytics makes or breaks the campaign. You cant test properly without a solid analytics program. Without great analytics you cannot tell which words are converting to the desired result, and which ones are eating you budget.
Keyword research is how you determine which keywords to target in the first place. If you do proper keyword research before you even begin an internet marketing campaign, your success rate compared to not doing the research will be astronomical. It is the foundation of all internet marketing.
