Law firms offer an essential service to the public – legal guidance and representation in an area that most people won’t be familiar with. From conveyancing to medical negligence, to redundancy agreements, law firms are there to help you through the most perilous of legal situations.
It’s all well and good to offer a necessary service, it’s another thing entirely to make people aware of it. In the digital age, more and more people are finding the products and services they use online, and legal help is no different. One of the common ways people encounter law firms online is through paid advertising.
Paid advertising allows you to create and serve ads to potential clients as they search online. With a variety of different ad types available to create, paid advertising has been a staple of online marketing across a variety of industries, and the legal industry is no different.
Interested in building your audience through paid advertising but not sure how to sell it to the partners? Read on for five benefits of paid advertising for law firms.
1. Search Engine Position
We’ve all submitted searches on a search engine before whether it’s Google or Bing. – it may be how you came across this blog! In fact, we’ve all conducted so many searches across different search engines, there are thousands of statistical reports dedicated to explaining user behaviour. For instance, did you know that less than 10% of users who conduct a search on Google move to the second page? In other words, people aren’t too keen to trawl through thousands of entries on a search engine page. That’s where paid advertising comes in!
As well as thousands of pages of results, a search engine will present ads on their results page – right at the top of page one. By using paid advertising, a law firm can immediately shoot to the top of a search engine results page for those looking to utilise legal services. The higher up the page, the more prominent their ad, and the more likely someone is to click on it. That leads the user to be one step closer to taking action to hire your law firm’s services. And the reason this is particularly helpful is…
2. Attracts high-intent searchers
A common, simplistic, approach used in paid advertising is that of the sales funnel. In short, a sales funnel contains all those users who land on your site. The entry point of the funnel, the widest part, represents the first interaction anyone has with your site – therefore containing the most users. The final stage of the funnel is the narrowest part, however, it represents those users who have been ‘funnelled’ through a conversion pathway from your site, because of their interest in your product or service. Whilst there are fewer of these lower funnel users, they’re more valuable in the sense that they’re more likely to convert to your site – they use your site with the intention of using your service.
By using paid advertising, particularly on Google, you are more likely to find these lower-funnel searchers. Think about it: the people who come across your ad aren’t just searching for the latest football results, they’re searching specifically for services similar to the ones you provide e.g. ‘probate solicitors near me’. You are capturing traffic where your audience is actively searching for your services, with the highest level of intent.
3. Advertise specific services
Many law firms offer an array of different services. However, with one of the benefits of paid advertising being that high-intent searchers will come across your ads, it’s important that their specific needs are catered to. Once again, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has got you covered!
Those high-intent searchers I mentioned are not just intending to use a law firm, they’re intending to use a specific service offered by a law firm. It’s not much good if you specialise in conveyancing for instance, but are contacted about medical negligence cases. Paid advertising doesn’t just allow you to market your firm’s brand, you can also target and advertise to those seeking your specialised areas.
By utilising landing pages (the page of your website someone first lands on when they click on an ad) dedicated to a specific area of law, building ads around those landing pages, and targeting the right terms being used by searchers, you can be assured that you’re only encouraging high intent audiences through your ads.
These terms, or “keywords”, are what you think those interested in your services might search for. Once they use these keywords, they trigger your ads on the search results page, which are of your design.
By using effective ad copy, users are more enticed to click on the ad and find themselves on your landing page, ready to learn more about how your law firm can help them. As well as effective copy, you can help your ads stand out even more by…
4. Promoting more unique selling points (USPs) with extensions
Ad extensions are additional pieces of your ad which contain useful business information, which can help give users more reasons to choose your business. These extra snippets of information can provide the marginal gains required for someone to decide to click on your ads.
Amongst the ad extensions you can utilise are images, callouts and site links:
- Images are, as you’d expect, pictures that can be included as part of your ad. By choosing relevant images in the field being advertised for or even images from your website, the link between your ad and site becomes more obvious to the user, which can help assure them of their choice to click on your ad.
- Callouts are small sections of text beneath the ad that promote unique services offered by your firm. These provide users with extra incentive to use your service before even clicking on your ad.
- Site links meanwhile are additional links placed below the description of your main ad. They can provide more specific parts of your site to direct traffic to in case the ad they’ve seen is too broad for their interest.
All three serve a purpose in themselves but also make your ads more prominent and stand out more to users than organic search results – a key advantage in getting people to click on your ads.
And when you’ve put together everything to make a successful ad campaign, you can even benefit from…
5. Quick results
Using online measurement tools such as Google Ads, you can get real-time data on how your campaigns are performing, allowing you to take swift action if needs be.
Not spending enough daily to meet your monthly budget? Simply up the spend limit in the campaigns tab.
Have ads that have poor ad strength? Amend the copy there and then to include more keywords. It’s never been simpler to manage your marketing campaigns.
You can also get results on data that isn’t currently being utilised in your campaigns. Keywords, for example, a major part of a successful PPC campaign, can be researched in detail ahead of utilising them, so you know how much you should be spending on them and how many visitors you should be targeting per month. Ambition is everything as they say, so make sure your ambition is as well-informed as possible through Google Ads.
Is your law firm ready to embark on its paid advertising journey?
I began by talking about the essential role law firms can play in the lives of anyone who needs them. Anyone can find themselves in a legal situation they’re not experts in, but that’s where the importance of law firms comes into play.
As an essential service, it’s important that law firms keep raising their brand awareness and converting sales by utilising PPC in their marketing; because, much as law firms offer that essential role in the lives of their clients, PPC can offer an essential role in the lives of law firms.