What happens when something unexpected happens? What if there is a huge product recall, like the Toyota sudden acceleration problem and subsequent recall or the Vioxx claims a few years ago? Unless you can predict the future, your site probably didn’t contain a lot of information about Toyota or Vioxx before they were all over the news. Since it can sometimes take months to get rankings for any given topic, you need a faster way to get visibility while the topic is still hot.  That is where pay per click advertising comes in.

Several Internet avenues are available to obtain law firm cases.  Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is an effective way to get quick visibility in search engines and some websites, without having to build up your SEO presence for months. The downside to PPC is that every visitor you receive from it costs you money. That is the “pay” part in the phrase “pay per click.” That means that you are paying search engines or websites to put your ad up so that people will click it to visit your website.  It is important to note that pay per click advertising does not have any impact on organic rankings, and you only gain visibility as long as you are paying. Ads can run from a few cents to e.g., $50 to $70 per click for competitive phrases such as “mesothelioma.”  While eighty percent of Web users choose organically SEO’d listings, the remaining twenty percent is still significant.

You should first ask yourself “what kind of traffic do we need?” and from there you can decide if it is the kind of traffic you can easily search engine optimize (SEO) for over a long period of time, or if it is something you need to rank quickly for in the case of recalls or other types of cases that require immediate visibility. PPC is almost always more expensive on a per visit basis than SEO. PPC will only give you visibility while you continue to pay. SEO on the other hand, will always give you a leg up on the competition, and is an investment that you can continue to build upon so that you keep up with competitors. Some compare PPC to renting an apartment and organic rankings to owning a home.  The work you have done to create a quality relevant site never goes away as long as your site still exists.

Thousands of individuals and companies claim to be able to manage PPC campaigns.  Choosing the wrong organization can cost you thousands of dollars.

Qualities and factors you should consider include:

1.       Control costs while working within your budget to give you the best possible cost per click.

2.       Relevant ads are what will get visitors to click and visit your site. They are also important for quality score, which has an effect on your cost per click and positioning.

3.       Choosing the Right Keywords is very important to the success of your ad campaign.

4.       Geographic Control of your ad campaign is very important and should be discussed with your PPC management company.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these components below.

Control Costs: We have heard about law firms that have lost tens of thousands of dollars on poorly designed PPC campaigns.  PPC can get expensive quickly, which is one of the reasons it is important to have a good pay per click management company to watch things for you. A good PPC manager will have the experience to watch your account and make adjustments to your campaigns over time to control costs. Be sure to work out a budget with your PPC manager that is appropriate for your geographic area and the type of advertising you are doing.

Relevant Ads: Ad relevance is very important for your marketing efforts in PPC.  Ad text should be relevant to your goal, and should contain keywords when possible. Keywords should be constructed in a way that makes sense to readers, not just a string of random words. Usually there is not enough space for complete sentences, but the message should be clear. A good PPC manager will also create more than one ad for each ad group, because Google will show both ads, allowing you to test which one gets the most activity.

Choosing the Right Keywords:  Keywords are extremely important when starting and maintaining a PPC campaign. Every time your ad shows, this is called an “impression” and if you have too many impressions and not enough clicks, it will decrease your quality score. This can happen if your keywords are too broad and your ad is showing every time someone searches for a phrase containing “lawyer” or an equally broad keyword.  If the keyword choices are too broad, this can quickly decrease your ad quality score and drop your ad out of sight. Keywords should not be very broad, but should instead focus on what you are trying to achieve. For example, if you are trying to get victims of medical malpractice to visit your site, you might choose a keyword like “surgical error lawyer” or something similar. If you chose a broad keyword like “lawyer” you would be getting a great deal of ad views from people looking for family lawyers, divorce lawyers, and all other types of lawyers. They are not going to click on your medical malpractice ad, and Google will soon decide that your ad is irrelevant and get rid of it. It is extremely important to have a keyword strategy in mind when developing a campaign.

Geographic Control: When advertising online, it is important to understand your target audience. As an attorney you may not have a license to practice law in states other than the state where your practice is located. You may be a small firm that wants to deal directly with people only in your local area. When setting up a campaign, it is important to decide the best geographic area for your ads based upon your goals and budget. A good pay per click management firm will help you decide on an area that fits your firm’s location and budget while still meeting your advertising needs.

