Legal Marketing Articles

Posts Tagged ‘ppc’

Creating Landing Pages for a Legal PPC Campaign

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

Creating Effective PPC Landing Pages

If you run PPC campaigns or email marketing campaigns, landing pages are critical to your success. In fact, landing pages are critical to organic search engine marketing, press releases, and just about all Internet marketing efforts. It is important that you create landing pages for your campaigns that are constructed to improve the conversion rate of your efforts. Here are a couple of tactics to help you improve your landing pages and marketing efforts.

Tactic #1:
Know when to simplify the contents of the page.  Some direct response practitioners like an exciting – if not circus-like – atmosphere in a landing page; however this does not always help the conversion rate of your program.  In today’s “”give-it-to-me quick-or-I’m-out-of-here”" world, you need to keep your landing page focused and pretty simple. Help the visitor digest what you are offering quickly and easily. Use short paragraphs and bullet points. Offer crisp value propositions to readers that play off the question in their mind, which is: “”Why should I take the action you want me to take?”

Tactic #2:
Also, be sure to offer multiple calls to action on the page.  Some people click on the first link they see on a landing page. Others read for long stretches before they take action. Have links at the top, bottom and in between. Make it easy for visitors to take action whenever they’re ready. Track everything. Try to custom tag each link so you know which ones are used the most. This will come in handy for the next time. If you have a multi-stage process like a survey, shopping cart, or registration form, see where you lose people and work on that.

You’ve spent good money getting people to your landing page. You might as well take a few extra steps to make your campaign as effective as possible.

Read the articles below for a crash course in law firm PPC. Then check out posts on legal PPC from our Best Legal Marketing Blog for more info.

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Legal PPC Basics

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

Legal Pay-Per-Click Basics

What is PPC? How do you use Adwords? If you are feeling lost in the world of search marketing, we can help. Here is a quick guide to all the basic lingo you’ll need to know for your legal search marketing campaign.

What is the difference between organic and paid search?

Paid search ads are typically shown on the top or right hand side of a search engine results page. In many instances they will appear when you search for a brand, product or service. These are also called “”sponsored ads”".

Natural search depends on how relevant the content is on your website in relation to a search term. In doing this, search engines run websites through their algorithm to determine which site has the most authority on a topic. Natural search results take up the majority of a search engine results page, and often attract much more traffic than the paid ads.

What is PPC?
With PPC, you pay for your firm’s ad to appear in the sponsored listings. Every time a customer clicks on your ad, your firm pays for that click. The price of a click is often determined by a bid-based system where advertisers specify how much they are willing to spend.

What is CTR?
Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions).

Keywords are the terms customers search for. Advertisers bid on how much they would pay for a particular keyword to result in an ad that is clicked on by customers. This is called keyword bidding.

Ad Impressions are reported any time that an ad is displayed. Ideally, you want more than an ad to be seen – you want it to be clicked on. Because of this fact, many ads have a pay-per-click payment structure.

Display URL is the website address displayed within your ad. It is often a shorter version of the destination URL that is used to improve click-through-rates and eliminate long URLs with too many characters.

Now that you have an idea of some popular advertising lingo, you are on your way to starting an online advertising campaign. Each of the main search engines have PPC advertising programs that could help your firm: Google Adwords and Microsoft Ad Center are two of the big ones. Google still leads the market in the amount of traffic it receives and has revolutionized the way PPC works. However, they are constantly changing the way they rank sites, so you need to stay on your toes.

Read the articles below for a crash course in law firm PPC. Then check out posts on legal PPC from our Best Legal Marketing Blog for more info.

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How to Convert Legal Assistance Calls to Loyal Paying Customers

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Legal marketing budget can run into several thousand dollars a month. This may include everything from tv ads, direct mail, email marketing, PPC, SEO, advertisements in local publications, seminars, yellow pages, directories or other kinds of online and offline media. When your firm’s phone starts ringing as a result of your marketing efforts, you are ecstatic and consider your marketing investment to be money well spent.

But is it really?

Not until you master the art of turning those phone calls into money in your pocket. Unfortunately, many of you are losing a whole lot of coin because you are investing in marketing without making the same investment in conversion.

