Part 1 of this series offered some insight for figuring out whether you need SEO. Part 2 explained how to optimize SEO by becoming an authority in your chosen niche. Part 3 reviewed how becoming a “go-to” business factors into SEO. In this installment, I discuss when paying for search engine advertising is easier and more cost effective than SEO.
Is Advertising Right for You?
Let’s face it. Google wants you to pay for advertising. Google makes nearly all of its money from search ads and no money from organic listings. The organic ranking algorithm is about building the Google brand, not yours. Said another way, the only incentive Google has for ranking a website highly is if showing that result gives Google’s user more confidence in using Google in the future.
Building authority and business reputation is difficult, labor intensive, and limited in scope with no guarantee of improved ranking. All of this is in an environment where the rules and competition continually change.
On the flip side, online advertising with Google and other search networks makes you show up exactly for the searches you want, in the geographic areas you want, with none of the extensive content writing, optimizing, link building and customer review demands. This is in exchange for money.
Advertising Options for Law Firms
Five common forms of online advertising work well for law firms that rely on advertising to build their practice. Depending on your location, practice areas, and goals, the costs range from surprisingly affordable to "We'll take your first-born child, please."
This is the most popular form of search advertising. These are the ads that appear above and down the right-hand side of organic search results. They consume up to 54 percent of the choices on a search results page. Perhaps more importantly, they consume 75 percent of the visible screen space “above the fold” on a typical monitor and 100 percent on mobile screens. They are called pay-per-click (PPC) ads because Google charges the advertiser when a user clicks on it. In general, the more that you are willing to pay for a click, the higher your ad will appear relative to your competition.
This form of advertising has a ton of useful benefits. The ads target the exact phrases and topics you want. You can control your budget and price per click on a granular level. You can literally draw on a map to define your targeted geographic area. You can track visitors from your ads through your website to when they contact you. You know exactly where your money is going. The market determines your cost. And there are no long-term commitments.
With the reporting available for PPC ads, you can see how many times your ad was shown, what position it ranks for each search term, how many times it was clicked, how many clicks resulted in contacts to your office, and so on. With this data, a campaign can be fine-tuned over time to channel more money into the terms and geographic areas that are performing best.
PPC advertising works very well on its own or hand-in-hand with SEO. By running a PPC campaign, you can test thousands of keywords very quickly without having to write any content. You can then use that data to direct your content writing for improved organic performance. For instance, you may think that the most popular search for your services will be "Ann Arbor Bankruptcy Attorney" but the data from the advertising campaign may prove that "Washtenaw County Bankruptcy Attorney" is more popular. You can then adjust the phrasing and content on your website to improve your rankings.
Google offers free programs for educating business owners on the basics of PPC advertising and will help you set up your first campaign. Independent consultants will also help you set up and manage a campaign. In my experience, Google’s employees tend to be a little loose with phrasing and budgets because of course their incentive is to sell more clicks, so make sure you’re paying attention to how things are set up if you go this route.
Display ads are like the newspaper ad or highway billboard of the Internet. "Display advertising networks" are operated by companies like Google to display advertisements and create revenue for website owners. Blogs, local news websites, national news websites, article repositories, research websites, attorney directories, and more all monetize their own website traffic by signing up with display advertising networks.
With display ads, website owners designate space on their webpages to display advertisements. Then, they tell the display network to fill that space with ads. The network uses its advertising algorithms to place ads for its customers (your law firm) on the websites that meet your criteria. You can define your criteria by both geography and website topic.
For instance, you can tell the network to display your ads to any user within 15 miles of your office that is reading articles about how to modify child support. The network takes it from there. Just as with the search ads, you typically pay-per-click with the display ads, and revenue generated is shared between the network operator and the website owner.
Display ads are a great way to create awareness of your firm for a topic or geographic area. These ads cost less than PPC ads because they are less focused and more technical savvy is required to set them up.
If you've ever shopped online, say for a hotel, and then keep seeing ads for that hotel on other websites, you are seeing retargeting in action. Retargeting ads are display ads that are only shown to people who have already visited your website. Based on their behavior on your website, visitors get added to your retargeting audience. When they leave your website and go to other websites that are part of the display advertising network, your ads will be shown to them. How frequently they see your ads and for how long depend on your budget and how long you want them to be targeted.
You can use retargeting ads to target all website visitors, or you can filter based on their behavior. For instance, you can target people who read at least three pages on your website or people who came in via a PPC or display ad. These ads are a great way to reel back in people who may have been interested in your services but got distracted or wanted to do more research. They are also great for practice areas where people take a longer time to decide, like estate planning, bankruptcy, and immigration, because they keep your firm top of mind.
One concern with this method is privacy. For instance, if a wife uses the shared family computer to look for a divorce attorney, it could create issues if retargeting ads for divorce law firms keep showing up on webpages when the husband uses the same computer later that week.
Sometimes there are worthwhile opportunities to advertise on other popular websites. Highly trafficked websites that share a similar target client might be a good place to do business. Sites like Avvo, FindLaw, and Lawyers.com might already rank highly for searches in your market. With advertising like this you typically enter into an agreement directly with the website owner.
Depending on the site, you will likely find options to target your advertising budget towards the practice areas and geographic areas most relevant to your practice. Costs and agreement terms vary widely with this type of advertising, but like all other forms presented here, it is very easy to track and report on performance as long as you are using a tool like Google Analytics to independently track your website traffic.
Private website ads have some notable downsides. They usually want to lock you into longer-term agreements. You're banking on the hope that they keep their high rankings and traffic. They may oversell their spots or show too many of your competitors. We have definitely observed positive outcomes from private website ads, but often there are other measures to take first before considering these ads. Before committing, run simulations in your market to see where you will show up and how many clicks it takes to get there. Also, call other firms that are using that advertising for your practice area, both in your market and similar neighboring markets, to get their feedback on whether it’s working for them.
Up Next
In the next and final installment on this series, I will offer conclusions for SEO strategies for different types of law firms and practices