Is your law firm guilty of these costly Google Adwords mistakes?
Google AdWords offers a wealth of targeting opportunities for any small business looking to gain visibility online and attract new leads. But law firms in particular stand to benefit greatly from the digital advertising platform because of the extremely high volume of online search in the legal industry.
Of course, the numbers do fluctuate but by and large, law firm search maintains very high search volumes from personal injury to estate planning to criminal defense.
Google leveraged that volume to drive traffic to your firm’s site through powerful targeting options via Google AdWords. The problem is because of that high level of volume, cost for clicks in the law firm search space is prohibitively high with a single click costing more than $75 in some cases.
But there are indeed ways to drive down that cost, and firms across the law space would do well to observe them. Here are three common mistakes firms make when implementing Google AdWords campaigns that drive up the costs and drain your pockets:
1) Linking to The Home Page: One of the most common mistakes most law firms make is linking their Google AdWords ad to their homepage. The problem with this approach is that most home pages are rather generic and general in nature. With mobile search and voice search taking over Google traffic flow, online queries are getting more and more specific. Also, Google ads typically don’t allow enough characters to include every practice area of most attorneys or firms, so creating textual synergy with the home page is difficult because most focus in on one and only one specialty.
Personal injury ads that lead to home pages that discuss medical malpractice, product liability, auto accidents and the gamut of personal injury law will return a poor score with Google in terms of content agreement, so positions on Google Search Results will be low for your search terms and costs for any clicks on that ad will be high.
Drive down costs by linking ad to a landing page created specifically for it with the exact keywords used in the ad. You’ll get better positioning and keep costs down and likely get more accurate traffic, while you’re at it.
2) Not Segregating Ads for Specificity: Google AdWords are geared to work best for those who understand how search works. The search terms that are being used to find firms like yours today aren’t likely the same as they were years ago. Keyword research (via the Google Keyword Research Tool) will help determine what keywords and phrases are getting the best volume in your space and the segregating ads into specific groups that target the various keywords that describe your practice areas will help guide the right audience to your site, which will help drive down costs for every click you receive simply because they will “bounce” from your site (leave the site quickly) less often if the site content correlates most with the search string.
Creating separate ads for child custody and child support, for instance in a family law campaign and then linking those ads to separate landing pages for each respective topic will help ensure the right audience gets to the right information on your site, which keeps costs per click down and makes Google happy to serve your ad in the top spots.
3) No Deselecting Negative Keywords: Negative keywords are those that appear in your keyword search but should not track traffic back to your firm’s site. For instance, let’s say one of your keywords is “patent attorney,” and your firm is looking for new client traffic, a list of possible negative keywords might include “Patent Attorney Jobs.” Not taking the opportunity to weed out that negative keyword would cause your campaign to pay for every click gleaned from searches for employement at your firm and not prospective clients.
Examine all the ways your keywords might be included in searches that have nothing to do with the kind of traffic you are looking to generate and you can bring down the cost per client acquisition your campaign ultimately pays.
If you would like to know more about strategic ways to promote your law firm, call Proctor Digital online visibility consultants specializing in law firm SEO and law firm marketing (312.535.3780). We have a proven track record of leveraging strategic search principles to move our clients up the rankings every day.