Google Ads for Professional Services: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads is being used by professional services firms to reach their clients online and grow their businesses. This is possible because Google Ads has all the tools to reach potential clients and you can use these tools and customise them to your requirements.

Whether it’s accountants, lawyers, architects, dentists, consultants or others, getting started is easy.

First thing you need to do is create an account at ads.google.com, if you don’t already have one. Next, you’ll need to create your first campaign.

I’ve included some instructions below and guidelines to create your campaign. Your choice of features will depend on what you want to achieve and you will get guidance as you create your campaign in Google Ads.

 

Campaign objective

The best objective in Google Ads for professional services is ‘Leads’. It’s aim is to get as many leads and enquiries as possible for your budget, by tailoring the campaign features like bid strategy to that objective.

 

 

As the screenshot above shows there are other objectives like ‘Website traffic’, that are relevant too. And these will try to get you a lot of traffic for your budget and you can also setup a campaign without an objective. You will however not get any guidance in the campaign setup.

 

Campaign type

Next, you will create the Google Ads campaign type for your business. For professional services the most relevant campaign type is the Search campaign. It is the most relevant for targeting people who are searching for an accountant, a lawyer, architect or any other professional services firm.

 

 

You can also setup other campaign types later. A good one is Display Remarketing to retarget people that have been on your website but did not convert.

So, it’s a way to remind them to return and make contact. This is most important because most people will arrive and never return and it’s not that they are not interested. They could have been distracted and then forgot about your website.

 

Budget

Next, you should set the budget for your campaign. It’s a good idea to start with a small budget and then increase it as performance improves. For professional services a budget of at least $700 or £500 per month is a good figure to start with.

 

 

As your campaign grows and as you add new keywords and block some that are not relevant, you can start to increase your budget. And that will help increase clicks and conversions

 

Bidding

Start with an automated bid strategy to leverage the power of machine learning capabilities in Google Ads. For professional services, that can be valuable because it means more time is focused on running the business and not just updating bids manually.

 

 

The automated bidding strategy to start with is Maximise Clicks. That’s because it is designed to get you as much clicks as possible for your campaign budget.

However, if you’d like to have more control over your bids, then Manual CPC is the strategy for you. But make sure to add ‘Enhanced CPC’ to it so that it bids higher for more valuable searches.

 

Keywords

Keyword research is important and in your account you’ll find a free tool called Keyword Planner.

 

 

It has two main options to choose from:

• Discover new keywords – use it to get new keywords that help you reach people interested in your services.
• Get search volume and forecasts – get search volume and other historical insights, metrics, and forecasts for how they could perform.

 

Use the phrase and exact match types only at the beginning. And then later on you can add broad match keywords because that will help you target a wider range of searches. But be careful with this because many will not be relevant and you’ll need to add them as negative keywords.

This is an example of a keyword in exact and phrase match type format.

“architects london” – phrase match keyword

[architects london] – exact match keyword

 

 

Text ads

Responsive search Ads in your campaign have 15 headlines and four description lines. That’s a lot of space to promote your services and is a lot more than previous ad types like Standard and Expanded ads.

Include all the benefits you have in each of your ads and make sure to include the main keyword in the ad, especially in Headline one.

 

 

Locations

Many professional services firms target local audiences. So, it’s important that the location targeting is set to those specific locations and not target people that are outside.

There are many location types you can target including country, city, town, county, territory and more. And you can use advanced targeting options like bulk and radius targeting.

With radius targeting, you can target people or businesses who are within a certain radius of your business, like 20 miles.

 

 

 

Ad schedule

The best ad schedule settings for professional services is to run ads during working hours. So that’s usually between 8am to 6pm during the week. However, running ads on all days and hours also helps to target people when they have more time and are likely to make contact.

 

 

In your Time reports you can then see which are the best days and hours for clicks and conversions. And you can maximise exposure at those times or just change the ad schedule to advertise then only.

 

Where your ads appear

Your Search ads are eligible to appear when people are looking for your services. The keywords you select will match with the searches that people carry out on Google and your ads will be triggered.

For professional services it’s important to achieve high ad positions because of the high amount of competition.

Your ads will also appear on Google partner sites if you opt into the Search partner and Display networks. But you must keep monitoring these networks to see how they are performing for conversions and if it’s not good you should turn them off.

 

 

 

Case Study

PS Accountants is an accountancy practice that helps small businesses grow. They contacted me because their campaigns were not performing in the areas that they were targeting in Google Ads. I created a new Search campaign for them that saw an increase in the click through rate by 200% and one of their main Ad groups had an impressive 17% conversion rate. Read the full case study.

 

 

Get in Touch

Want to know more about Google Ads advertising for professional services? I’d be happy to help and can discuss setting up an effective campaign for your business. Use the contact form below to reach me.