Very rarely is it the case that you fire up a Google Ads campaign for your law firm and the next day you’re inundated with leads. There’s a lot of work to them, often not fully understood or appreciated!
One of the most hair-pulling exercises is when a law firm has a Google ads campaign that is doing a bunch of heavy-lifting but the clicks just aren’t converting to leads.
At Practice Proof, not only do we at times face this issue, but when inheriting Google Ad accounts from other agencies who clearly don’t understand the legal industry, here’s what we do in diagnosing and testing potential solutions.
Check Keyword Query Search
Great Google Ad campaigns for law firms are predicated or built on great keyword research. By having a look at the keyword query search over the last 60 days can illuminate keywords that need to be tightened up by re-thinking keyword match types. For example, if you’re a family law firm and you’re running a keyword like, “divorce lawyers” with a broad keyword match, then any search term that has those 2 words in any sentence will trigger your ads. If this is the case, your law firm marketing is likely spending good money on search terms like, “who is Jeff Bezos Divorce Lawyer” “how much do divorce lawyers earn,” “I want to be a divorce lawyer”etc. They’re not great keywords that you want to pay for. So, considering other match types, like a broad match modified or phrase match could be worth testing out.
Check Your Landing Pages
The fundamental rule, only to be broken in certain circumstances, is don’t take traffic to your website homepage. Why? Because homepages are usually far too broad to respond to targeted ads. In other words, if you’re an injury law firm taking a user who has entered the keyword search for “shopping centre slip claim” to your home page where they have to navigate their way around to find what they’re truly looking for can be disastrous to good leads. Ideally you want to be matching search queries with pages that respond to them. The exception may be if you’re a criminal law practice running generic criminal law ads and your homepage is well-geared with overt relevant practice areas and calls to action.
Check Site Speed
A killer in a number of legal industry verticles. If your law firm is a criminal law or personal injury practice, potential clients may want help urgently. In this case, a slow website can cost you the click as well as the lead because they’re not hanging around waiting. If your law firm’s website is antiquated or slow, consider updating it with modern law firm website design landing pages or have the website rebuilt. Need help, talk to us!
Check Your Value Proposition and Call to Action
Believe it or not, we still see many law firms with landing pages and no unique value proposition and/or no overt call to action. Remember, legal consumers increasingly shop around, so by having a call to action, like, “free consultation” “fixed fee consultation” “download free guide” “talk to a lawyer now” etc you can encourage the user to engage. In relation to your value proposition, running Google Ads can be like setting up a physical shop front next door to 12 competitors. What are you going to tell potential clients walking past why they should seek help from your law firm and not all the others in the street. You can also run smart forms of which the user enters the information of which a response or answer populates for them. For example, forms like an online assessment of personal injury claims or family law matters, or estate disputes we can design and deploy for your firm!
You’re Just Not that Good
Sure, this is controversial, but there are those occasions when your law firm’s bad reputation does precede you. There was one occasion when we went to work for a law firm, unbeknown to us at the time, but they were shonks and everyone knew it. There’s a number of crude metaphors we could use to elaborate, but I’m sure you know what we mean.
If your law firm is running Google Ads and you’re not happy with the result, take us up on our Free Adwords Grader. Alternatively, if you’re a law firm considering Ads, book a free consultation.
