SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is used to quickly increase visibility and grow traffic from search engines through paid search engine advertising, such as Google’s AdWords. Whether you are using paid advertising to appear on the first page while waiting for your search engine optimization to move you up organically, or to enhance your already successful organically ranking website, SEM should be in your marketing mix.
Online advertising, whether using Google AdWords (PPC), Facebook ads, or legal targeted sites like Avvo.com, can generate targeted traffic to your website. Because you have full control of the message, as opposed to organic search engine listings, your law firm will often see higher conversion rates and better quality leads. Once you add in advanced tactics like retargeting (also called re-marketing) conversion rates from paid advertising can grow even more.
It pays to play, but you need to know the rules.
Google AdWords (PPC)
It’s simple, right? Pay Google, get leads. Well, it’s not that simple…
Paid search campaigns, especially those from Google AdWords need regular monitoring. The terms and phrases people use to search for your firm and legal services may change each month, and without proper adjustments could lead to increased cost on irrelevant searches. Bid prices need to be optimized to match the growing amount of competition, and you should always be testing ads and landing pages to continue to improve your paid advertising return on investment (ROI).
If you don’t understand all of that jargon and terms, it’s okay, because we do. And along the way, you will too. That is because GNGF is a certified Google Partner Agency experienced in managing traditional paid advertising campaigns for many of our clients.
As a Google Partner Agency, we also adhere to the Google best practices and it is a pet peeve of ours when we hear about “set it and forget it” agencies that don’t come close to being transparent with their clients. We are shocked to learn that many law firms don’t know how much of their “Google AdWords” fee to their agency was spent on ads and how much went into the agency’s pocket. Our reporting will always show what is spent on Google and our management fee is very clear.
Not sure where to start with Google Ads?
Our legal marketing experts have put together our 7 best tips for creating the best legal PPC campaigns.
Facebook Ads
Facebook continues to be the largest growth for a traffic source to our clients’ websites. The social media giant has overhauled their advertising platform and continues to add more advanced tactics to provide quality traffic to your firm’s website. Through the use of psychographic targeting and advanced audience creation and segmentation, Facebook advertising allows your law firm to target ads to your ideal clients.
Legal Directories
As leading authorities in the legal marketing space, we have built relationships with companies such as Avvo, Lawyers.com, and Nolo to name a few. Our team can assist in connecting you to the most knowledgeable resources for advertising on each site respectively. Furthermore, if we manage your website, our reporting can track the actual success of those campaigns so you can make decisions based on your firm’s ROI.
Remarketing
You have invested a significant amount of time and money in getting someone to your website, but they leave without calling, chatting, or filling out a form. You just see a metric in your analytics that the visited and left.
Fortunately, even though you don’t know their name, their issue, or email address, you can still market directly to this person by tagging their web browser and showing targeted ads on other sites they visit. Keeping your firm name top-of-mind for someone who came to your site from either a referral or a general internet search but left before taking any action can help still turn this website visitor into a lead.
This technology is called remarketing, and many of our clients use it to maximize the yield of their search engine optimization or paid search engine marketing investments. It typically costs a lot less to continue to market to someone who has already visited your website, than it does to get a new visitor. If you are investing in putting your website in front of new prospective clients, you should have a remarketing campaign in your marketing mix.