Google Ads Management for Lawyers
But how can we accomplish the growth that we’ve spoken about? Allow us to explain.
Our PPC for lawyers services actually consist of a lot of processes, which we’ll explain in great depth once you contact us for our services and think about employing us for real.
This ensures that you’re 100% aware of what work we’ll be doing on your paid advertising and what exactly it is that you’re paying for.
However, to make sure that you’re not just calling us for a quote, not sure what to expect, we’re going to explain briefly what the bulk of our services consist of.
Do Google Ads Work for Lawyers?
Google Ads is one of the best ways to market yourself as a lawyer, especially because of the particular benefits you’ll receive through this marketing channel.
In fact, there are many benefits that make Google Ads worth the money spent, including the fact that you can see results relatively quickly—sometimes in as little as a week. However, the most important benefit of Google PPC for lawyers is that they make it easier to compete with.
While marketing methods like SEO (search engine optimization) will generally take months to produce any meaningful results (and even years for highly competitive niches), Google Ads can provide you results almost immediately.
Furthermore, you don’t need to invest as much time in order to compete with Google Ads; there are a few ways you can gain an upper hand over your competitor which doesn’t involve as much hard work as SEO does.
Getting to Know Your Business
The first step when it comes to Google Ads for law firms is getting to know more about your business and exactly what services your law firm provides. This allows us to understand the approach that we need to take when marketing your law firm.
For example, there is a great difference between Google Ads for personal injury lawyers and Google Ads for criminal lawyers, as these require different approaches both in terms of what language to use when marketing your services, as well as the kinds of keywords that we need to target.
The same thing applies to different legal professions, of course; there is a difference between Google Ads for attorneys and Google Ads for solicitors as these are different jobs in subtle ways.
Usually, we would also take this time to also understand who your target audience is—however, as you’re well aware, this is particularly tricky with legal services. How can you target users that are going through a divorce, for instance? Or have to appear in court after being prosecuted?
Not only is it next to impossible to do so (what characteristics can you really use to target someone in an unhappy marriage as opposed to a happily married person, for example? Their search history possibly?), this kind of targeting is also suspect and looked down upon.
It’s essentially targeting people based on their personal troubles, which is understandably considered dishonest.
Finding the Keywords That Matter Most to You
Instead of targeting users based on characteristics and behaviour, we can use keywords in order to find your ideal customers: these would be people that are actively searching for legal services.
By discovering which keywords users are searching for services similar to the ones you provide, we can display your ads to those users exactly as they’re searching for those services, which makes them more willing to become your clients.
Moreover, by doing our keyword research properly and cleverly, we can find golden keyword opportunities that not only help you find clients exactly when they’re searching for services like the ones you provide, but that have low competition, high search volume, or low CPC (cost-per-click).
Targeting a mixture of these different sorts of keywords will guarantee that we are maximizing every bit of value from your ad budget.
Once we have a list of such keywords, we’ll use keyword match types to further maximize the value we can gain from these keywords. And finally, we also need to create a list of negative keywords—keywords where you don’t want your ads to appear—in order to save on ad budget as much as possible.
Google Ads Cost for Lawyers: Budgeting
An extremely important part of what we do includes helping you arrive at an estimate of how much you ought to be spending on Google Ads on a daily and monthly basis. Knowing how much you should spend on Google Ads is one of the most important parts of using the platform.
This is because not only can you better make financial estimations for the rest of the year, but it also helps us understand what kind of keywords we can target, and what kind of strategy we can pursue.
For instance, with ad budgets on the lower end of the spectrum, we can target keywords that have lower CPCs. These would be keywords known as “long-tail keywords,” which are search queries that are highly specific but low in search volume. However, since they are so specific, they often have a lot of value to offer.
On the other hand, with higher budgets, we can increase not only the number of keywords, which allows us to explore more opportunities “horizontally,” but also target more expensive and competitive keywords, which can secure a greater number of clients for your law firm.
How Much Is a Click for Lawyers in Google Ads?
The average CPC for the legal industry, according to research carried out by LocaliQ, is $9.21, with different legal industries experiencing different CPCs. Below you can find a bar chart that displays these average CPCs across different legal practices:
Bear in mind, however, that these numbers are derived from a range of different keywords, each with their own varying CPC. CPC is not a static number but one that fluctuates depending on a number of factors, including the competition in the industry and the quality of your ads.
In fact, certain keywords that happen to be particularly competitive can have costs of hundreds of dollars—while this might dishearten you, bear in mind that each client you gain will provide with much more revenue than a few hundred dollars.
In reality, CPC is not the most important metric to be considered; we consider CPA (cost-per-acquisition) as much more important. This is the cost incurred to gain one client, as in reality not every click instantly becomes a client.
On the other hand, CPA needs to be offset with ROAS, or return on ad spend, which is how much you’re gaining through the money spent on advertising; by understanding how much you’re gaining through your paid advertising investment, the CPCs and CPAs won’t matter as much anymore.
