Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing platforms like Google Ads are a great way for law firms and other local service businesses to start getting prospective customers and clients to their website. With PPC, you can quickly get your business in front of potential customers and clients at the moment they are searching for your services.
But, if done incorrectly, you can quickly spend a lot of your marketing dollars and have absolutely nothing to show for it.
This is why many attorneys and other local service business owners think PPC marketing doesn’t work. They’re simple not doing it correctly. To run a successful PPC campaign, you have to look at it from a comprehensive point of view. Not taking into consideration how other marketing channels work together (like your website, Google reviews, or your content and sales copy) can and will absolutely hinder the success of your PPC campaign.
It’s critical that you have a complete digital marketing strategy in place before you ever start sending paid traffic to your website.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Getting potential customers and clients to your website is only half the battle. Once they’re there what action do you want them to take?
- Call your business
- Fill out a contact form
- Sign up for an email newsletter
- Download an ebook, etc.
In regard to internet marketing, conversion rate optimization (also called conversion optimization, lead conversion, or just CRO) is the process of increasing website leads and sales without having to spend more money on attracting additional web traffic.
How Conversion Rate Optimization Works
Conversion rate optimization actually shares many of its basic principles with direct response marketing (think mail, radio, TV, and print ad campaigns), which have been around for almost 100 years. Like direct response marketing, modern day conversion rate optimization utilizes human psychology, A/B split-testing, goal or conversion tracking, and audience testing to optimize your website.
Some test methods, such as split testing (also called A/B testing) enables you to monitor which headlines, images and content help to convert more of your website visitors into new customers and clients.
Importance of Tracking Goals and Conversions
Conversion tracking is the most important thing you need to do in order to increase your conversions, but it is the one thing that I see most often overlooked. You will never know how successful your marketing efforts are, or how to optimize your campaigns for more success unless you track conversions.
You can track your conversions by setting up “Goals” in Google Analytics. If you are an attorney or other type of local service business, the two most important conversions you want to track are phone calls and contact form submissions.
You can track “click to call” buttons and contact form submissions for free by integrating Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics. Or, if you want more precise data on your phone call conversions, you can integrate paid tools such as CallRail.
Additional Keys to a Positive ROI for Your PPC Campaigns
Use Keyword Targeted Landing Pages
A common mistake we see lawyers and other local service business owners make when running PPC campaigns is not having dedicated landing pages specifically for each of their ad groups. The more specific you can make your sales process using PPC ads, the better your results will be.
Separate Yourself from Your Competitors
Leverage your experience, reviews, awards, and results, to your advantage. Tell your prospect why they should choose you over the competitor down the street.
Target the Right Keywords
If your campaign is setup to run the broad match keyword “oral surgeon” for example, it can (and will) still show your ad when someone types a keyword even loosely related. When setup like this the keyword “dentist” alone could trigger your ad.
For this reason, broad match keywords almost always lead to lower conversion rates, so it’s best to avoid them. By setting all your keywords to either phrase match, or exact match, you’re telling Google to only show your ad when someone searches for that keyword specifically.
Conclusion
Gathering, analyzing, and testing visitor data is key to optimizing your website and landing pages, along with developing a complete digital marketing strategy. It’s amazing how many business websites there are that don’t employ even the most basic of CRO tactics. This opens the door to a huge opportunity for those that do.
