If you’re interested in acquiring clients online for any type of business, Google AdWords is an option you should always consider. This platform is responsible for the ads that appear on Google, the most widely used search engine in the US and around the world, and in many cases, it can be a very profitable acquisition channel. I’ll try to explain how it works, as well as its main advantages and disadvantages, so you can evaluate whether using Google Ads for lawyers is a good idea.
Although we’re talking about a lead generation channel related to the Google search engine, Google Adwords shouldn’t be confused with search engine optimization, or SEO, which we discuss in depth in our SEO guide for lawyers: everything you need to know. Google Adwords, therefore, has nothing to do with SEO; in fact, it’s categorized under an entirely different acronym: SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
If you’re not sure what Google AdWords is, I’ll illustrate it with an example. Imagine you’re someone who needs to hire a lawyer because you have a legal problem, or you need to hire a virtual assistant for lawyers because you need an assistant for your law firm. You decide to search Google to contact a law firm. Enter “lawyers” in the search engine.
In the screenshot above, you can see two large blocks: one boxed in red, which corresponds to Google AdWords ads for lawyers, and another below that contains results provided by Google that are not advertising and depend entirely on organic positioning or SEO. In this article, we will focus exclusively on these Google AdWords ads.
Google Ads for Lawyers: How Does It Work?
This advertising platform moves huge amounts of money every day, and many companies around the world generate a large volume of business through the clients they attract through Google AdWords.
There are also companies that invest much more money in this advertising platform than they can return in sales. Google AdWords per se is neither good nor bad; you just have to understand that it doesn’t work for everyone and requires a good strategy and planning. We’ll try to explain how it works so you can better understand it.
Keyword and location targeting
How Google AdWords works is fairly simple to explain, although not so simple to implement successfully. To put it simply, what you do with Google AdWords is create advertising campaigns where you can choose a series of keywords (“lawyers” in the previous example) and a geographic area where you want the campaign to run.
For example, you could create a campaign for people searching for things like “lawyers” anywhere in New York, or a campaign that would be shown to people searching for “floor clause” in New York, or a campaign for people searching for “divorce lawyers” in New York and the surrounding area. This is therefore a very powerful way to show your law firm’s advertising to people searching for services related to your services in a specific area.
The concept of location is very important, and it’s something that’s poorly managed in many law firm campaigns I’ve seen. Your firm isn’t interested in everyone seeing these ads; your firm is only interested in reaching those people who can become clients. If you only provide your services in California, what’s the point of having your ad seen in New York or Florida? It’s clear that it won’t generate new clients and will cost you nothing.
In Google AdWords, you pay for each click
The main feature you should understand about Google AdWords is that you pay for each time a user clicks on your ad. This is an essential factor you must keep in mind at all times to avoid, as far as possible, having people who aren’t potential customers waste your budget. Therefore, as we explained in the previous point, you must carefully control which areas your advertising campaigns are displayed in and with which keywords.
Of course, to control your spending, you can set a maximum limit on how much you want to spend per click. Obviously, if the limit you set is lower than the average bid cost of the ads competing with your firm’s, your ad may never be shown.
How much do you pay for each click?
There’s no fixed price, as this depends on many factors. Google AdWords has implemented a price auction system, so the more you’re willing to bid to appear in the results, the more likely you are to appear.
Price isn’t the only factor that decides whether you appear or not, but it’s one of the most important. There’s also a system that, based on previous results, determines the likelihood that users will click on your ad. If these are low compared to other competing ads, it may decide not to show yours (or show it lower) in favor of others that pay less per click.
Competition is a determining factor for price
Since it’s an auction system, it’s clear that the more lawyers and law firms are willing to bid to get clicks on campaigns similar to yours, the more expensive the click will be. This is a determining factor when assessing whether Google AdWords might be an interesting channel for you, depending on your budget and the effort you’re willing to invest.
For this reason, in large urban areas like New York, California, or Canada, clicks will be much more expensive than in other areas where there is less competition for SEM advertising campaigns, such as many small and medium-sized cities.
This means that the same campaign that may be very profitable in Valladolid may be a waste of money in Madrid, simply because you will most likely pay much more for each potential customer in the latter case.
Another factor that greatly influences competition is the keyword. For obvious reasons, law firms running Google AdWords campaigns are willing to pay much more money for clicks on ads for specialties that, on average, generate higher fees, such as traffic accidents or bankruptcy proceedings, than for ads for specialties that typically generate lower fees, such as immigration matters.
Keyword filters
It’s also important to know that in AdWords, you can (and should) set filters for the keywords that will be associated with your ad. You can filter a campaign so that it only appears if one or more keywords are specifically included, and you can also include a series of negative keywords that, if present in the user’s search, will never show your campaign.