How Much Should a Law Firm Spend on Google Ads?
In our experience, law firms should be prepared to spend quite a bit of money on paid advertising. Of course, the amount of budget that you spend will depend on the size of your firm, but a mininum of $2,000–$3,000 is imperative in order to secure results that are worth writing home about.
The number is subject to change according to a variety of factors, including the size of your business and the competitiveness of the industry you’re operating in (for instance, personal injury law is more competitive than family law).
However, a good rule of thumb is to set aside between 5–10% of your total revenue as a total advertising budget (this would include other forms of marketing). Then from that total advertising budget, you can apportion part of it towards Google Ads—this is where we’ll help out.
Choosing Your Campaign Types
There is a good number of “forms” of Google Ads, and each has its own uses. These are known as campaign types, and there are a total of 9 campaign types. However, not all of these campaign types prove to be the best Google Ads for lawyers.
In our opinion, it’s these ads that can help you achieve your marketing goals the most:
- Search ads: arguably the most recognizable form of Google Ads, these are the sponsored results you generally see at the top of Google’s search results page, although they can occupy other positions.
- Display ads: if you’re browsing your favorite legal website and you see banners on the sides and top—then you’re looking at display ads.
- Local service ads: these are the ads that you find at the top of the search results whenever you search for a physical business; local service ads for lawyers are actually very effective since law firms are always physical locations.
- Video ads: were you ever watching a YouTube video and you were greeted with an advert instead? Well, that’s what a video ad typically looks like.
Ideally, we make use of all of these campaign types at once in order to gain as much value as we can from Google Ads; however, this will depend on your ad budget, and how much you can afford to have all of these campaigns running simultaneously.
Improving Your Ads with Ad Extensions
One of the ways of making your ads even more compelling other than setting a catchy headline is by using ad extensions. These are free-to-use add-ons that we can add to your adverts to make them even more clickable than before.
Just like campaign types, not every ad extension will be worth using when making use of Google AdWords for law firms; according to us, the most important ad extensions to use for law firm PPC are the following:
- Location extensions: this puts the physical address of your law firm’s location as part of the ad, allowing users to find your business quickly and easily.
- Call extensions: other than a location, you can add your phone number, which allows users to instantly call your law firm.
- Seller ratings extensions: since lawyers are highly dependent on their clients’ trust, this extension is perfect for giving a potential client that initial peace of mind; this extension aggregates reviews from third-party sites, synthesizing them into a five-star scale that’s displayed on your ad.
- Callout extensions: these are 25-word snippets that will display the most important selling points of your business.
- Sitelink extensions: this extension allows you to display further links from your website, which is ideal for when you offer multiple services (e.g. your law firm has divorce specialists, family specialists, etc.), or when you have other important pages to display (e.g. pricing pages, contact us pages, etc.).
Using these extensions can really make the difference between someone choosing to interact with your ad and simply scrolling away.
A Landing Page as Convincing as You
Getting users to click on your ads is pretty much step 1 of the Google Ads game—step 2 is getting them to “convert,” that is, make them take a desired action after clicking on your ad. Which is, of course, to make use of your services.
To do this, we build landing pages that not only look professional and striking, but as persuasive as you need to be on the job. These pages will be optimized to persuade the user to choose your law firm above your competitors’.
We do this in a variety of ways, but essentially we highlight elements that will make choosing your law firm appear as the best choice for that visitor; these would include elements like testimonials, your certifications, etc.
Regular Reporting to Stay On Top of Your Campaigns
What’s the point of paying us to manage your Google Ads if you have no idea how your paid advertising campaigns are performing? That’s right: there’s no real point.
This is why we insist on having regular meetings with our clients where we present you with updates on how your paid ads are performing. Moreover, we also provide you with reports that essentially summarize what we would have explained in our meetings.
Since we know that you won’t have time to read 20+ page reports full of marketing lingo and data points that simply won’t concern you, we simplify these reports so that they are easily digestible.
Updates Make Perfect
Far from creating your ads and landing pages and forgetting all about them, we continuously check for opportunities how we can improve on your ads.
For instance, through landing page A/B testing, we can vary aspects of your landing pages and test which version seems to perform best. Once the results come in, we’ll use the version that resonates with users best.
Other examples of optimizations that we will carry out include diverting more ad budget towards the keywords that seem to bring the most conversions as well as updating the headline of your ads to see which one attracts the most clicks.
What Is Google Ads?
If you’re unaware of what Google Ads is and how it works, then you’ll be far less inclined to make use of it. Which is why we’re going to give you a brief overview of what the platform is and how it functions.
First of all, Google Ads is Google’s paid advertising platform; in other words, it’s where marketers and business owners can pay Google directly in order for their ads to be presented to users on a variety of platforms, depending on which type of Google Ads are made use of.
Finally, Google Ads makes use of an auction-based system: essentially, marketers will place bids on keywords depending on how much they’re willing to pay for either a click, 1000 impressions, or an engagement with those ads. Choosing to pay for one or the other will depend on your marketing goals.
