75 Most Expensive Legal PPC Keywords

With the cost of each click being so high, it’s crucial that you are sending visitors to a page that gives you the best chance at converting your website visitors into actual leads and clients. One of the biggest mistakes that law firms make is spending amounts of money to send traffic to a website or landing page that has poor conversion rates. Don’t make the same mistakes. If you want to maximize your conversion rates, be sure that you are sending your visitors to a page that maximizes conversion rates. To increase conversion rates, make sure you are A/B testing all your ad campaigns and striving to constantly improve your ad performance.

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The click heat map graphic below gives us insight into where the participants in our study actually clicked. Each participant was asked to click on 3 links on the page that they would click on if they had conducted this search. The percentage of clicks for each result on the page shows you the exact breakdown each position earned in the study.

Summary of Key Findings

• 41% of clicks went to paid listings (the first 5 positions on the page, all which were paid, accounted for 40% of clicks)
• 22% of clicks went to organic maps results
• 31% of clicks went to maps results if you include the paid map listing
• 31% of clicks went to organic search results
• 16% went to the #1 organic position (the highest percentage of clicks for any result on the page)

Important Takeaways for Your Law Firm

1. Smarter ad types with better quality ads will earn more clicks. Take a look at the 3rd paid listing on the image above. Even though it is in the 3rd highest position on the page, it only received 2% of clicks! Even with such a large percentage of consumers clicking on paid ads these days, simply having ads running doesn’t mean you are going to have success. Google Ads are much more complex than they have been in the past and it takes someone who really knows what they are doing to be running your firm’s ads on Google. If you aren’t A/B testing your ads on a regular basis to look for ways to improve performance, you’re not running an efficient campaign. The ad landscape is constantly changing and you should be trying to fine tune your performance on a regular basis.
2. You should be creating smarter content on your website on a consistent basis in order to target more search phrases. When I look at the search results here, I notice that even the results that are appearing high on the page organically are still very far down on the page. The #2 organic result here is actually the 10th item down the page, no wonder why it only got 5% of clicks! Focusing only on the most obvious search phrases (personal injury lawyer, car accident lawyer, etc.) is an outdated way of thinking. Smarter marketers will create content that answers users questions related to their situation. Here at iLawyer, we use a combination of historical keyword data, competitive intelligence, keyword research, proprietary software that utilizes Machine Learning in order to generate smarter content ideas for our clients.
3. Good reviews are still highly important to able to appear in Google Maps listings. It is also highly important to consumers who are looking not only at your star rating but also at the number of reviews you have. Both factors impact your CTR (Click Through Rate). Make sure you are providing EXCELLENT service to the clients you represent and ask them to leave you reviews on Google. While it’s against Yelp’s TOS to ask for reviews, it’s not against Google’s policy. These days consumers are going to leave reviews and they are much more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one, so don’t give them a reason to give you a poor review. As the chart below shows, nearly 88% of consumers want a law firm to have 4 stars or higher so make sure you are paying attention to your online reviews.
   
4. If budget allows in 2020, you should be doing both Google Ads and SEO in order to give yourself the best opportunity to consistently generate cases online. The days of consumers avoiding clicking on paid ads are long gone as a result of Google improving the relevancy of ads and of course Google increasing visibility of paid ads and pushing organics lower on the page. If you aren’t running paid ads, you are missing out on a significant percentage of consumers searching for lawyers online as 40% is a huge number to be missing out on.So what kind of budget is needed to run paid campaigns? That depends on the market you are in. As we have talked about in the past, the price you pay per click can be very expensive. In some of the medium to larger markets in the country, aggressive advertisers will often spend between $50,000-$250,000 a month on paid search (or more). While you don’t need to spend that much, you will typically need to spend at least $10,000 a month or more to get good results although this can be less in softer markets. But if the average cost per click is $100, a $10,000 budget only gets you 100 clicks! SEO on the other hand on average will start at $5-10k a month in a competitive market (less expensive in less competitive markets) and generally provides a much better “Cost per Click” average as long as you have agreat law firm SEO company running your campaign.

Note: The click test image and reviews chart above are taken from our latest study that analyzes how consumers choose lawyers online in 2019-2020. We will be releasing more details of this study at MTMP in October so please contact us if you would like to learn about the study findings.

