Monday, April 27, 2009

Law Firm PPC - Why Your Firm Hasn't Been Successful

By david wolf

Law firms like many other businesses often make a very expensive mistake when it comes to marketing law with PPC. Firms are competing in a very competitive market place where one client can be worth thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. With that kind of money at stake, there is a lot to gain or lose. Is there anything the can give your firm the edge?

The simple answer is to be better than your competition. Of course gaining those skills can take a PPC marketer years and a lot of money to be able to compete. Most legal firms decide to do there PPC internally. Often times someone suggested they need to start marketing online and mentioned google and everyone came to the consensus of adsense. The trouble is it doesn't work out to be so easy, and you are wasting your firms marketing budget. This might be a solution.

Would you recommend that a defendant represent himself in court? Why not? Because no matter how smart they are, law, and being effective in a court room is something that requires years of experience and specific knowledge to become good at. A physhics professor may be smarter than you, but he does not know how to object when a prosecutor makes an unsubstaintiated claim.

What your firm should be doing is getting an expert in the field of PPC to manage the campaign for you. The reason is the same reason a PPC expert should hire a lawyer for law advice. PPC marketers spend years honing their skills to stay competitive. Most likely you are competing against them right now if you are advertising online, and you are at a huge disadvantage. Normally a good PPC management firm would charge 15% of your marketing budget + an hourly rate to do the the testing, tweaking, and research. This is not set in stone and is merely an industry average of sorts. Often times other arrangements are made.

A good PPC expert can more than make up for the 15% budget fee. This is because they know what keywords to target, and which ones not to. They also know how to get higher in the rankings without paying more. They also know how to attract only those customers that you want to click on the ads.

This translates in to higher conversions per clicks, and only paying for the clicks that are getting conversions. Sounds like a good thing right. Because it is. A very good thing. Imagine what would happen if you were spending $5000 a month in PPC advertising online, and you could increase your conversion from getting leads from 10 clients a month, to getting leads from 20 clients per month. That is huge.

That means that you can pay more for successfull clicks, and possible even increase your advertising budget because it is so successful. Below are several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns. If you are outsourcing to a firm or specialist, they should know these facts inside and out.

Creating optimized landing pages is crucial. You want the page that the person lands on to be as relevant as possible to the search term. It makes sense to them, but Google also rewards you with a higher relevency rating, which means it costs less to appear at the top.

Testing testing testing. Very few PPC campaigns are profitble on the first day. You have to test and see what works. You should be making multiple versions of your ads, and multiple groups of ads. The more specific and niche you can get with your ads the better. See which ones perform and which ones do not. Keep the best performers and then test them against more ads.

Analytics is the most important piece of any internet marketing. Without it you do not know who is click where, or where your conversions are coming from. This is how you find out which words are being effective and which ones are not. This will let you know where to spend your money.

Keyword Research: You want to find out what your target market is searching for, and how much competition there is. You also want to know the strength of the keywords commercial intent. This means is the person using that word in the discovery phase of the decision cycle, the comparison phase, or the action phase. Start by marketing to the action phased words first. That way you can save on clicks from 15 year old mesothelioma research reports.

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