The Cost of PPC Advertising for Lawyers

As the world becomes increasingly connected these days, legal clients have discovered new ways to find the services they require. While many of them rely on recommendations from family and friends to find a trustworthy solicitor, a growing number of people use search engines to obtain the services they need. For this reason, law firms should consider PPC advertising for lawyers so they can strategically place themselves where their prospects are looking.

What is PPC Advertising for Law Firms?

PPC or pay-per-click advertising is an online marketing strategy in which you pay a fee whenever someone clicks on your ads. You can utilise many PPC platforms to advertise your legal practice, with Google Ads being the most popular and widely used. Also, there are different types of PPC ads. However, the most common type is the paid search ad.

Paid search ads appear on top of search result pages as “sponsored” results whenever a person performs a relevant online query. However, note that you can’t pay Google and other platforms more to ensure that your ads will appear for all related searches. Instead, PPC platforms use an automated process known as the Ad Auction to verify if your ads are indeed valid and relevant.

How Much Does It Cost for Law Firms to Advertise on Google?

Unlike traditional marketing methods, such as billboards and TV ads, PPC advertising enables law firms to promote their services without spending a significant amount of money. It also helps level the playing field, allowing smaller law offices to compete with more prominent legal practices.

However, paid search can get expensive quickly, especially if you’re a complete beginner and/or you don’t have a good strategy in place. Also, law-related search terms are amongst the most expensive keywords to bid on, with the law and government-related keywords costing an average of £7.16 per click on Google Ads.

While they are not the most expensive (the honour goes to casino-related search terms whose average cost per click (CPC) is £58.57), bidding on law keywords can drain your marketing budget quickly if you’re not careful.

How to Keep Your PPC Costs Law

With the legal service industry being one of the toughest and most competitive sectors, it’s understandable that related search terms are popular and in high demand. However, this doesn’t mean that you have to invest a significant amount of money to succeed with PPC advertising.
If you want to maximise your marketing budget, here are some simple strategies for keeping your PPC expenses low:

Ensure that your ads have a good quality score

An ad’s quality score is an estimate of the quality of its ad content, keywords, and landing pages. It ranges from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. You’d want your ads to have high quality scores because it translates to lower expenses and better ad positioning.
To start improving your ads’ quality score, identify which key aspect of your score (ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected click-through rate) is dragging everything down. Then, work toward improving it.

Avoid broad match keyword setting

If you want to maximise your budget when doing PPC advertising for lawyers, avoid selecting the broad match keyword matching setting on your Google Adwords for lawyer campaign. Otherwise, you’ll have little control over the keywords you’re targeting. This means your ads can show up for irrelevant searches.
Because Google wants you to spend as much money as possible, broad match is selected as the default setting. Therefore, when starting a Google Ads campaign, always de-select this option and choose modified broad match or phrase and exact match instead to avoid incurring huge expenses.

 Add negative keywords to your campaign

Besides choosing the right keyword matching strategy, you must also ensure that your campaign includes negative keywords. As the name implies, negative keywords prevent your ads from appearing for a particular word or phrase. They can be quite useful as they help you avoid unwanted impressions, especially if you have chosen the phrase match or broad match keyword matching option.
See that you add negative keywords to your campaign continuously. Not only will this strategy help you reduce your ad spending, but it can also give your overall click-through and conversion rates a boost.

 Set Cost Per Click limits

No matter your bidding strategy, ensure that you set a specific limit for your cost per click. Again, the default setting is set to no limitations. If you leave this on, you’re essentially telling Google that you are willing to pay an unlimited amount of money for a single click. To keep costs low, make sure to set limits for your CPC.

 Keywords are not everything

When doing PPC advertising, avoid focusing solely on the keywords you want to target or bid on. It would be best to consider other factors to improve your ads’ performance. Consider asking yourself the following questions:

• Which location drives the most conversions with a relatively reasonable cost per acquisition (CPA)?
• Which device (desktop, mobile, or tablet) produces the best results?
• What time of day yields the best conversion rates?

Answering these questions can help you determine the low and high-performance areas where you can adjust your CPC accordingly. For example, by increasing your bids when your ads’ performance is at its best, you can make them more visible. This can help boost their conversion rates, which can help you obtain a better return on investment.

 Always Invest Wisely on PPC Advertising

It is no secret that the legal service industry has some of the most expensive keywords to bid on. But with a good PPC strategy, you can keep your ad spending low while maximising your return on investment.

Do you need help developing and managing a cost-effective PPC campaign for your law firm? We at Kinetic Traffic are happy to help. Don’t hesitate to contact our team to obtain the PPC solutions you need.