Legal Search Marketing

Legal SEO News for Lawyers

Pay Per Click Marketing

Difference between PPC and Organic SEO listings (2005 vs. 2019)

By 1 Comment

What is the Difference between Google Paid Listings & Organic Search Listings?

*** This post was done originally in 2005! How much has changed in 14 years? Not much and a ton at the same time.  

Google Paid Ads vs. Google Organic SEO

Some lawyers are confused by the difference between the pay per click (PPC) sponsored listings and the free organic listings at Google, Yahoo, and other top search engines.

The free or “organic” search listings at Google are listed on the left side of the page and the sponsored PPC listings are located on the right side of the page under “sponsored links” and sometimes at the very top of the page, right above the organic listings.

—> 2019 Update….. The organic listings are still in the same place, but the paid ads are also on the left side of the page, usually above the organic listings and the map local listings.  

Organic listings take time and effort to achieve and are usually a result of a legal web site that has a lot of good content, is listed in the Yahoo and Open directories and has a lot of links pointing to it from other sites.

*** 2019 update — This is still true and actually organic rankings take a LOT of time and way more then they used to take. It’s much harder to achieve organic rankings at Google.        Yet the having good content, being listed in top business directories and having a lot of relevant and authority links is still the key to ranking higher in the Google organic listings. 

The pay per click or sponsored listings are a result of web sites that bid a certain amount per click on a keyword. The higher the bid, the higher the ranking. Even though at Google its a little bit of a different bidding process then at Overture. At Overture, its simply a matter of whoever bids higher, gets the higher listing, where at Google, its a combination of different criteria including amount bid.

GOOGLE SEO FOR LAWYERS

**** 2019 update —- Who the F is Overture?!?!  They used to be the main player in town as far as pay per click went, way back when!  Then Yahoo bought them a while back.  Now the main players in pay per click are Google ads and Bing/Yahoo ads, as well as Facebook ads, Pinterest ads and Instagram ads.  

Obviously you want to be listed in the organic listings because its like the gift that keeps on giving and you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks on your site.  Yet it takes time to get the free listings and sometimes you have no choice but to pay extra to visitors to your legal web site. Some lawyers do both, get great organic listings but then also pay for the sponsored links to cover all bases.

**** 2019 update —-  Organic listings and traffic from Google is still the gift that keeps on giving.  Getting top rankings is more important than ever.   Also, it’s the same thing where sometimes you must do paid ads if you want any traffic because you dont have good enough organic listings.   

Also you might have top rankings for most of your keywords, but you still might want to do some paid advertising if you really want to be aggressive and get more brand recognition.

SEO for Lawyers in 2019 Conclusion

The key in 2019 for Lawyers who want to do Attorney SEO Marketing, which by the way should be literally 100% of all lawyers.  The key is that you first want to make sure that Google trusts your Brand.

Your brand name is your firm name, SO you want to get your brand out there in a number of ways.

With link building, you want to make sure that the anchor text of the links pointing to your site are your brand name and going to your home page.

Then once you build up your authority and trust with Google, then you can create some Power Pages and then get more links that point to these pages.  Then you will want to some partial and exact match anchor text but not that many and not until you first establish your brand and home page links.

This can take 6-12 months or more and is a never-ending process.    One thing you want to focus on with your main pages is to create a lot of visuals like images, videos and infographics.   If you are a personal injury attorney, you want to create visuals to explain how the personal injury process works.

Google AdWords for Lawyers: Example of how to save money for Law Firm Ads

By Leave a Comment

Adwords for Law Firms – How to Save Money on Campaigns

Google Adwords is the main way your going to do Pay Per Click Marketing for attorneys usually.   Its a pretty simple thing where you pay Google to show your ads when a user does a search for your practice area keywords.

Is Google AdWords worth if for solo lawyers and small law firms? YES! 100% for sure if done right, you will get new potential clients contacting you.