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1. When you need leads right away

With a PPC campaign, you can have a campaign up and running and generating leads in as little as 24 hours! As a Google Adwords Premier Partner, we have a personal rep at Google that provides us great insight as well as data and metrics that most other providers do not have. That’s a pretty big deal. While SEO is often highly effective, a search engine optimization campaign will take time (several months to over a year depending on the level of competition). When you need business right away, running a smart PPC campaign is the way to go.

2. You want to test before engaging in SEO

You may be considering testing out a new geographic market place or a new type of case to go after and are unsure whether it will work or not. Before engaging in a long term SEO project, running a Pay Per Click campaign can often be a great way to experiment and find out if this is something you want to pursue.

3. You need keyword data

Several years ago, Google removed keyword level data from Google Analytics so these days you can’t see the keywords that send traffic to your website. Running a Google Adwords campaign can be a great way to get valuable keyword level impression data that can help to prioritize the most important keywords in your SEO efforts.

4. You want to generate more calls

Google now offers a type of ad called Call Extensions on mobile devices where instead of visiting your website the user calls your law firm. For law firms that prefer call-leads over form-leads, this can be a great way to quickly generate more phone call leads for your law firm. Given that mobile traffic numbers continues to climb every single year, that can be a great way to market your law firm.

5. When you want to target very specifically

If you have very specific keywords that you want to be found for, running an “Exact Match” AdWords campaign can achieve exactly that. This allows you to serve your ads to potential clients who search for your exact keyword or very close variants. You may also want to target a specific geo-area for where your ads display. This is known as radius targeting. Running Facebook ads, you can even target specific business addresses like hospitals, chiropractors, etc.

The post PPC vs SEO for Lawyers in 2017: When is Paid Search better than SEO? appeared first on Internet Marketing for Lawyers.

Those look a lot less like traditional ads which would likely result in more click throughs. You can see a “sponsored” text in grey in the top right of those ads but many web users won’t even notice that because it doesn’t exactly stand out. Compare that to the normal text ads where you see a green “ad” notification next to each ad.

In the test ads you will also notice a “Google guaranteed”checkmark next to each paid listing. This is part of an advanced verification process that Google is currently using for certain local service businesses such as plumbers and locksmiths. Will Google require some kind of verification process for law firms? We will have to wait and see.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Google testing local map pack ads. Back in June at SMX, Joy Hawkins tweeted out a screenshot of a single ad that was displayed at the top of the 3-pack:

Joy was also the one who tweeted out a picture of this current test Google is running.

What specific type of map ads Google ends up using we don’t know for sure yet but what you can count on is local map pack ads coming soon. Considering the importance of map pack visibility to law firms, it’s no doubt one type of Google ad you need to consider using when it is available. We will have more info on this as changes occur.

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Top 20 Highest Priced PPC Keywords for Attorneys

Feel free to hover over the bar charts to see CPC or simply browse the table below the chart.

Below the table shows the top 75 most expensive law related Adword costs.

The cost for a single click to your site can sometimes be enormous depending on the keyword you are bidding on.

To put these numbers into perspective, the majority of the PPC campaigns we manage are for personal injury lawyers and our average click cost for the year is currently $27.

As this sunburst chart below shows (hovering over it triggers tool tip information), Texas, California, Arizona and Pennsylvania clearly have aggressive marketers going after personal injury related keywords!

The original study, which looked at millions of keywords, was conducted by Emperical Proof and used SEMrush data to find the 100 most expensive Google Adwords keywords. To be clear, this means that these numbers are only an estimate and is not actual data from Google Adwords campaigns . SEMrush uses a formula to estimate CPC costs that takes into account CTR multiplied by search volume and then multiplied again by the average Cost Per Click. Without having access to Google analytics they cannot account for Quality Score which does factor in to actual PPC costs. Even though it’s not actual Google Adwords data, it is still helpful and does provide a good idea of what click charges may be in a given market.

Does this mean you shouldn’t do PPC?

No, but what it should tell you is that you should have someone who is truly an expert with extensive experience managing law firm PPC campaigns running your campaign. Even in this set of results above we see some keywords that you would not want to be paying for (at least at that price) if you were a personal injury lawyer. It pretty common knowledge in the legal marketing space that mesothelioma related searches have always been one of the most expensive keywords, but at nearly $1,000 for a single click that’s still simply shocking. And Texas really loves those truck accident keywords don’t they? If the keywords you’re bidding on priced too high then you should have a smarter strategy in place so that you are not wasting all your campaign budget in a matter of a few clicks.