Other Considerations

Mobile Users
As smart phones become more common, many people are accessing the web from their mobile devices. It can sometimes pay to target these devices for your campaign. For example, if someone were in a car accident, they may start searching for an attorney right away from their phone. If they see your ad, they are one touch away from calling your firm and becoming a potential client.  When asked about the growing mobile market and how it relates to search advertising, Google’s Senior Product Manager for Ads Quality, Nick Fox, stated “The big thing we found on Android is how the “click to call” feature has taken off. You click the ad and make a call and speak directly to the advertiser. It works incredibly well on the mobile phone.”

Strategic PPC Ads

Supplemental organic campaigns can be combined with strategically placed PPC ads and other law firm marketing areas. A niche area, especially when combined with a locale, can provide a cost-effective method  to obtain exposure and inquiries.  Additionally, some of our clients wish to have a dominant SEO presence and also appear prominently in PPC ads.  This increases the chance that they will receive inquiries.

Social Media Ads

Other websites, including social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn offer pay per click ads.  Facebook is now the most visited website on the Web and receives more monthly traffic than even Google.com. Your pay per click consultant can advise you on how to leverage Facebook and other websites in order to gain relevant visibility for your firm. Facebook allows you to target ads based upon demographics.  You can target by different demographics such as age, sex, marital status, geographic location, and any likes or jobs that the person has entered. This could be helpful if you are a workers’ compensation attorney interested in construction site injuries, for example, because you can target construction workers with your ads. A good pay per click management company will utilize all of the tools at its disposal to get you the best visibility based on your budget and needs.

Law Firm Competition

If you would like to see the phrases other law firms or your competition are using, feel free to contact us or  choose one of the several “PPC spy” programs that are available in a Google search.

For Additional Information

In addition to law firm SEO management, Consultwebs has managed law firm PPC campaigns totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past few years.  We use sophisticated reporting systems and keep our clients informed on the progress of their campaigns.  We can provide numerous references.  To learn more about PPC advertising or obtain assistance with your PPC campaign and goals, please contact us at marketing@consultwebs.com or 800-872-6590.

Choosing A Reliable Pay Per Click Company For Your Law Firm | Law Firm Web Marketing

For most users, the Basic reading level will probably be too low, but this level might be great when looking for information for children (Google gives the example of reading material for elementary school classrooms).  The Advanced reading level might be on the opposite end of the spectrum, much too complex for your average reader. Discussions about complex scientific processes or websites containing a lot of unusual or advanced terminology will likely be meant for a very niche audience of people searching specifically for this type of dialogue.  As a law firm, you want to reach a large audience and convey your message, while still sounding authoritative about the types of litigation you handle. For this reason you should ideally target the Intermediate reading level.

Most of our law firm website content is written at the intermediate level to reach the large majority of readers. We want to convey information in an informative way, while demonstrating expertise in the subject matter to the reader. Some sites get carried away and become too advanced in their content, becoming Advanced level reading material. This type of writing is useful at times, but you want to be careful not to alienate your readers.  If you filter results by the various reading levels, you will notice that your site may not appear in some reading levels. Take a look at some of the pages on your site that rank for a given term in Google, and then try to filter them by reading level to see where you stand.

For example, if we do a search on “Truck Accident Lawyer” and open the advanced search area to change the reading level, we will get different results for the various reading levels.  One of our clients does not appear for the Basic and Advanced reading levels for that search, but they rank very well within the Intermediate level search.

(Click the thumbnail to the left for a better view.)

This is exactly where we want them to appear. The Intermediate level shows our readers expertise without alienating them by using complex terminology.

Obviously there will be exceptions to writing at this level. Some content will be intrinsically complex and using complex terms and concepts can’t be avoided.  Some pages might have a very simple function and serve only a basic need on your site and may end up on the Basic reading level (“thank you” pages, or pages with very little content for example). Generally the Intermediate reading level is what you should strive for when developing content for your website to reach the most users and achieve the best rankings.