Yet many lawyers will waste 1000’s of dollars because the campaign is not setup right. There are a lot of different options with Adwords and the problem comes when your bidding on SUPER PRICEY Keywords for Lawyers.  Personal Injury, Bankruptcy, Family Law and a few others are really really expensive.  I mean its no big deal if your paying 40 cents a click BUT if your paying $30-200 per click, then it get get bad really quick.

Ive seen a lot of lawyer campaigns where they are bidding way to high, or not setting a budget, or bidding only on broad match keywords and a number of other things that will make your campaign not a winning one.

*** Here are a few TIPS to make your lawyer AdWords account work better.

#1-  Setup Conversions in your AdWords campaign to measure the ROI of your campaign.

#2- For Every Ad, have a Landing Page that fits the keywords you are bidding. Do not use the HOME Page.

#3- Organize your campaign into different AdGroups

#4- Have at least THREE Ads for each Adgroup

#5- Research your competitors to see what Keywords they are using

RECENT CAMPAIGN FOR LAWYER USING GOOGLE ADWORDS – Huge increase in Impressions, Clicks & Lower Costs

I had a lawyer client recently who wasnt thrilled with the last couple of months of Google adwords advertising because they spent about $2000 and only had one conversion and no real leads.  This is what can happen when your bidding on personal injury or car accident terms.

Lawyers will bid as high as $200 per click, Ive seen it as high as $721 and Im sure someone will pay $1000 per click if they feel it will lead to a new client.

SO with this lawyers campaign at Adwords, I was able to login and review it and could see a few issues right away that could be improved. Some of the issues that I saw:

  • The bidding strategy was setup so that Google would decide on the bid and the max bid was set to $75

  • The landing pages were almost ALL the sites home page instead of practice specific pages.

  • No contact form on the landing page

  • Broad Match keywords resulting in searches that were not related to personal injury

—> Numbers from Previous Adwords Campaign for 12 day period…..  (7/23 – 08/03/18)

(Practice Area Campaign #1…)

—> Total Impressions = 389   (The ads didnt really run much because the budget was spent so quick after just 1-2 keyword clicks)

—> Total Clicks =  7

—> Avg Cost Per Click = $35.00

—> Conversions = 0

—> Total spend = $230.00

 ****************************************

(Personal Injury Campaign #2…)

—> Total Impressions = 777

—> Total Clicks =  12

—> Avg Cost Per Click = $40.00 ……

—> Conversions = 0

—> Total spend = $474 + 230 = $704.00

So here you can see they spent $704 on ONLY 19 clicks from those two campaigns. Since they cost $35-40 per click, it was more expensive and the campaigns had to be shut down early and why the impressions are lower.      Then the even bigger issue was the ZERO conversions.

19 Clicks for $704  vs. 110 Clicks for $515 

I created a new Campaign with multiple adgroups and ads.  Instantly the cost per click went from $35-150 down to $2-15 tops. Also because the past campaign was setup so the price was so high, the ads stopped running and the total impressions were low.

New Campaign I setup for PI keywords and that has run for past 12 days…

—> Total Impressions = 4,300 

—> Total Clicks =  110 

—> Avg Cost Per Click = $4.95 

—> Conversions = 2

—> Total spend = $515 

BETTER RESULTS IN 2 WEEKS – Lawyer PPC Marketing

* Impressions went from 1000 to 4000 over same 2 week period.

* Clicks went from 19 to 110 over same period

* Total cost was lower ($515 vs. $704) and Per Click went from $40 to $5.

Then even better the campaign got 2 conversions and a number of phone call clicks.  So this is an example of how you can #1 lower the overall cost and #2 Improve the Google Quality Score and conversion rate.

Google AdWords for Lawyers 

If your law firm needs assistance with Pay Per Click Marketing or Google AdWords assistance, please contact us for a Free Estimate.

[Contact_Form_Builder id=”15″]

 

4 Reasons a High Google Adscore Will Save Your Law Firm Money

By Leave a Comment

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:

  • Locations

  • Business contact info

  • Star ratings

  • 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

Let us help you create a new PPC account at adwords OR fix an existing account.   Do you think your account could be working better? We will take a look and run a free PPC analysis and let you know what your doing right and wrong, and what your competitors are doing, exactly.

