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A Beginner’s Guide to PPC for Family Law Firms

Written by Erik J. Olson on . Posted in .
Home > Blog > A Beginner’s Guide to PPC for Family Law Firms

Spending money on advertising only benefits you if you are getting a return on that investment. Yet understanding pay-per-click advertising (PPC) campaigns and how to build them is not always easy. Array Digital can help your family law firm build effective online advertising campaigns. Call our team today at 757.333.3021  or use our contact page to schedule a consultation to discuss how we can help you get more leads.

What is PPC?

Digital marketing involves many facets that need to come together to create an effective advertising campaign for your business. One of those facets is PPC advertising.

PPC stands for pay-per-click advertising. This form of advertising allows you to pay for ads that use your targeted keywords to draw traffic to your landing page. These ads show up on search engines, on other websites, and on social media pages, giving you many opportunities to capture the attention of potential clients.

When done well, PPC gives you the ability to purchase a top spot in the search engines. This tool can be a huge benefit to your search engine optimization work, reaching potential clients more effectively exactly where they are looking for your help.

Yet, if you do not know what you are doing with your PPC ads, you may waste your advertising dollars on ads that are not effectively creating your audience. These are complex campaigns with a number of tools and analytics that can make it overwhelming.

What Are Some Benefits of PPC Advertising?

Lawyer google advertisement

PPC ads allow you to buy a spot on the search engine results page. If you use your marketing dollars well while building your ad campaign, this can mean a high ranking even if you are struggling to get a high ranking with your organic SEO. This means these ads can yield significant benefits to your overall digital marketing plan, including these:

1. Drive Traffic to Specific Web Pages

With PPC, you can create ad copy that drives traffic to specific web pages, called landing pages, that have a dedicated purpose in your overall marketing. While some PPC ads will send traffic to your home page, you can also create specific landing pages for specific search terms or geographic areas, then use PPC ads to draw potential new clients to that page. For a family lawyer, this might include specific pages for divorce lawyers, child custody lawyers, and other practice areas.

2. Effectively Reach Potential New Clients

Another benefit of PPC advertising is the ability it gives you to better reach your target market. If you build effective campaigns, you can purchase a spot on the first page of the SERPs, which is something you might not be able to achieve with SEO alone.

3. Complement Organic Search Traffic from SEO Efforts

PPC does not replace SEO. You need both as part of your law firm marketing strategy. However, Google Ads is a tool that perfectly complements your organic search optimization efforts.

4. Increase Brand Awareness

Finally, even if you do not have a good click-through rate (CTR) on your PPC ads, you are getting your name and link seen. This can increase brand awareness for your family law firm. Prospective clients will see that you are visible when they search-relevant keywords, and this puts your name in their minds.

Types of PPC Ads

If you plan a pay-per-click advertising campaign, you will find there are three specific types of PPC ads you can use. They are:

  • Search Ads: Search ads target the search engine results page. You build ad campaigns around target keywords, and they show up on Bing or Google search results when someone searches those terms.
  • Display Ads: Display ads appear on websites that people browse. They use retargeting to show ads based on past searches, and this can cause the person to click by seeing a reminder of something they’d searched in the past.
  • Social Media Ads: These ads show up on popular social media platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. They also show results based on past search history, and these can be a good way to keep your brand in front of your target audience.

A good PPC campaign will likely use all three of these types of PPC ads to complement your online marketing campaigns and drive more traffic to your law firm’s website.

PPC Ad Campaigns Best Practices

If you are ready to jump into a law firm PPC campaign, you need to adopt some best practices. These are paramount to building a successful PPC campaign that will not waste your money but rather draw more people to your site. Here are the best practices the team at Array Digital recommends when building a PPC marketing campaign.

1. Know Your End Goal

Before you even craft your PPC budget, make sure you have your end goal in mind. Your goal may be building brand awareness, or it may be to improve your click-through rate. Your end goal will drive your search campaign, so you need to clearly define it.

