Google AdWords: Why You Should Start Investing in Your SEO

Google AdWords is a pay-per-click system that’s designed to aid with both marketing services and products. It works through the Google Search Engine and has the potential to help your practice grow. You’re probably curious as to how search engine optimization (SEO) can be useful towards the success of marketing your law firm.

1. Rank Higher for Nonorganic Phrases

Although the ultimate goal is to rank high for organic keywords, this doesn’t always happen. This leads to your site not showing up on the first page and hurting your marketing campaign. And when your site isn’t ranked high, you’re missing out on traffic. With Google AdWords, you have the ability to use a PPC strategy that  centers around keywords that aren’t organically linked to your business. In other words, you can purchase nonorganic keywords for your ads.

2. Targeted Marketing

Google AdWords can aim  your ads globally, but for a lawyer, it’s best to stay with local regions or cities. This means with this marketing campaign, you’re completely in control of the area you want to target. Some of the geographical targeting options include selecting cities, zip codes or using a set mile radius selection around a major city.  You can even choose to exclude certain areas. For example, if you wish to not market in certain zip codes and have previously chosen a mile radius targeting option, you can select the specific zip codes to have Google Adwords not bid on keywords entered from select zip codes within your selected target radius. This allows your campaign more funding for zip codes in the radius where your services may be a better fit.

3. Most of the Results Are Ads

A great deal of the space on the search results is ads. More than 80 percent of search results consist of AdWords ad placements. It’s not surprising that a majority of Google’s income stems from AdWords, which is why ads take up a great deal of the results. Moreover, a large quantity of the space at the top of the page is ads. This makes it easier for your ads to get seen and by a larger number of people.

3. Easy to Measure

With traditional marketing, it is difficult to accurately gauge how many people saw your ad. You can only estimate and guess. However, with Google AdWords, you have the ability to see accurate and detailed records of how many people saw and clicked on your ads. In addition, you have the ability to see which keywords perform the best, which gives you the ability to search engine optimize your site even further. The report will even list what times of the day your advertisements do the best. Ultimately, this can all be used to enhance the efficiency of your marketing campaign. The date related to your results comes in very quickly, so you can immediately determine where the weaknesses are in your campaign and take the necessary steps to improve your law firms’ marketing. There is also the ability to perform “A / B Testing” for example if you think an iteration of your text ads may work better, but you are not 100% convinced, you can run a split test for the new text ad to display evenly against your previous text ad, then measure if there is an increase in form submissions (commonly called CTR – Click Through Rate) or phone calls to your practice.

4. AdWords Works Instantly

Standard SEO strategies tend to not pay off right away, so you may not see your initial investment working until several months after you launch it. Once you create an account and have your ads approved, they’ll be displayed in the search engine results. Your site will start to receive traffic soon after your ads are launched. I was able to personally reap the benefits of such marketing when I launched my own campaign for approximately 2 weeks in order to improve my overall sales funnel. The campaign consisted of a landing page that drove traffic thanks to Google Adwords, and it offered a download of valuable content, a series of follow-up emails, and a free consultation. The results were more than satisfying, attracting over 200 new client leads for my law firm! See my campaign in action here.

5. Competitors

Do you know how many of other attorneys in your region are using Google AdWords? Do you know if any of them are running a marketing campaign? You can keep up or even outrank your competitors by using AdWords.

6. Flexibility with Spending

If you’re on a tight budget, you’re in luck. This marketing allows you to control your spending since there isn’t a locked-in contract or a minimum amount you have to spend. In addition, you can set daily budgets on how much you want to spend bidding on keywords. Then you can set monthly maximum spend rates. An example would be you could

Your marketing success can be reached organically and without the aid of Google AdWords, but sometimes, it takes money to make money. It is an investment worth looking into if you are eager to improve your brand recognition at a quicker rate. Set your budget, make a plan and get started. Have you launched successful marketing campaigns that attracted a significant amount of business through the use of the pay-per-click system? What has your expereience been with Adwords? Share with us below in the comments, we would love to hear from you!