Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest ways to generate attention for your law firm online.

With the right strategy, you can get your ads in front of the right clients quickly and create opportunities for new cases long before your organic ads start showing benefits.

PPC vs. SEO: Which Gets You Results Faster?
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However, law firm marketers have to grapple with another choice for improving their company’s traffic. SEO, which is an excellent way to generate leads for a firm, always comes up on the list. The question now is: which online marketing strategy can provide you with results faster?

While the return on investment for SEO can be very high, it takes longer for the strategy to work. Here’s what you need to know:

SEO is for the Long Haul

Search engine optimization takes a while to kick in. That’s because search engines take time to index pages, analyze on-page and external links, and evaluate other factors affecting a website’s search rank. SEO also takes more effort because content needs to be created, organized, and published.

Although many companies consider SEO to be a low-investment tactic, it’s still a substantial investment considering that you need to pay for content, optimization, link building, etc. Additionally, SEO isn’t the best way to run a time-sensitive campaign like announcing a limited-time service discount – it probably won’t get enough views in the short term to be worth the time.

PPC Is Nearly Immediate

PPC requires some time to do the initial research and configure a campaign, but the results it delivers are straightforward and quick compared to SEO. This makes it the perfect channel for promoting a new discount or service, endorsing your business brand, and so on. Plus, it offers a way to occupy more real estate in SERPs.

Law firm marketers can even use PPC and SEO together; the former can provide some quick visibility while they wait for the long-term benefits of SEO. For PPC, it’s also possible to do specific keyword and A/B testing (the intel you gain from ad performance is gold. You can apply it in your other marketing efforts such as SEO and social media marketing).

How Long Does It Take for PPC Ads to Work?

Done right, PPC takes a week or two to show significant results. Legal companies with a lot of data about their target audience may see new clients beginning to emerge as soon as they launch their campaign. If you have no prior research or insights into your audience, results may take a little longer.

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To get results faster, most experts recommend focusing on gathering information from your first campaigns to fuel the rest. You’ll need to take the time to learn exactly where you should be targeting, which metrics you need to watch, and how much you should bid on certain campaigns.

You want your legal firm to attract as many potential clients as possible, fast. So, it helps to think of those initial campaigns as an investment.

How to Optimize Your PPC Ad Results

Here are a few tips to help you get results as quickly as possible.

Collect Data

As mentioned above, one of the ways to speed up your PPC results is to gather data to help you make the right bids and purchases. Ideally, you should be looking at ways to enhance your visibility into your marketplace and customers.

Collect as much information as you can about who your audience is, what kind of ads they respond best to, and which keywords generate the best results. It may help to set some initial goals for your campaigns to determine what you should be measuring. For instance, your first goal might be to see which terms clients engage with the most.

To create a wide-reaching campaign for your legal company, make sure you use location-based targeting. This helps you keep costs low when running your tests while ensuring you reach the right clients. Location-based targeting means you can make broad decisions when it comes to testing things like ad copy and keywords without over-spending.

Adjust for Optimization

Now that you have the basic information you need for your ad campaigns, you can begin adjusting for optimization. Look at your keywords, and assess which options generate the highest clicks. You can remove keywords with high impressions and low clicks from your campaign to reduce costs.

In this phase, you should be analysing not just your keywords but your target audience, too. Ask yourself some questions like, what kind of client age group are you most likely to reach? Are your customers finding your firm through searches on a desktop or smartphone?

Using your data, you’ll be able to revise and set up manual bids for keywords to achieve the highest return for the lowest cost-per-click. Remember, the keywords with the best return on investment can change over time. Keeping a close eye on your search terms and how they perform will allow you to weed out unnecessary phrases that aren’t generating valuable results.

Scale Them

After you have a decent idea of your audience and how the PPC landscape works for your law firm, you can begin to expand your keyword list. For instance, you might begin to use variations of your keywords and semantic terms, like “family law attorney” and “family lawyer.”

You can also begin to upgrade the results of your ads by testing your ad copy for signs of higher engagement and even creating dedicated ad groups. For instance, if your firm offers multiple legal services, you might create separate ad groups for family law, personal injury law, and even business law.

Law firms with multiple locations can also generate better results by creating location-specific ad campaigns. Adding the name of a city or town to the keywords that rank highest for your customers may generate a higher number of qualified leads.

Consider Increasing Your Budget

Now it’s time to use the data to start earning higher profits. You’ll have a good idea of which ad campaigns and keywords bring the most clients to your company, so you can begin to increase your budget in those areas and decrease it elsewhere.

Many law firms will also begin to focus on the services that get the most attention, such as personal injury law for motor vehicle accidents or divorce law. Keep an eye on the kind of services your customers tend to inquire about.

It’s also worth looking for ways to boost the quality scores of your campaigns. For instance, you may decide that it’s time to add a different CTA to your campaigns if you seem to be losing customers at the last conversion hurdle. Rather than asking customers to “book a consultation now,” you may switch to “book your free consultation now.”

Conclusion

PPC and SEO are both great strategies to generate leads for your business, but PPC is going to work a lot faster, especially if you optimize your pay-per-click ads using the methods discussed in this article. Feel free to combine both strategies, or focus on doing PPC well if your goal is to see ROI in a short period.

New to PPC and need help with creating and managing your campaign? Get in touch with Webrageous. We specialize in Google Ads management for personal injury attorneys (auto accident, mass tort, etc.) as well as other types of attorneys and can help you design a high-performing campaign