Your end goal can be many things. Perhaps you want to increase the number of phone calls you get inquiring about family law legal services. Maybe you want to get people to fill in a contact form, so you can call them. You may even want to build your email subscription list. Because there are so many potential goals, you need to start your plan by defining your end goal, then build your campaign from there.

2. Know Your Target Audience

In addition to knowing your goal, you need to know your target audience. Knowing the needs of your target audience will help you build ad copy that entices them to click. Understanding searchers and their intent have a significant impact on your overall success in your PPC ads.

Researching your target demographic is essential to any marketing, but it is particularly important for PPC campaigns. You have a limited number of words you can use to reach your audience when setting up your PPC ads, and every single one of those words must be effective. If it is not, you are wasting your money and might as well abandon your campaign. However, if the wording and keywords are effective and tailored to your target audience, it can be highly effective at helping you reach your marketing goals.

3. Perform Keyword Research

Keyword research is the key to using your ad spend effectively. You need to do keyword research to choose cost-effective keywords that have a good CTR but do not cost too much. This step is where professional PPC help is beneficial because you can learn how to choose the most effective language.

Keyword research is more than just thinking about what people might search and using those words. You need to use tools to find keywords, refine them, consider their cost, and target all of those efforts to your target audience. Start by brainstorming potential keywords, then use keyword research tools to find variations and synonyms. Then, plug those into the ad campaign to see what they cost. You can often find a good synonym for a high-cost keyword that has a much lower cost per click (CPC) to help you manage your budget better.

As you do your keyword research, remember to be specific, including geographic specifics. Sometimes you can lower your CPC by adding some more specific terminology to your keywords, while still finding keywords that are effective.

When choosing keywords, try to find a balance between average monthly searches and low competition. The more competition a keyword has, the more expensive it will be. However, words with low search volume will not help you reach your target audience, so you need to find a balance.

Keyword research is challenging. Working with Array Digital and our keyword experts can save you time and effort in these challenging tasks.

4. Build Effective Landing Pages

Your landing pages are important. If people click on your link but cannot find what they need on your landing page, you will not have many conversions and your ads will not be effective. Knowing your goal will help you build those landing pages.

For example, if your goal is to get more contact information from potential clients, then your landing page will have a form submission that you target. If the goal is to get people to call for a free consultation, then you will want your phone number prominent on the site. Make sure no matter what your goal is that you have your name, address, and phone number (NAP) clearly marked on the page, so you can build your local search while building your PPC campaigns.

There are many components to an effective landing page. Some factors to consider include:

  • Layout – Make the layout engaging and have a careful plan. Avoid distracting page elements that might cause people to click away.
  • Above-the-Fold – Prioritize the content above the fold which displays before someone has to scroll down. Make sure that the above-the-fold part of the page has a clear call to action and a button or phone number the site visitor can use.
  • Visuals – Landing pages need to engage with visitors the moment they view them. Value the visuals that you add and make them match your brand image and evoke a feeling of trust in your family law firm.
  • Copy – Concise copy that tells people exactly what they need to know while evoking trust with your law firm is important, so spend some time developing your copy well.
  • Exit Opportunities – You do not want people to click away from your landing page. Avoid exit opportunities, which may include links to other websites or even your own main home page.
  • Offer – Your landing page needs some sort of enticing offer. Free consultations are common for family law firms, but you can also offer a downloadable report or case evaluation. Think through your goal and choose an enticing offer that will work for that goal.

Remember that you can have more than one landing page. For each PPC campaign, design a landing page specific to it. Being specific will help your landing pages be effective. Finally, do not be afraid to change your landing pages if they are not working for you.

5. Set Budgets After Keyword Research

You need to plan a budget for your PPC ads, but wait to plan that until you have done your keyword research. Your research may affect how much you are able and willing to spend on your PPC campaigns.

Your firm has several approaches you can take to your budget. These might include:

  • Budgeting based on your prior year’s income and expenses.
  • Budgeting based on a percentage of income.
  • Budgeting based on the planned marketing activities you have for the year

Remember, you are the only one who knows how much your firm can afford to spend on PPC ads, but you do need to plan a budget. Because cost-per-click (CPC) can vary so much from one keyword to the next, you need to know how much you can afford to spend.