These negative keywords are especially useful for fairly generic keywords. Let’s continue with the example of the keyword “lawyers.” If your firm is interested in attracting clients who search for lawyers on Google in a certain area, there will likely be a number of searches where you don’t want to appear.
Consider searches like “lawyer movies,” “New York Bar Association,” “lawyer courses,” or “lawyer jokes.” For obvious reasons, the chances of you getting a client for your firm from searches of this type are minimal, so you can set your advertising campaign to not show if any of the following words appear: movies, jokes, bar association, courses, etc.
Not paying enough attention to this filtering is one of the most common mistakes made in Google AdWords campaigns for lawyers, which ends up causing the affected firm to incur unnecessary costs in its campaigns and thus lowering its profitability.
Google AdWords for lawyers: from click to client
So far, this is a simplified explanation of how Google AdWords works. You’ve already understood that you pay for each click on your ads, that the cost depends on the competition, and that you can filter your ads by keywords and geographic locations. However, this is just the beginning.
When the user clicks on the ad, they’ll be redirected to a page on your law firm’s website. For now, the user is nothing more than a potential client you need to convert. Until they leave their contact information on the website or contact the firm, they’re of no value to you.
For this reason, it’s pointless to have a perfect Google Adwords strategy, capturing clicks with the right keywords and at a reasonable price, if once they reach the firm’s website, what they find isn’t optimized, and most of them leave the page, discarding your services.
Optimize your landing pages to achieve conversions
In digital marketing terminology, a landing page is the place where visitors are sent after clicking on an ad. It’s extremely important that these pages are optimized for conversions, because once they get there, you need the visitor to provide their contact information in one way or another to convert them into a customer. If they reach the landing page and leave without doing anything, you’ve wasted the click and, therefore, wasted money.
The conversion rate
However, it’s important to understand that it’s impossible to convince every visitor to become a lead or potential customer. Of all those who arrive at your landing page from a Google AdWords ad, some will become potential customers (because they contact you or provide their contact information), and others will leave without taking any action.
To measure the success of your landing pages, you must understand the concept of conversion rate, which refers to the number of potential clients you acquire in relation to the number of visitors to your page, expressed as a percentage. A conversion rate of 5% means that for every 100 visitors who click on your ad, 5 become potential clients for your firm. The higher the conversion rate, the less money it will cost you to acquire each potential client.
Aside from properly filtering the users who see your ads, as explained above, the other key factor in improving your conversion rate is optimizing your landing page to increase the chances of visitors contacting you or leaving their contact information. Here are some of the most important things to keep in mind:
Make it easy for the user to take the action you want
For a law firm, once a user visits through Google AdWords, the key is to try to convert them into a client. To do this, you need them to either contact you directly, either by phone, email, or a contact form, or leave their contact information on your website via some type of form, hoping to be contacted back.
For this reason, it’s essential that your landing pages make it very easy to find how to get in touch or fill out the form. Ideally, visitors should know within three seconds of landing on the page what you expect them to do. You don’t want them to go to your blog, you don’t want them to read the legal notice, you don’t want them to see photos of your office. All you want is for them to become a client, so make it easy for them.
Create topic-specific landing pages
Suppose you’ve created several Google AdWords campaigns for your law firm, for example, one for divorce, another for floor clause claims, and another for traffic accidents. You should never send all visitors to the same site. If a user has reached your ad looking for a divorce lawyer, send them to a landing page where you focus the content on how your firm will help them achieve their divorce.
Don’t distract the visitor with anything else because you already know the visitor who arrived there wants a divorce, so focus on the divorce; everything else is secondary.
Similarly, a user who clicked on an ad looking for a traffic accident lawyer should be taken to a landing page that exclusively addresses how to claim damages for damages suffered in a traffic accident, ignoring any other topic. In other words, always create specific landing pages for each type of campaign, and you’ll have a higher conversion rate.
This is another of the most common areas where Google AdWords strategies for lawyers are often implemented incorrectly.
Avoid any distracting elements on your landing pages.
Always be clear that the visitor who has reached your landing page has cost you money, and you need to maximize your opportunities to monetize it. You also have an idea of what their needs are because they’ve told you so by clicking on an ad for a specific topic.
At this point, all the content on your landing page should focus on getting them to contact you, eliminating anything that could be a distraction or deter the visitor from achieving their goal.
Minimize any links to other sections of your website that distract visitors from the goal of becoming a client. Forget about including links to your Facebook page, your Instagram account, or your office blog. Reading the articles you publish draws them away from the page where they can contact you or leave their contact information, and you don’t want that to happen.
