Marketing Tips For Your Law Firm: PPC Services

In this series of articles, we’ll discuss how your law firm marketing strategy can benefit from obtaining SEO services, participating in pay-per-click advertising, improving local search rankings, implementing a content marketing plan, and how lawyers can, in fact, grow their law firms with these marketing strategies.

Our first article covered SEO services. Next, we’ll address how PPC services can grow your law firm.

How Can PPC Services Help My Law Firm Grow?

PPC or pay-per-click advertising is a marketing tactic where you buy ads on a major search engine or social media network that link to your website. These ads may look like any other search engine listing, but unlike SEO, their high-profile, top-of-the-page position isn’t earned. It’s paid for.

Where using SEO was a bit like being listed in the 21st century version of the phone book, PPC is like having a billboard at a busy intersection in pre-digital times.  

Here are three ways PPC services can help your law firm grow.

Build your law firm’s brand online.

One of the most powerful benefits of PPC is its ability to help law firms and small businesses build brand awareness online. In 2014, Google reported paid search efforts improved consumer’s “top-of-mind” awareness by more than 6 percent. (Google, 2014).

Other benefits of PPC for brand building are that branded keywords are often inexpensive. Also, branded PPC visitors to your website not only tend to stay on a website longer, they also convert into customers at a higher rate.

Best of all branded PPC allows you to control more of what is said about you on the first page of an online search. In a time when online reviews rule, and in a service industry where the stakes are high, negative if not malicious online reviews are a reality. PPC gives law firms territory above, or in a higher position than, online review sites like Yelp!

Benefit from the trickle down effect of PPC.

PPC can also support other law firm marketing strategies your practice may employ like SEO.

For example, studies show a PPC ad high on a search results page can give more clout to your search engine optimized (SEO) website pages or articles also listed further down in the search results.

The eye naturally reads from top to bottom, so first, the searcher’s eye will find on your PPC ad – they are usually at the top of the page. Then as they scroll down the results. The more often they see your business name or content, the more likely they will be to click your paid or organic listing.

The best part? The searcher may never click on your paid ad – just your organic listing. That means, your ad worked for you without costing you any money. Congrats!

Make an impact fast, and get results that are measurable.

Perhaps most importantly, PPC provides some essential important benefits other marketing strategies just can’t offer.

For example, PPC is fast! Once you have an ad account with some ads and keywords set up, you simply activate it. That’s it. It is live and working hard for your firm. With other marketing tactics like content marketing and SEO, it can take months to see a return on your efforts.

PPC also provides valuable information about the people who are searching for your services. A PPC campaign can tell you when, where and how an individual is searching for and finding you. This information will help you not only refine your PPC ad campaigns to be more efficient, it may inform other law firm marketing strategies you choose to develop.

Next Steps

We recommend starting your first PPC campaign on Google Adwords or Facebook since they are the most widely used. Set up an account, create a basic ad with your business name, location and contact information, and make it live!

If you are concerned about the stigma attached to over-advertising a law practice, creating a PPC ad campaign that reads more like a business listing in a directory will still help you build your presence online, establishing brand awareness, while you navigate your concerns about advertising.

Having said that, authenticity matters. You may also consider creating a couple of these “listings” that use a partner or established lawyer’s personal brand – their name – not just the law firm’s.

Law firm marketing is not like marketing for other industries. If you don’t have time to establish your firm’s PPC accounts – branded or otherwise, Above the Fold Media provides PPC services. Learn more about what we can offer your law firm today.