PPC, also known as search engine marketing, focuses on getting immediate traffic – and potentially, immediate leads, for your business. But – this form of marketing can be extremely expensive. The legal industry has one of the highest associated cost per clicks. Attorneys often have CPC’s ranging from as low as $15, to as high as $125-$150.
Based on past experience, it’s quite easy for lawyers to easily spend anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 on PPC, on spend that is 100% justifiable! It’s because of how expensive PPC clicks are, for lawyers. Due to this, it’s important that all possible steps be taken to curtail wasteful spend.
The first thing to take into consideration when managing a PPC campaign on behalf of a law firm is to consider your budget – and your ROI. One of the biggest blunders we see made my law firms is that their budget is not large enough (think $500-$1000). For example, if you’re in the personal injury industry, the average CPC is $100 or more. That means on a budget of $1000, you’re only going to get 8-10 clicks. If your budget isn’t high enough, PPC may not make sense for your law firm from a business standpoint. Those 10 clicks can be anyone…a competitor, your employee, your spouse, or even you! Is it really worth it? Hard to say – I guess that would depend on your conversion rate to lead, and conversion rate to case sign up. Assuming your numbers are average (3% lead conversion rate), the numbers may not make sense. On a budget of $1000, you might get 1 lead, if that.
In the case of a personal injury lawyer, that 1 lead, might be worth it, due to a potential settlement being anywhere from $XXXX to $XXX,XXX. That can be significant ROI in the hundreds, or thousands, of percents.
Bottom line, if you’re considering PPC – it has to make sense from a business stand point. If it doesn’t make sense, you need to either increase your budget or evaluate other mediums of advertising that may make more sense.
If you decide that PPC does make sense for your business – your next focus should be on picking the right keywords. One of the most common mistakes is not understanding the difference between broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match, and exact match. When doing PPC, make sure you setup conversion tracking. In this day and age, it’s possible to not only see which keywords resulted in phone calls, but also which keywords lead to a contact form being filled out.
Generally speaking, long tail keywords are much cheaper than shorter keywords – and as a result, it’s better to have a spread of keywords. Once you have accurate data, for which keywords lead to conversions, it’s best to focus on keywords that work, and increasing their respective CPCs. Instead of focusing on hundreds of keywords, focus on fewer, but more effective keywords.