Fortunately, converting leads into clients won’t cost you much more money than you are already spending to attract those leads, but it does require an upfront investment of your time and energy. Best yet, once you get it down, your lead to client conversion process can run without your involvement. The place to start is to get a crystal clear understanding of where you are right now. Here’s what you’ll want to do:

1. Over the next month, make a commitment to collect the metrics data you would need to track your numbers.
2. Have whoever answers your phones log every phone call.
3. Require that all inquiries be recorded on a prospect intake form, which captures how the person heard of you, all of their contact information, specifics about their situation and whether they made an appointment.
4. Use a spreadsheet to track how many actually made it in for their appointment and finally how many of those callers became paying clients after meeting with you or the other attorneys of your firm.

Each week, sit down with your team and review your lead to prospect conversion number (this is the number of phone calls you received that turned into appointments) and your prospect to client conversion number (this is the number of appointments made that turned into clients). If these numbers are not both at least 75%, don’t spend any more marketing dollars until you fix your client engagement problem because otherwise you are pouring money down the drain. There is NO POINT in spending money on marketing if you are not doing as well as you can to convert your prospects into paying clients once they pick up the phone to call your office.

Here are a few diagnostic clues to find the “leak” where your prospects may be getting away during the client engagement process:

  • Your phone is not being answered in the correct way
  • There is no system to follow up with prospects who want more information
  • There is no system to follow up with prospects in the time period between when they make an appointment and come in to your office for their appointment
  • You are not following a script during your client engagement meeting

Well begun is half done! Make a good start by collecting hard numbers on what’s actually happening in your office so you’ll be ready for the fixes as they are presented and understand which fix you need to focus on. You may be quite surprised by what you discover once you begin collecting your numbers.

We can take for example the NJ criminal defense lawyers of Benedict & Altman who have started focusing on optimizing their website to convert more leads into customers. With a site that includes several calls to action for visitors to  email and phone the firm, they are set-up to win in terms of gathering leads. Now, they just need to follow the steps above to convert those leads into customers.

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Posted in FAQs, Internet Marketing, Lead Capture, Strategies that Work | 1 Comment »

Pay-Per-Click Search Marketing

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Let’s discuss two types of search results: organic versus pay-per-click, or PPC.  Organic search results rely on your website content and the code behind it, plus other techniques on the more technical-side, to get you to the top of search results.   PPC, on the other hand, lets you pay to be featured on search engine result pages.

PPC has been reported to be more successful in attracting page viewers over the short term, although other processes have more longevity.   Ideally, it’s best to have a solid page that is optimized for search engines, backed with a marketing effort that targets social media and other outlets, combined with PPC efforts to achieve maximum visibility for your law firm online.

It’s a multi-pronged attack, but once you learn the logic behind each process, it all makes sense.

How PPC Works

In order to use PPC, you must bid* on the keywords you want to target. For lawyers, it is good practice to bid on keywords that are geographical; for example, if you’re a lawyer based in Dallas, TX, it’s in your best interests to bid on keywords that include “Dallas.”  It’s highly unlikely that a woman seeking a divorce lawyer who resides in New York is going to be interested in hiring a lawyer based in Texas; utilizing local keywords lets your most likely leads find you much more easily and weeds out clients that you won’t be able to help, thus saving you further time and money. 

An experienced marketing organization is your best bet for this type of campaign.  These professionals can monitor your results and will be able to choose the best keywords for your legal niche and target customer base to ensure you get the most bang for your buck.

Benefits of Pay-Per-Click

PPC provides you with nearly-instant results for your investment; your site will likely see a boost in visitors almost right away once you implement PPC.  It’s a quick way to generate new leads and attract clients away from un-sponsored competitor links. 

Your marketing manager will be able to see where visitors are coming from, what keywords get the most attention and provide the most cost-effective solution, and use that information to help you get the most possible leads.

*Some organizations don’t use a bidding process; they will establish a flat rate; however, the big operators who offer PPC all currently operate on a bid-based model.

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Posted in Pay-Per-Click | 2 Comments »