—> Call us at 312-620-6190

[Contact_Form_Builder id=”13″]

Google Adwords Quality Score (QS) Explained

By Leave a Comment

Google Adwords Marketing for Lawyers

Quality Score, aka QS is super key when it comes down to how the whole Google adwords formula works.     

Just because you spend the most money, doesnt always mean you are going to be #1 when bidding at Google adwords. ‘

Google adwords is actually now known as Google Ads but either way its the main pay per click marketing option most lawyers would use in order to drive traffic to the firms website and landing pages.    There are many things that go into doing a Google adwords campaign and its really easy to mess it up and if your bidding on high dollar keywords, which most lawyers are, then it makes sense to bring in a pro that has been doing Google adwords marketing for years and is familiar with everything that goes into it.    The main factor is your QS or Google Quality Score.

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 (notice how I said “click”, not “conversion”).

HOW GOOGLE ADWORDS WORKS – ITS NOT WHO BIDS THE MOST

If you look at the graphic below, it shows how 4 different advertisers would be ranked based on factors like how much the max bid is, the quality score and then ad rank to determine the actual amount spent per click.     The main thing to notice here is how advertiser #1 has the lowest max  bid, but a high QS. So the bottom line is that they are only paying $1.61 as the #1 advertiser for that keyword, where the advertiser #3 had a max bid of $6 and wound up paying $4.01 as the #3 spot.   Doesnt seem to make sense but it comes down to the formula that I will explain and really its all about the QS, if you can get this higher, you will pay less no matter what.

—>  The Max Bid TIMES the Quality Score = AD Rank

—> Then the CPC = The Ad Rank of competitor below you / Your Quality Score + 0.01

SO in the example above, the #1 person is bidding $2 times his 10 QS = Ad Rank of 20

Then his cost is 16/10 + 0.01 = $1.61.

It call comes down the QS and getting that higher. First here is some basics on Google Quality Scores for lawyers.

Let’s start with the GQS basics…

Any time that someone searches a term in Google, AdWords may show ad campaigns above and to the side of the organic search results.  I say “may” because ads will only be shown if advertisers are interested in bidding on the keyword contained in the search term.

With AdWords, the ads are ordered based on their “Ad rank.”

 

Your ad’s ad rank is composed of 2 factors: how much you bid (cost per click – CPC) and your quality score.

The quality score is Google’s best guess at how useful your landing page is for the searcher of that search term. This can be understood as the ad relevance. It’s composed of many different factors.

Since it depends on the specific keyword searched, your landing page will get an individual quality score for each keyword in your advertising campaign. Usually they will cluster around one specific number (from 1 to 10), but sometimes you’ll see significant variation in quality score.

—> Read more on PPC Marketing for Attorneys

—> Free PPC and Google Adwords Analysis for Lawyers

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.

—> Read the full article on Google Quality Score

Google Adwords for Law Firms – Free Analysis

Google PPC For Lawyers

Let us help you create a new PPC account at adwords OR fix an existing account.   Do you think your account could be working better? We will take a look and run a free PPC analysis and let you know what your doing right and wrong, and what your competitors are doing, exactly.

Call us at 312-620-6190

—> Read more on PPC Marketing for Attorneys

—> Free PPC and Google Adwords Analysis for Lawyers

[Contact_Form_Builder id=”15″]

Pay Per Click Marketing for Lawyers, Worth It?

By Leave a Comment

Lawyer Google Adwords Marketing

PPC for Lawyers, Good Idea?? –> YES 100% for Sure, if Done Right!

Pay per click marketing for law firms is just another way to bring potential clients to your website.   Yet for some lawyers., its the only way!  Yet really you should always be doing something towards organic and local SEO for lawyers. It just makes sense when your paying $77 a click, or even higher.  I had a lawyer the other day have some bids at over $170!   This is what happens when you do personal injury PPC marketing for lawyers, it gets really really pricey.  So does Bankruptcy Law, Family Law, DUI, Criminal Defense and many others.   That doesnt mean your going to get a ton of cases if you decide to also bid, you might but its going to cost for sure and you have to test out things to see what works best.

