Google Adwords Marketing for Lawyers – Quality Score (QS)
I would say most lawyers would NOT know what a Google adwords quality score is. Im sure they would all make great educated guesses but most non marketing people would not know what this is or why its important. Yet when you say its the thing that can save you 1000’s over lifetime of your adwords campaigns. The quality score in AdWords is very important and simply put, if you can make your ad near perfect, Google will reward you with a high quality score (1-10) and lower costs per click. Yet if do everything wrong and have a low quality score, well then you will pay more for every click.
What Is The AdWords Quality Score?
In the simplest of definitions, the AdWords Quality Score is a numerical value given to a keyword that sits between 1 and 10, that then tells the advertiser how relevant Google thinks your keywords, ads, and landing pages are in combination.
The lower the score, the more you pay per click. The higher the score, the less you pay per click on Google adwords.
4 Reasons a High Google Adscore Will Save Your Legal Practice Money
Reason #1 – Quality score affects your CPC: Google has a tough job when it comes to AdWords. They want to make money, but, at the same time, they don’t want to lower the quality of their search results.
So how do you balance this?
Google came up with their ad rank formula.
Since your ad rank is determined by some formula involving multiplying quality score by CPC, this means that one way you can decrease your CPC, is by improving your quality score.
** You want to make sure that your Ad Copy is top notch and that your landing pages are all optimized and setup correctly. So if your a bankruptcy lawyer, you want to create different ad groups for chaper 7 keywords, chapter 13 keywords, general filing keywords. Then in each ad group, you will have a small set of keywords related to the group and then your landing page should be about that topic. SO if its the Chapter 7 keywords, then the landing page would be about Chapter 7 and have the keywords your bidding on that page, as well as a contact form. THIS is a much better idea then making the landing page your home page or other not as relevant page.
Any page with a high landing page quality can show up on the higher ad spots, which have a higher click-through rate and have an overall lower cost. The ad campaigns in this higher ad group have a higher quality score than those shown in the ad group on the right of the search engine.
If someone wants to drive traffic to a low quality landing page with a high bounce rate, they’re going to have to pay much more per click.
Obviously, the less you pay per click, the more likely it is that you can profit from the traffic, and vice versa.
Reason #2 – You can also get lower bid estimates: When you set an advertising campaign on AdWords, you’ll get bid estimates. These are the amounts that Google recommends that you bid if you want to show up in the top few ad spots, when a relevant search query is entered.
Reason #3 – A higher quality score equals a better ad position: As you improve your quality score during an advertising campaign, you will notice that your average ad rank starts to improve as well (unless it was already in first position).
This is due to the ad rank formula. The higher your quality score goes, the better your ad rank gets.
Reason #4 – Some extensions require high quality scores: One way to get a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) on your ads is with ad extensions.
These are special features that make your ad campaign stand out of the ad group to a potential customer, and will attract a higher CTR.
There’s a few different common Google Ad Extensions:
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Locations
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Business contact info
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Star ratings
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Sitelinks (just more links to different parts of your site)
Some are added automatically by Google, while you’ll have to set up others.
In order to get these extensions to actually appear, you need a high enough quality score and ad rank.
If you have a low quality score, it is very difficult to get them to show up, because your ad rank will be too low. You’d have to pay a ton per click and it probably wouldn’t be worth it. Increasing the quality score of your ad campaign will increase your ad rank. The bottom line is that if your going to do Google adwords and pay per click marketing for your law firm, then you want to do whatever you can to cut costs and have your marketing dollars go farther.
The key is the LANDING Page that you use. You want to have a lot of different landing pages, one for each of your practice areas, maybe more then one. You want to test them out and there are a lot of different things you can do. It would make sense to take a look at what your competitors are doing and see what kind of landing pages are working for them.
Google Adwords for Lawyers – Free PPC Analysis
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