Provides different options to convert visitors into customers
To convert a visitor into a customer, there are several options, such as calling you on the phone, sending you an email, or filling out a contact form. Don’t choose for them; give them all the possible options to become a customer. Some customers prefer to call by phone, others feel more comfortable filling out a contact form, and others prefer to send you an email directly. As long as they do any of these, your goal has been met, so allow them to do it however they feel most comfortable.
Do not ask for information that is not essential.
When requesting information via forms, there’s one principle you should always keep in mind: the more information you ask for, the lower the conversion rate will be.
If you’re asking the user to fill out too many fields, on the one hand, you’ll generate annoyance, and on the other, the user may feel like you’re asking for information they don’t have to provide (remember, they don’t even know you at that point).
Ask for their name, phone number, email address, and optionally a brief description of the problem, but not much more. At this point, you don’t need to know their last name, address, zip code, or zodiac sign. Any information you need beyond basic contact information can be requested later in a personalized way by email or phone.
Make sure the potential client hears from you as soon as possible.
Once they’ve contacted you or left their contact information, it’s critical that you get in touch with them as soon as possible, preferably by phone. The longer it takes from the time they leave a request or attempt to contact you until they actually speak with you, the greater the chance they’ll contact another firm, and you’ll lose the client.
Obviously, depending on the time and day of the week, it’s not always possible to provide an immediate response. For this reason, it’s a good idea to set up an automatic email and/or SMS system that sends a message thanking them for the contact request and informing them that you’ll get back to them as soon as possible. This, which isn’t difficult to do, will help you gain some time in many cases, which can mean the difference between closing a client or them moving on to another firm.
Google AdWords for Lawyers: The Conversion Funnel
If you’ve followed the explanation up to this point, you’ll have seen that we’ve gone through a series of steps in the process. In the world of digital marketing, this is known as a conversion funnel, and it’s essential to fully understand how it works to analyze whether or not Google AdWords campaigns for lawyers are profitable.
At the first level, we have the people who are browsing the internet and see the ad. Of these, some will click on the ad, and others will go to another website in the list. Of those who have clicked on your ad and reached the landing page, some will leave their contact information and become leads, while others will leave the page without taking any action.
Going down another level, we find those leads with whom, after an initial call, you arrange a meeting at the office, and those with whom there is no possibility of following up. And finally, of all those with whom you have a final meeting, some will ultimately sign the order sheet and become clients, and others will not. Your goal should be to lose as few clients as possible at each step of the conversion funnel.
The importance of measuring results
Just as vital as correctly implementing your Google AdWords strategy is knowing how to measure the results at each step of the funnel, since what isn’t measured can’t be improved. This is another of the glaring mistakes made by many firms using Google AdWords. They are unable to accurately determine the profitability of their SEM campaigns, or even ensure that they are achieving positive returns.
Let’s use a numerical example. Let’s say you have a Google AdWords ad viewed by 10,000 people. Of these, 10% click on the ad and arrive at your landing page. You’ll pay for the 1,000 clicks you generated, and 1,000 visitors will arrive at your website. Let’s imagine you have a 5% conversion rate on your landing page; that is, only 5 out of every 100 people who view the page become leads (they leave their contact information or contact you). Of the 50 leads you’ve captured, let’s say you have a meeting with 50%, and of those 25, you get 60% to sign the order sheet.
In this example, 10,000 people started the funnel, and from there, you acquired 15 clients for the firm. This means that 0.15% of the people who saw your ad became clients, and 1.5% of those who visited your website became clients.
Focus on continuously optimizing the funnel
Your goal should be to try to improve the percentage of each step. You should aim to achieve the maximum conversion rate at each point to obtain greater profit for the firm. Let’s suppose you make a series of improvements to your website’s landing page and instead of having a 5% conversion rate, you raise it to 7.5%.
Although it may seem like a very small improvement, if you do the math from the previous example and keep the other values constant, you’ll see that you would close 22.5 clients. That’s a 50% improvement.
Do you see what I’m getting at?
Correctly measuring each step will help you determine the exact return on investment your campaigns generate, allowing you to work on improving your processes. Therefore, improving your conversion rate should be an obsession for you, as the economic impact on your business after optimizing the funnel can be enormous.
Should you invest in Google AdWords?
If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably still wondering whether or not it would be a good idea to try Google AdWords. Or maybe you’re already working with Google AdWords campaigns and think the results could be better. The truth is, it’s not easy to make decisions without considering all the scenarios and thoroughly studying the different steps required for a successful advertising strategy on this channel.