June 26, 2009

Law Firm Pay Per Click - Why Your Firm Hasn't Been Successful

by David Wolf

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! You can be better than the competition. The sad truth about law firms and most business when it comes to marketing online is that they try to do it for themselves. Someone in the office says "We should be marketing online, lets try adsense." Everyone says its a great idea and they give it a shot. The problem is, it isn't that easy. Here is why.

In your right mind would ever recommend a client represent themselves in court with little or no court experience? Why not? You would not do that because you know that regardless of how smart that person is, they have no court experience or expertise. This is something that requires years of experience to master. A rocket scientist may be smarter than you but they do not know that asking to dismiss a piece of evidence because the paper work wasn't filed properly was even an option.

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.

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 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.

The implications of this is that your can pay more for your clicks if you have to. Up to double what you would have paid before and still have the same or better results. You may even be able to increase the advertising budget because of its effectiveness. We have comprised a list of several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns.

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 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: 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.

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