The Importance of Adwords and How to Use It.
According to Avvo the first thing people do when they wish to hire an attorney is ask their friends for referrals [1]. If that doesn’t work out, their next place of call is unsurprisingly internet search engines.
As Google is the most popular search engine, it is clearly a huge area of opportunity for any lawyer seeking more clients.
So when a person goes to Google searching for an attorney to hire, what determines the results Google shows?
How can you get the person searching to visit your website and then turn them into a paying client?
First of all, when you see a page of Google search results, half of what you see are paid ads and the other half are what Google’s search algorithms have decided to show you organically. Naturally to increase the money they make, Google displays the ads first as you can see in the below image. The ads are the ones in the red boomerang.
For some search terms the ads can receive 50% or more of all clicks on the page, so even if your site is showing organically, the ads can be a great way to get extra visitors to your site.
In order to get an ad for your website to show, you need to bid on search terms in Google’s Adwords program. Once you do this, the position your ad shows in depends on the maximum price you are willing to pay per click, combined with Google’s quality score they assign you for the keyword, combined with your use of ad extensions.
Basically it’s a combination of how much you are willing to pay mixed with how good you are at running an Adwords account.
Many lawyers make the mistake of trying to run the adwords account themselves. The problem is Google make setting up an account really easy, so easy in fact people think “This is easy, I don’t need to hire someone to do this.”
Often, when entering their keywords, they will put them in like this:
New York Lawyer
New York Attorney
Really they should be entering them like this:
“New York Lawyer”
[New York Lawyer]
“New York Attorney”
[New York Attorney]
Without the grammatical syntax around the search terms, Google will show your ads against very broad searches [2]. It’s likely a huge amount of the searches your ad shows against will have nothing to do with people searching for a New York Lawyer.
And so $$$$ later with little to show for it, lawyers who try and run Adwords themselves either write it off as a scam, teach themselves Adwords (which is doable, but expensive if you’re doing it on your own dime), or decide they need to bring in a professional.
Why You Need to Utilize Custom Landing Pages
Getting your Adwords up and running properly is only half the puzzle. The mistake a lot of Google Adwords advertisers make is they are sending traffic to either their home page, or to pages on their website that are not suitable for Adwords traffic.
It’s a mistake to send Google Adwords traffic to your home page because it’s unlikely to contain content specific to what the site visitor searched for. This means your quality scores will be lower, which means Google will charge you more to show in the same position than for a rival advertiser with a higher quality score.
Also, if the person was searching for “Intellectual Property Lawyer” and they get taken to the web page of a random law firm: “Welcome to Smith, Buchanan and Donaldson Attorneys”, with very little mention of intellectual property law, it’s likely they are just going to close the web page and try somewhere else. So if you send your search traffic to unoptimised pages, it will cost you more and your conversion rates will be lower.
The right way to do things is to build a separate landing page (at the very least) for every different service you are advertising. These pages should contain headline text that matches what the person searched for. They should contain all the key points about the service being advertised and also some background information on your firm.
Most importantly of all the page should contain a contact form for people to fill in. This is important because if you don’t do this, you aren’t encouraging people to take an action. They will just see your site, think: “oh cool”, and then go somewhere else.
When the visitor fills out the contact form, the details then get sent straight to your law firm, who then call up the person and turn them into a paying client.
Here are some example landing pages we have built for our clients in the past:
Driving Down Costs and Ensuring Profitability
The best aspect of this system for generating new clients is you can precisely measure marketing spend against revenue. If you are running Google Adwords campaigns for ‘drink driving defence’, ‘drug driving defence’ and ‘speeding defence’ legal services. You may for example see that the drink and drug driving campaigns are running very efficiently for you at £40 spent per new client obtained, but the ‘speeding defence’ campaign is running a bit too expensively at £150 per new client obtained.
In this case you could reduce your bids on the speeding campaign, or totally shut it down and instead put the extra money into the drink and drug driving campaigns.
We recommend to our clients that they initially start small in their Google Adwords budget and then slowly ramp the budget up month on month. The strategy is basically to get it profitable, then invest more money into it until you start getting diminishing returns or more business than you can handle.
If you’d like to speak with us about how we can employ this strategy with your law firm, please contact us here.
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