Google & Reading Level: Develop Content That Informs Without Overwhelming | Law Firm Web Marketing

This is generally useful because if you go searching for “Chinese Takeout” you don’t want results for Anchorage, Alaska if you live in say, Palm Beach, Florida.  But we run into problems when you have a business that operates in multiple locations (like many large law firms do).  So if you have a branch of your firm in Florida, but you are working in the Texas office, you would have a hard time seeing how well you rank in that geographic area without adding some specific geographic keywords, and even then you may not be getting a very clear picture.  Well those days are behind us.

Google recently announced on their blog that you can now control your location with the click of a button (ok it’s a couple of clicks, you have to expand the left side menu first, but it’s easy!).  Now you can be in the Florida office, and still check to see what someone in Austin, Texas would see when they search for “Car Accident Lawyer” or “Neck Injuries From Large Cowboy Hats” thus ensuring that your results are regionally specific and you are seeing what a local will see when they search.

How to Travel Anywhere Instantly Without Even Getting Out of Your Chair | Law Firm Web Marketing

Many experienced law firms stay ahead of the game by keeping their ear to the tracks, to see if they can hear the next big case coming. Maybe they check CNN or their favorite news outlet on a daily basis for drug recalls, or food poisoning stories, but there is an even easier way to keep up with relevant web content and the latest recalls. I’m talking about Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is not new, but it is certainly underutilized. It’s a free tool that lets you receive emails showing you new results on a given topic. For example, let’s say you are an attorney that takes food recall cases and defends clients who were poisoned by those foods. You might set up a Google Alert on “Food Recall” or “Food Poisoning” and have those new results emailed to you when they become available. So now, instead of browsing several news sites each day trying to stay on top of the latest recalls, you can just check your alerts via email and see all the relevant new content on that subject.

OK, so now you have the alerts set up. What do you do with them? You stay ahead of the competition of course! You make posts about the recalls to your blog before your competitors can. You talk about what it means for clients and their families. Post about what they can do if they think they might have been affected. Post about what they should do to protect themselves, what their rights are, what the company responsible is doing to rectify the situation and all those other informative topics that present you as a knowledgeable and “up-to-date” law firm.

Why stop with only a blog post? You can also send out a series of press releases, develop new content for your website with information about the recall, start a targeted pay-per-click campaign, or, if you have some decent recording equipment (easily affordable these days), you could even do a Youtube video where you present your expertise on the latest recall and what people should do if they are affected.

Blogs are becoming more integrated into search engine results, but are still often underutilized by law firms. Stay ahead of the competition by having your own blog.  Keeping your site up to date regularly with your own custom content, videos and articles about the latest news is a great way to get search visibility while showing your visitors that you are knowledgeable and competent in your area of legal expertise.

Google Alerts + Your Blog & Website = You Are An Informed Expert | Law Firm Web Marketing

When taking a look at various other online web services and companies, I have noticed an alarming trend developing among many web vendors.  It is a trend that preys upon the ignorance of the non-tech-savvy individuals who still desperately need an online presence to enhance their business.  I’m talking about overcharging for cheap or even free services. 

The most recent example of this behavior has developed with the coming of Google Places Tags, which we mentioned in a previous post on how to make your business listing stand out.  Lately we have noticed several vendors selling these listings (free from Google) and a tag ($25 per month at Google) for up to $400.  Think about that a minute.  That’s $400 for a $25 service that takes approximately 15 minutes to add to an existing Google listing. 

At Consultwebs, we provide listings as a part of our overall web presence strategies for our clients (at no extra cost) and we sometimes even cover the cost of the tag at $25 per month.  I have seen various online vendors charge outrageous sums of money for numerous free Google services, including installing Analytics, setting up an Adwords account, and other lesser-known online services.  While I do realize that people should expect to pay for labor and expertise in setting up some of these services , I also recognize when someone is blatantly attempting to cash in on the ignorance of their clientele.  If your web vendor is charging you a large “set up fee” for a service that is otherwise free, you may want to ask some questions. 

The next time someone tries to sell you something, do a quick Google search to learn more about the service.  Don’t make split-second decisions about services you know little about.  Gather more information, think about it, and call them back.  If they are a legit business, then they will work with you to explain their costs.  It is important to ask questions, and even ask “why does this cost so much? I thought this service was free.”  There may sometimes be more labor involved than you previously thought.  More often than not, you may just find you are spending money for nothing.

Money for Nothing | Law Firm Web Marketing