Lawyers Google Adwords Marketing

We have helped many lawyers save big money on adwords advertising. Contact us today for a Free Adwords Review.

Google Adwords for Lawyers Done Right

A lot of lawyers and other businesses try to do Google adwords with not the greatest success.  Most of the time they are making one of many PPC mistakes such as:

  • Allowing Google to choose how much they will pay for you so they can Maximize Clicks

  • Doing only Broad Match keywords… Which is the default and seems like the right thing to do, yet its not big time

  • Not setting up Conversion Tracking or Performance Goals

  • Putting all the keywords into one campaign and one ad group

  • Not bidding on the right keywords, or enough keywords

  • Using the HOME PAGE as the Landing page, on every ad!

  • Choosing a super high of an amount to bid and as a budget.

This list can go on and on.  Its really easy to mess up Google adwords or just not set it up right.  This is why you have to constantly monitor it and check the results and how much you are paying per click.     You also need to make sure that you have a high Google Quality Score and this is done in a variety of ways but mainly via a great landing page

—> Read more on PPC Marketing for Attorneys

—> Free PPC and Google Adwords Analysis for Lawyers

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.

—> Read the full article on Google Quality Score

Google AdWords for Law Firms Tips

Google adwords is not the only game in town.  Instead of competing with everyone for the right to be #1 and spend $99 a click, why not instead goto Bing and take that $99-999 you just saved and invest it in a PPC campaign here? Usually the keywords are cheaper and you can make your budget last longer.   Not always the best conversions but really you never know where your next client is coming from.   You want to be covered and you really need to be everywhere these days.  Local, organic, video, Facebook, twitter, Youtube!

So at Google adwords you want to make sure your doing keyword research and checking out your competitors for starters.

** PPC Marketing Tip #2 for Lawyers 

—> If your competitors have been doing Google adwords pay per click marketing for years, odds are they have figured it out and its working. SO you can easily find out what they have been bidding on, how much they are spending, the exact ad copy and much more.    You can also figure out what keywords are working best and which ones you should be bidding on.  *** We can tell you EXACTLY what the ads and keywords are ***

Google Adwords for Law Firms – Free Analysis

Let us help you create a new PPC account at adwords OR fix an existing account.   Do you think your account could be working better? We will take a look and run a free PPC analysis and let you know what your doing right and wrong, and what your competitors are doing, exactly.

Call us at 312-620-6190

[Contact_Form_Builder id=”13″]

Google AdWords Has New Enhanced Campaigns

By Leave a Comment

GOOGLE PPC FOR LAWYERS

Google announced an upgrade to AdWords called Enhanced Campaigns that will allow advertisers to target consumers more efficiently with ads based on context like location, device type, and time of the day, in a single campaign.

Enhanced Campaigns have three main features:

  • Campaign and budget management: An advertiser with a local presence could increase bids based on context, such as the location of the user or to adjust for device (e.g., “if this query is from mobile device, increase bid by 10%”). Bid adjustments will be found in the campaigns settings tab.
  • Ads Based on Context: Advertisers will be able to differentiate mobile preferred creative where an ad would appear if the query is from a mobile device. This would take into consideration the capabilities of the device – such as whether the device can download apps or make phone calls. Mobile preferred creative will be a type of ad selection in AdWords.
  • New conversion types: This will integrate phone calls from click-to-call and app downloads in AdWords reports. It will be easier to see the full value of campaigns across actions and from new platforms. Phone calls and app downloads will be additional columns as a conversion in reporting.

Why enhanced campaigns? (From Google Blog)
People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.

This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.

This all sounds good but it does seem like you can’t control certain things as well. Also this is a big thing for MOBILE because the ads will be shown to people on mobile devices by default. Also there are new ad extensions you can use that seem pretty exciting, like offers you can put with your ads and many other things.  This means for one you better have a mobile version of your site setup!