Winning PPC Campaigns for Attorneys: High-Intent Keywords & Local Audiences

Pay-per-click or PPC advertising is a powerful tool for any service provider including lawyers and attorneys. Well-configured PPC campaigns can help you create a steady flow of leads that you can convert at your convenience. A winning PPC strategy needs more than just choosing a keyword and bidding on it, however.

In this guide, we’re going to be looking at the significance of a strategic approach and the smart use of high-intent keywords to create effective PPC campaigns. We’ll also look into how you can gain access to local audiences for better-quality leads. The practical advice that we are going to provide here is all 100% reliable and tested, and even leading law firm marketing agencies like Grow law firm use them for their clients.

Strategic Keyword Selection

The first step is to identify high-intent keywords that are more likely to resonate with your target audience looking for legal services. This is an entire process and often an ongoing one. It doesn’t end with a single search for keywords on an SEO tool that gives you the volume and difficulty of different words.

The process also involves delving into each keyword individually and seeing the currently ranking pages. What do they offer? What can you offer better?

You should ensure relevance and specificity to ensure that the PPC campaign attracts the right kind of audience for your practice.

Ad Copy

Refining the ad copy comes next. Reputable service providers, like Grow law firm SEO services, use specialist ad copywriters to create ad content that is to the point, clear, concise, and easily digestible. Good ad copywriters sometimes make use of bold copy or witty one-liners to put the point across. It’s most dependable to stick to your guns, however, and talk about your USPs in as few words as possible.

Any ad copy can be refined up until a point. The greatest ad copies in the world didn’t all start that way. They started with a longer sentence, phrase, or even a paragraph. It took several refinements to create headlines like:

• At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in the New Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.
• It’s a mutiny to mix a Gin-and-Tonic without Schweppes!
• How Women Over 35 Can Look Younger.
• Reward your top executives with a sabbatical year in Britain – on half-pay
• How to tour the U.S.A. for £35 a week

It comes with practice and you should be able to improve your headline when you try a lot of different variations.

Targeting Local Audiences

There are many law firm SEO companies out there. What the good ones have in common is their ability to pin down and effectively reach the local target audience. It’s very important to tailor your PPC campaigns to local audiences. This can be done by choosing location-based targeting options.

You can use keywords or set up location-based parameters and incidentally, you will have an ad campaign that can reach everyone within your firm’s geographical reach. Now, the keywords you’re bidding on determine what part of this slice you’re able to get.

All winning PPC campaigns are based on local targeting. If you have not been targeting local audiences so far, then it will be a game-changer for you. PPC platforms provide different targeting options that help you narrow down your audience effectively. In fact, you can limit your campaign to a city, region, or even a particular radius around your office!

Specific local targeting almost always increases the likelihood of conversions.

Landing Page & Website Conversion Rate Optimization

An integral part of any SEO guide for lawyers is optimizing landing pages and the website’s overall conversion rate. Both of these are interlinked and there are a few things you can do to improve them. A website’s conversion rate optimization (CRO) mainly depends on how good your landing pages are and it’s not rare for firms and lawyers to do extensive A/B testing or split testing to see which option works better.

You can do split testing with different landing page designs, layouts, content, visuals, or offers, for example.

In many ways, driving traffic to your website through PPC campaigns is just the beginning. People click on many ads but ultimately don’t convert and more often than not, it’s the fault of a poorly designed landing page or badly executed website or sales funnel.

Follow these tips to optimize your landing pages and website conversion rate:

• Align your landing pages to the ad’s message and intent. Don’t crowd landing pages and keep them super specific. Quickly tell the visitor what should they expect, what you promise, or what will you do for them. You can also include some catchy or data-backed information on why should they choose you over others.
• A well-placed call-to-action (or multiple CTAs in the case of longer landing pages) is the second most important thing. Prompt the user to take the desired action without overwhelming them, forcing them, spamming them, or sounding overly promotional. Whether it’s a contact form or a button, schedule a consultation, or download an ebook—It should be non-intrusive enough for the visitor to feel as if it’s their choice to click on it.
• Make sure your website loads fast, is user-friendly, and doesn’t confuse users when navigating. A visually appealing and fully mobile responsive website are prerequisite to improve conversions today.

Wrapping Up

Getting there can take some time but once you get an effective PPC campaign up and running, it can be a powerful way to get a stream of qualified leads to process. Finding potential clients who need your legal services will not be challenging anymore once you crack the PPC formula. Hopefully, our guide helped nudge you in the right direction.