Pay-Per-Click advertising in major search engines such as Google and Bing, is known as search engine marketing (SEM) and can be an effective method for immediately driving targeted traffic to your law firm’s website. For attorney search engine marketing strategies, pay-per-click advertising is particularly effective immediately after the website is first launched.
Search Marketing for Criminal Defense Lawyers
Browse through our specific information guides on:
- Google Adwords
- Google Local Service Ads (LSA)
- Yahoo Search Marketing
- Microsoft AdCenter (MSN)
- Facebook / Meta Paid Advertising
As part of your internet marketing strategy, we can help you select keywords that are relevant to your legal practice. We then bid on the CPC or cost per click. Generally, the higher the bid, the higher up the ad will appear.
Every time someone searches for that keyword, the law firm’s ad will appear in the sponsored listings at the top and along the side of the search results. Each time a user clicks on the ad, the law firm’s account will be charged the CPC rate, so they pay for each click.
Attorneys will use PPC ads to drive targeted traffic to their website. While PPC advertising can be effective, lawyers should be careful not to overuse this method. Want to know the biggest mistakes made by attorney when beginning an internet marketing campaign? These attorneys spend too much money on the most common pay-per-click trophy key terms.
SEM vs. SEO
Sponsored ads receive only a fraction of the volume compared to organic listings. In addition, PPC advertising costs money each time your ad is clicked. As opposed to organic search results, which don’t cost anything. Having a strong organic search visibility in major search engines is more cost effective and will drive more traffic to your website than SEM. However, SEO takes a great deal of time and effort to achieve first page organic search results.
Internet Lava’s Cost-Effective Search Marketing for Lawyers
At Internet Lava, strong organic search visibility is the primary objective of our online marketing campaigns. Every service that we provide is centered on achieving strong organic search rankings in major search engines so you can dominate the competition. Our SEO efforts are comprehensive and can bring you the lasting results you need to consistently connect with local consumers.
The biggest downside to SEO is that it takes time. With Internet Lava, our focus is on SEO and in some cases, Pay-Per-Click advertising in Google for the first 6 months after your website is first launched. We choose the most relevant keywords to your industry and geographic region, and we set up and pay for your SEM campaign during the 6-month time period. During this time, you will have first-page search visibility in all three major search engines via sponsored ads. This will drive immediate traffic to your website and allow you to instantly connect with local consumers.
At the same time, our primary efforts will be focused on SEO. We will optimize your website for these same keywords. The keywords that get the highest volume are the most competitive and will take the longest to achieve higher search rankings. During the 6 months of SEM, we will begin optimizing your website for these same keywords. At the same time, we will also target more specific, less competitive keywords so you can rank organically much faster for the niche areas of practice that are most profitable to your firm.
Our reasoning for using PPC advertising only during the first 6 months is that after 6 months, you will have a strong enough organic search visibility that you won’t need SEM anymore. This also helps keep costs as low as possible for you.
Search Engine Marketing Explained
There are several important factors that influence the success of a PPC advertising campaign.
Advertising Budget
How much are you willing to spend on paid search listings? This is going to depend primarily on how much of a return you are getting on your marketing efforts. Many attorneys will choose keywords that have a high search volume and generate a great deal of traffic. These keywords can often have a higher cost-per-click and the clicks may or may not turn into a new client contacting you.
Cost Per Click and Bidding
Legal search marketing keywords can be some of the most expensive to bid on. This is because many law firms choose to run an aggressive PPC campaign to bring in traffic. A bidding war can sometimes result in a keyword cost-per-click of up to or even more than $50 per click. If you choose to bid that highly on a keyword, you must be aware of the potential costs vs. the return on investment.
Click Fraud
Click fraud occurs when an individual or computer program maliciously clicks on paid search ads in order to generate a charge to the advertiser with no interest in the advertiser’s link. This can occur when someone wishes to deplete the competitors’ advertising. Click fraud is illegal and there are safeguards in place to attempt to trace click fraud by following the IP address of the clickers.
Quality Score
One of the most important factors of search engine marketing is quality score. This score is an assessment of the quality of the ad and can have a direct influence on the rank and cost per click of ads. This variable is used by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (Bing) to calculate where ads will rank. Sometimes ads can rank higher, even if they have bided on a lower priced CPC because they have a higher quality score. So, just because you are bidding higher, does not mean your ad will show up at the top. Several factors affect the quality score.
Click-Through Rate is the rate of clicks an ad generates vs. impressions or how many times the ad appears to a consumer. A higher click-through rate can mean a better quality score.
Ad Copy Relevance is the measurement of how relative the text of the ad is to the keyword.
Landing Page Quality is the quality and relevance of the page that the ad links to. They should contain the same keyword as the ad itself.
Load Time of the Landing Page can also affect quality scores. It’s good to have a home page that loads quickly.
Running Your Own SEM Campaign vs. Using a SEM Professional
Anyone can set up a search marketing campaign, but you must consider that having a successful campaign requires time and effort. Each ad must be monitored to ensure that it is bringing you results. Bids must be adjusted and quality scores must be good.
At Internet Lava, we have managed successful PPC campaigns for our clients. Our focus is bringing you targeted traffic that will quickly turn into a new customer.
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