Are Lawyers Allowed to Advertise?
Yes, lawyers are not prohibited from advertising their services through any of the standard marketing channels. However, you should be aware that marketing in the legal space is highly regulated; in fact, it’s regulated by state court and bar association rules, typically those set by the American Bar Association (or ABA for short).
In fact, legal advertising is regulated through the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, particularly Rule 7.2: Communications Concerning a Lawyer’s Services. The specific rules state that lawyers are allowed to advertise their services through any media they prefer. However, there are some caveats to this rule:
- Lawyers are prohibited from compensating individuals for recommending their services, except in specific circumstances such as paying for advertisements, or referral services.
- Lawyers can refer clients to other professionals as long as there is a non-exclusive reciprocal referral agreement in place and the client is informed of the agreement.
- Nominal gifts of appreciation are allowed, but they should not be seen as a form of compensation for recommending a lawyer’s services.
- Lawyers cannot claim to be certified as a specialist in a particular field of law unless they have been certified by an approved organization, and the name of the certifying organization must be clearly identified in any communication.
- All forms of advertisement need to be as transparent as possible, and that means that they must include the name and contact information of at least one lawyer or law firm responsible for its content.
Essentially, making use of Google AdWords for lawyers doesn’t break any of these rules, so you’re in the clear if you decide to make use of our services. 😉
Where Do Lawyers Advertise?
There are many marketing channels that lawyers can actually make use of in order to advertise their services. These range from pay-per-click marketing like Google Ads, to more subtler forms of marketing, such as review websites and good, old social media.
As a Google Ads marketing firm, we’ll be able to guide you and turn your Google paid advertising into a success story. We’ve already seen above the benefits of incorporating Google Ads into your overall marketing strategy, and hiring a Google Ads agency like us will reduce the hassle of having to learn the platform, invest time into the strategy, etc.
However, you cannot solely rely on Google Ads to meet all of your marketing goals. Google Ads should only be one piece of the puzzle; as a lawyer, you should make use of all other forms of digital marketing other than Google Ads. This would include other forms of PPC (Bing Ads, for example), paid social (Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.) SEO, social media marketing, etc.
Other forms of internet marketing that can be leveraged and which don’t necessarily fall under any of the marketing methods that we mentioned above would include submitting your business to map apps, like Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and Apple Maps. These help your customers find the physical location of your business much easier.
You could also submit your law firm to review sites, like Yelp and Trustpilot; marketplaces for legal services, like Avvo; and legal directories. Furthermore, you should never underestimate the power of more traditional forms of marketing, like newspaper ads, radio ads, television ads, billboards, flyers, etc.
Finally, other ways to advertise your services without necessarily being considered as forms of marketing are by participating in legal conferences, submitting articles to reputable legal publications, and even guest blogging on renowned legal websites.
FAQs
How much does Google Ads for lawyers cost?
Unfortunately, the legal industry is one of the most expensive and competitive niches out there when it comes to paid advertising; in fact, according to research performed by LocaliQ, the average CPC for lawyers is about $9.21. And the costs can even be higher, with CPCs in the hundreds not being unheard of.
How do I advertise my law firm on Google?
There are 2 ways that you can actually advertise your law firm on Google: these are either SEO or Google Ads. Both of these marketing methods have their unique way of doing things, and each one has its own set of pros and cons.
SEO consists of techniques that subtly improve a website in such a way that Google decides to rank it higher in its search results pages. Google Ads, on the other hand, is a form of pay-per-click marketing where marketers pay Google to display their ads across various platforms.
SEO tends to be cheaper and produces more long-term results that provide continuous returns without the necessity of regular payment; however, SEO takes far longer to produce results, is often more difficult to compete with, and its results aren’t always measurable.
Google Ads, on the other hand, requires continuous payment in order for the marketing method to work; in other words, once you stop the payment, the ads stop. This obviously means that Google Ads is a short-term strategy. However, it tends to bring more immediate results, more qualified traffic, and its results are directly measurable.
What is the best form of advertising for a lawyer?
The best form of advertising that lawyers can make use of nowadays is any form of digital advertising—and ideally, all forms of digital advertising in order to implement a holistic, omnichannel approach to your marketing. Therefore, leveraging PPC, SEO, SMM (social media marketing), etc. and merging them into one marketing strategy is the best course of action.
What kinds of advertising do lawyers most commonly use?
Lawyers tend to use a mixture of both traditional approaches to marketing, such as newspaper ads, brochures, and billboards, and more modern approaches, which would include SEO, pay-per-click, email newsletters, etc.
Can lawyers advertise on YouTube?
There is nothing stopping lawyers from advertising their services on YouTube. There are many forms of YouTube Ads available, ranging from short, 6-second bumper ads, to giant banners at the top of the YouTube homepage known as mastheads. Choosing one over the other will depend on what you wish to achieve with your marketing.
