Google Ads For Lawyers: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads is proving to be the most effective digital channel for lawyers and law firms in the UK, US and across the globe.

As a law firm, running a Google Ads campaign helps you to target people that are further down the buying funnel. This means you are reaching people that are actually looking for your services and are ready to purchase.

More law firms are seeing the benefits of running pay per click (PPC) Ads on Google and many of your competitors are doing so.

In this article I outline some important features that will help you set up an effective Google Ads campaign for lawyers.

 

Campaign Goal

One of the most important decisions is the goal type that you select. There are seven campaign goals in Google Ads, and as a lawyer you can select any one of these, depending on where you want to appear. The most likely goal is to get enquiries and so you will choose the ‘Leads’ goal.

This will then determine other campaign settings that are available to you like the campaign type, the bid strategy and others.

 

Campaign Type

There are six campaign types available to you when you select a ‘Leads’ goal as described above. These campaign types include Search, Display, Shopping, Video, Smart and Discovery. The most suitable and relevant for your law firm is the Search campaign type.

With a Search campaign you target people that are searching on Google for a law firm and a related service that you provide. So these type of prospects are usually more qualified and very interested in what you have to offer as a lawyer or barrister.

After selecting the Search option, you are then presented with a number of options to help reach your goal.

The most relevant is to drive website visitors and/or phone calls to your law firm.

 

Budgets

One of the benefits of running Google Ads for lawyers is that you can start with a low budget. So, a budget of $300 or £300 per month is a good amount to start with and then you can increase as performance improves.

However, you should consider the competitiveness of the keywords you will be bidding on. Below, I have some suggestions on how to setup your keywords for maximum performance.

Divide your monthly budget by 30.4, which is the average number of days in a month. And then set your average daily budget for your campaign.

Keywords

Finding the right keywords is one of the most important steps in setting up and managing campaigns for your law firm. And that goes hand in hand with picking the right match types because that helps to determine the search queries that you get.

You will also need to find variations of keywords that help you to target the right people. For example, you should have combinations of keywords related to lawyers, solicitors, barrister, attorney etc that are relevant to your firm.

And being location specific is important, like the towns, cities, counties, countries and so on that are relevant to you.

For example, a law firm targeting Birmingham can use the following keywords with relevant match types

“Birmingham lawyers” – Phrase match type
[Birmingham lawyers] – Exact match type
Local solicitors – Broad match type
Direct Access Barrister Birmingham – Broad match type
And many other relevant variations

Also, add negative keywords to block searches that are not relevant. And some examples include:
Jobs
Careers
Free
And so on

 

Text Ads

Responsive search ads help you to reach the right people with relevant ads at auction time. These ads provide you with up to 15 headlines and four description lines – and this is much more than you get with previous ad types like standard and expanded ads.

As a law firm, you can also use “Call only ads” to drive calls only from your ads. So, when people search online they can call directly from your ads. You will need to add your phone number and business name in the ad, something you don’t do with Responsive search ads.

 

Ad Scheduling

Ad scheduling is about choosing the days and hours when you want your ads to run. As a law firm you are likely to see best performance when you run your ads on working days and during working hours between 9am and 5pm when staff are available to receive enquiries, especially phone calls.

 

However, running the ads all the days and hours has its benefits too. Many people search for legal services outside working hours and do a lot of research in the evening when they have more time. And they will send an email enquiry then, or give your law firm a call during working hours.

So, if you are not visible when they are searching at those moments, then you could be losing out on quality enquiries. When starting out, it’s a good idea to advertise 24/7 and then narrow it down to the best days and hours for your law firm.

 

Where your ads appear

Because you will be running a Search only campaign to target people searching for solicitors or a law firm, your ads will appear on the Google search engine. They will also appear on Search partner websites if you opt in to that. And these are hundreds of search engines and platforms that people use to search for your services

 

Case Study

TQ Legal is a law firm that helps its clients with civil fraud, money laundering, financial crime, driving offences and similar matters. After setting up 11 new effective campaigns we were able to achieve a 10% conversion rate within a three month period. The ads are now better targeted and click through rate is above 5%. Read the case study here.

 

Get In Touch

 

Want to know more about Google Ads for lawyers and how I can help you setup and manage an effective campaign to drive quality leads? Fill out the form below