Paid Search Advertising Best Practices For Legal Services

Navigating the legal marketing landscape is complex, and to get the best possible results from paid media, legal marketers need to understand how to work around its unique challenges. The list of considerations is extensive, from understanding the intricacies of the legal sector and ensuring regulatory compliance to building trust, credibility and maintaining client confidentiality. Those legal-specific constraints are then compounded with the day-to-day tasks you need to perform as a marketer, like optimizing conversions, managing your business’s online reputation, and measuring return on investment.

The right paid media advertising approach not only enhances visibility in a competitive market but also allows for precise targeting and measurable results, providing a solution to some of the most pressing pain points in legal marketing. This is a collection of paid search advertising best practices based on Workshop Digital’s experience as a digital marketing agency for legal clients, as well as some tactics that are having impressive results for businesses leveraging paid media advertising in other tightly regulated industries.

Paid search advertising, also known as Pay-Per-Click (PPC), is a marketing strategy where advertisers pay to get higher listings on search results. It's an efficient paid media channel for businesses, especially law firms, to reach their target audience at the right time and place. By leveraging paid search advertising, legal marketers can instantly boost their firm’s visibility, increase brand awareness, and drive relevant traffic to their websites.

In this highly competitive industry, you can find an edge by analyzing the right paid search advertising data to inform your strategies. Based on our experience, these are the must-haves in every successful legal marketing strategy, and a few innovative new techniques that are already yielding great results for our legal clients.

How to use keyword research to improve your legal marketing

Choosing the right keywords for your paid search campaigns is a fundamental step that also impacts many other areas of your marketing. For legal firms, keywords should be relevant to services offered, have a high click-through rate (CTR), and be proven terms that lead to conversions. Tools like Google Ads and Semrush can help you identify high-performing keywords and filter out low-performing ones.

Focus on location-related keywords, as clients prefer to have easy, face-to-face access to legal resources. Also consider using long-tail keywords with lower competition and higher intent, as these can often yield the best results. Remember, your potential clients are likely searching for specific legal services or seeking answers to complex legal questions, so it’s okay to go a little deeper into topics to find clients with more immediate needs.

Crafting compelling ad copy for legal services

Writing compelling ad copy is another crucial element of paid search advertising. Your ad copy should be honest, engaging, and tailored to attract mid to lower funnel searchers. For legal firms, use keywords in your copy and clearly communicate the unique selling points of your services to help your firm stand out from your competition that is likely also advertising on Google Search. Including benefit-driven headlines and strong calls to action (CTAs) can significantly improve your ad performance, as well, as clients are looking for legal expertise and assurance that their legal issues will be handled professionally.

Optimizing landing pages for legal firms

Landing pages are existing or custom website pages that contain the messaging that pays off the promise of the content in your ads, as well as conversion points like forms and other lead generation tools that convert visitors into leads or clients. An optimized landing page should be relevant to the ad copy, provide clear and concise information about the service, and guide the visitor towards the desired action. For legal firms, landing pages should align with ad messaging by offering valuable information about your services and how they can help clients, as well as clearly laying out the necessary next steps and providing easy paths to contact your business. Remember, your potential clients are looking for trust, credibility, and the easiest way to engage your services.

Embracing mobile advertising in legal marketing

With the majority of search traffic coming from mobile devices, optimizing your paid search campaigns for mobile users is a must. This includes ensuring your website has a mobile-friendly user experience and uses mobile-specific keywords. You can increase the impact of mobile ads by ensuring the creative in your ads is optimized for the various platforms where they will appear and consistently updating the art and copy to appeal to as many audiences as possible.

Embracing mobile advertising in the legal industry can significantly enhance your campaign's reach and effectiveness, especially if you offer the types of services that people tend to search for as the need arises. Also consider the demographics of your target audiences and the platforms they prefer to use when looking for important information like legal representation.

Tracking conversions is the most common measure of success for paid search campaigns, but understanding how clients are finding and engaging with your marketing materials is more beneficial for your marketing strategy. It allows you to pinpoint which keywords, ads, and landing pages are driving the most conversions and adjust your strategy accordingly to maximize efficiency and your ROI. To add further clarity to the value of the engagements your ads generate, you should also have an idea of the value of each of the conversions each ad yields to ensure you are targeting (and getting) higher value clients. This deeper understanding of your audience and the potential business they can provide is a big help when setting up bidding to help you keep budgets in check.

For legal firms, it’s important to consider all aspects of compliance when implementing conversion tracking and analytics tools. These tactics can provide accurate measurement and valuable insights for improving marketing campaigns, but don’t go after metrics that will compromise security and potentially put your data (and your firm) in a tight spot.

Expanding your paid search advertising is an easy way to reach more people to promote your legal services. By following the best practices outlined in this blog, your legal firm can leverage build your own custom strategy to reach your target audience, increase brand awareness, and find more clients. If you would like to talk to some experts who do this every day, contact us right now. We are happy to provide a pro bono analysis of how paid search advertising can benefit your legal firm.