With competition for Pay Per Click (as well as law firm SEO) tougher than it has ever been and click charges so high, it’s especially important that you are conducting A/B tests on your PPC campaigns to make sure you are maximizing click-throughs and conversion rates. This will help make sure you are getting the most bang for your PPC spend.

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While a very select few (I can count them on one hand) do a fantastic job of running smart and efficient campaigns, the vast majority of law firms are wasting marketing budget dollars and most importantly missing out on potential new clients through improperly run paid campaigns. Competition among lawyers is very tough, so unless you have someone that really knows that they are doing handling your campaign it’s not going to be very productive for you.

Running a Google Adwords campaign and running an efficient and successful one are two very different things. 

With the time our team spends analyzing search results and paid search campaigns every day, we see a lot of the mistakes being made and money being wasted by law firms around the country. To be fair, it’s not always the law firms themselves who are managing these poorly run PPC campaigns. Often times agencies who are managing the campaigns don’t take the time to make sure they are maximizing the PPC budgets they are responsible for or simply don’t know how to run one successfully.

Should I hire someone in-house or go through an outside agency?

Maybe you are a lawyer who realizes you shouldn’t be running paid search campaigns yourself but are considering hiring someone in-house to manage this for you. If you are spending a very large amount on Adwords each month, no doubt this is something to consider. The average salary according to Payscale for a PPC manager is $48,292 a year which comes out to $4,049  a month. Of course for someone who is really good you are going to be paying a lot more than that. The average cost that agencies charge to manage PPC is 15-20% depending on monthly campaign spend. So with a 15% management fee, you would need to be spending $26,993 a month to equal that $4,049 monthly salary. Of course that doesn’t include payroll taxes, etc. so really that monthly cost to your business is actually higher to have someone in-house.  However, your average PPC manager is not going to be able to compete with agencies who have many more assets available to them to help maximize the efficiency of campaigns, including software, keyword data sets, web designers, programmers, CRO (conversion rate optimization) experts and experience managing many campaigns to help understand what works and what doesn’t work. For most law firms, hiring someone in-house is not the best option.

How to choose the right company to manage my Google Adwords campaign?

There are a number of things that are vital components of running successful campaigns. The company you hire to run your paid search campaigns should have or be doing all the following:

Experience managing PPC for law firms

While experience alone should not be the reason you hire someone to manage your PPC, it is important that someone has extensive experience running successful paid search campaigns. Even more important is experience within the legal industry and having a deep understanding of what works and what doesn’t work. Whether it’s personal injury, criminal law, family law, bankruptcy or anything else in legal, you can be sure it’s highly competitive and keywords in the legal industry are among the most expensive in all of paid search. When a single keyword can cost hundreds of dollars, you better make sure the company managing your campaign really knows that they are doing. If you are a criminal lawyer for example, do you really want to show up for keywords like this below? No, you do not.

Utilizing Research & Data

Understanding how to properly research the right keywords to use in your campaign is another critical component of running smart and efficient campaigns. Take a look at Google’s suggested bid amount for the search term “Houston personal injury lawyer”. Not exactly cheap, right?

While there are plenty of law firms that spend $25,000-$50,000 a month (and more) on Google Adwords, most law firms don’t have that kind of budget. So how do you compete with the law firms that have much larger budgets than you do? The PPC management agency running your campaign should be smarter about the campaigns you run and what keywords your ads show up for (or don’t show up for!)

Conduct Testing

Successful campaigns don’t begin and end with simply selecting the right keywords to run. Equally as important is to make sure you are testing which ads perform best in order to maximize click-through rates and lower your cost per click. The best Google Adwords agencies also conduct A/B testing on your landing pages to help improve conversion rates and to maximize performance of your campaigns. Will a different tagline help improve conversions? How about a different image? Will a picture of the attorney smiling as the main landing page image produce better results then an office staff picture? You don’t know unless you test!

Understanding how to properly conduct these tests is key to helping your campaign perform better.

Data Analysis

What is working and not working? Why? What ads perform the best? Which ads get the highest click throughs? Which pages convert best? Does video help conversion? Can video hurt conversion? What do users think about your website? What do site visitors think about your site compared to your competitor websites.

Analyzing the data can provides mountains of invaluable insights and information. Knowing what to look in the data analysis process is crucial to making your campaigns work.

Image: Click heat map test to see what ads earn the highest click throughs for a specific keyword 

Questions?

Let us know if you have questions, we’d be happy to answer them for you.

The post Should I manage Google Adwords in-house or hire a PPC specialist? appeared first on Internet Marketing for Lawyers.