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Pay-per-click (PPC) ads can play an integral role in almost any lawyer’s well-rounded legal marketing plan. Selecting targeted strategies based on your practice area can maximize the benefits of your ad spend. Keep reading to learn more.
Just like there is a nuance to legal marketing for personal injury lawyers, there are also specific strategies that will help maximize your return on investment (ROI) in Google Ads PPC. In this post, we are exploring five strategies designed to help personal injury lawyers maximize their ROI in PPC ad campaigns.
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1. Optimize Your Ad Schedule
Many lawyers set their Google Ads schedule to primarily align with weekdays. This makes sense in many practice areas for a variety of reasons.
Consider business law for example. Corporate clients are typically in the office and focused on their legal needs, whatever they may be, during the work week. As such, a business lawyer may receive more leads during standard business hours. However, this is not always the case for a personal injury lawyer as injuries happen 24/7, often when people least expect it.
Other lawyers simply limit their ad run times to business hours because it aligns with their schedule or otherwise benefits their practice management goals. However, this could result in a missed window of opportunity for connecting with potential clients who are looking for lawyers.
Accordingly, we suggest scheduling your ads to run on weekends and at other times outside of traditional business hours. Of course, if your budget permits, a 24/7 ad schedule gives you more exposure and more potential clients to connect with. However, we recommend working with your PPC specialist to determine a healthy mix of times to run your personal injury lawyer ads and create a schedule that makes sense for your practice goals and budget.
Finally, run ads when you are able to answer your phone and can respond to email and text leads. If you do not respond promptly, you are likely to lose the potential client to another lawyer.
2. Set a Healthy Budget
Budgets and finances are important for any business. Lawyers are not the exception by any means. Thus, you need to determine what portion of your law firm’s overall budget will be dedicated to marketing. Then, within your marketing budget, you must determine how much money you can feasibly allocate to pay-per-click advertising.
Even once you have set this PPC budget for your law firm, you will need to optimize it to maximize your ROI. You need to determine whether you want to spend your budget on more competitive practice areas and keywords (e.g. car accidents) or on more niche areas where the bid amounts will be lower (e.g. pedestrian accidents or dog bite injuries).
Of course, additional factors go into appropriately determining your law firm’s ideal keywords and budget allocation. For example, the competitive nature of ads in your targeted localities, as well as desired reach, all play a role in determining the best strategies for your practice.
This analysis should not be undertaken lightly. It requires someone with extensive expertise and specialized knowledge in pay-per-click advertising for lawyers and law firms. If you need assistance with this analysis and determining a healthy budget allocation for your practice, contact our Justia Amplify team for assistance.
3. Optimize Your Ads to Increase Your Clickthrough Rate
Clickthrough rate (CTR) matters for your ad performance. Higher expected CTRs generally correlate to a better ad rank. By leveraging all of the tools at your disposal through Google Ads, as well as crafting effective ad copy, you can increase your CTR and, in turn, improve your ad rank and overall ad performance.
We suggest using CTAs (calls to action) and marketing language in both your Google Ads headlines and descriptive text. CTAs encourage people to take action (click or tap) on your ad to learn more or contact your law firm.
Similarly, you can leverage the numerous ad extensions available through Google Ads to further maximize your CTR and the effectiveness of your ads. Call, sitelink, and location extensions are some of our favorites, but you can learn more about the various ad extensions in Google’s help guides.
4. Use Specialized Landing Pages to Maximize Your Conversions
The process of effective PPC advertising does not end at getting clicks on your ads. To ensure your firm’s ROI in PPC advertising reaches its full potential, you also need to focus on converting the clicks on your ads into leads and those leads into clients.
Start with your landing pages to convert clicks into leads. You need a dedicated landing page for each of the core case types you promote through Google Ads. For instance, if you are running ads targeting big rig accidents, as well as ads focused on premises liability and related injuries, then you should not have one combined landing page. Instead, you need to create two tailored landing pages that mirror your messaging for each of these ads.
These landing pages should also include compelling information about your practice, such as years of experience, awards/recognition, and positive outcomes. On this landing page, you can also leverage social proof, such as client testimonials and reviews. If you offer free consultations, accept contingency fee cases, are open 24 hours, or employ other similar business practices, you should highlight them on this landing page as well. Finally, be sure to also leverage a CTA on the landing page that encourages visitors to contact your law firm.
Once these clicks have become leads, you need to focus on maximizing your conversions from lead to client. Remember, your PPC specialist can bring quality leads to your law firm but it is still your job to seal the deal.
You should implement practices designed to set yourself up for success. This includes having a strong intake process with a well-trained, professional staff. If you use an answering service to manage calls when your office is closed, be sure they are professional, courteous, and know exactly what intake information you need.
Be sure you respond to inquiries promptly. Ideally, you will have someone, whether it be your in-house office staff or an answering service, answering calls anytime you are running PPC ads. You should return any calls received and schedule a full consultation in a timely manner. Likewise, you should respond to contact forms within a reasonable amount of time.
When you miss calls, delay responses to inquiries, or otherwise delay the process, potential clients will move on. Likewise, if a potential client encounters untrained or rude staff during the intake process, they are more likely to move on to another firm.
5. Be Open to Change
As Google Ads PPC for lawyers continues to evolve, so do the best practices. The Google Ads algorithms update and change. New bidding strategies and campaign types are introduced. Previously popular ad types are retired (generally referred to as “sunsetting” by Google). Thus, to successfully leverage PPC for long-term law firm growth, you need to understand that your campaigns and strategies will change over time.
For example, among the many Google Ads PPC bidding strategies available for lawyers, automated bidding strategies have emerged as a key tool in the Google Ads world that are shifting the focus from lead quantity to lead quality.
While marketers continue to examine the data around campaigns utilizing automated bidding strategies, it has become clear that automated bidding tends to outperform manual bidding in the long run. Thus, marketers can use automated bidding strategies to complement other PPC best practices and ultimately achieve better outcomes for law firms.
Final Thoughts: Why Do You Care?
Google Ads present an opportunity for lawyers to build a robust marketing strategy by creating additional avenues to connect with potential clients on search engine results pages. Leveraging targeted strategies for campaign optimization allows personal injury lawyers to ultimately increase their ROI in Google Ads PPC.
The members of our Justia Amplify team have extensive training and specialized experience in optimizing Google Ads PPC campaigns for personal injury lawyers. To schedule a free consultation and learn more about the ways Justia Amplify can help your law firm grow, contact us today.
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