So what is an effective PPC budget? The answer is specific to your goals and your campaign. You need to ensure that you are getting a return on investment for your ad campaign, but some things are hard to measure. For instance, measuring the ROI on branding is not easy. Work with a skilled PPC campaign creation company, like Array Digital, that can help you manage your budget and determine your profitability.

6. Have a Call to Action

On every ad, have a clear call to action that tells the reader what to do. “Click here” is not effective. More effective CTAs may include:

  • Subscribe
  • Download
  • Get quote
  • Listen now
  • Apply today
  • Watch more
  • Learn more

Match the CTA to the audience and your overall goal for the campaign to ensure that the action you are asking people to make makes sense for your goals and your target audience.

If you do not tell your audience what to do with your campaign, and if that call to action is not compelling, you will not get many clicks. Your time and effort are lost. If the call to action does not match the landing page, you will not get conversions from the ad. People may click, and those clicks will cost you money, but you will not get new clients or contacts from them.

7. Test Your Work

Now that you have some PPC campaigns set up, you need to test them. Test everything relating to your campaigns. Test the ads, change the keywords to see if a different strand would work better, tweak the ad copy to see if it will gain more clicks, and monitor these changes to see what works best for your campaign. Analytics is a huge part of PPC management, so take the time to work on this planning.

PPC campaign management involves testing, tweaking, and testing again. It is a constant process, and you need to learn what your metrics mean to do it effectively. Again, this is where a professional marketing team, like Array Digital, can be helpful.

8. Enable Broad Match Keywords

Broad match keywords can help you get more eyes on your ad copy. Broad match keywords allow the search engines to display your ad if the user’s search query contains a close match. For example, if your keyword is “Chicago family law firm,” and you enable broad match keywords, your ad may show if someone searches for “family law firm in the Chicago area,” even though it is not an exact match.

9. Improve Your Ad Copy

Finally, make sure your ad copy is excellent. You do not get very many words when setting up a Google AdWords ads campaign, so you will want to be very precise in this task. Again, professional help with professional copywriters can help you get it right.

Remember, if your ad copy is not working, it may need adjustment. Do not be afraid to change the wording to make it more effective.

Get Professional Help for PPC Digital Marketing for Your Family Law Firm

Digital Marketing Specific for Law Firms

Array Digital specializes in helping law firms with their online marketing efforts, and that includes PPC campaigns. We know what it takes to find success. We also understand what law firm clients need and how to reach them with PPC campaigns.

Get Professional Help Creating Effective PPC Campaigns

Array Digital can help you establish a marketing campaign that works. From crafting the copy to setting up the back office and bidding on keywords, we understand the process intimately. Because we are legal marketing experts, you can count on us to save you time and effort as you set up your campaigns.

Manage Your Monitoring and Testing More Effectively

Not only does Array Digital help you set up your campaigns, but we also assist with monitoring and testing. We understand the metrics you receive from your campaigns and what they mean. We use that knowledge to maximize your budget, so you get the best possible results from your campaigns. If something is not working well, we can help you tweak your PPC legal marketing campaign to be more effective, because we understand what your metrics mean.

Free Your Time to Serve Your Clients

Ultimately, working with Array Digital for your PPC marketing campaigns frees you to spend your time helping your clients with their legal needs. You will not be wasting time on tasks that you do not understand well. By partnering with our experts, you get more time to do what you do best, and that is to help your own clients.

Schedule a Consultation to Discuss PPC Campaigns with Array Digital Today

Array Digital is here to help your family law firm find success with your online marketing goals. We understand law firm marketing, and we want you to get more conversions with effective PPC campaigns. To request a free consultation, call 757.333.3021 or complete the online contact form to speak with our experienced digital marketing experts.

Written By Erik J. Olson
Founder & CEO
Erik J. Olson is the Founder & CEO of Array Digital—a marketing agency that enables its clients to achieve their dreams, fulfill their missions, and impact more lives with their services.

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