Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising Worthwhile for Your Law Firm?

Whether your law firm should use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a question whose answer depends on an understanding of the pros and cons of PPC ads, and where that type of advertising fits in with your firm's overall marketing strategy. This question was addressed via some case studies of personal injury law firms using PPC in a recent Law.com article.

Here's a summary of the pros and cons of PPC:

Pros:

• PPC can result in higher quality leads for the firm's services;
• PPC can produce relatively quick results, with calls increasing fairly soon after a pay-per-click campaign begins;
• PPC can boost targeted traffic to the firm's Web sites; and
• Although PPC advertising can be expensive, a well-planned and managed campaign can pay for itself by attracting new, high-quality business to the firm.

Cons:

• PPC can be expensive: some key phrases sell for as much as $100 per click, and the prices for key words and phrases are increasing;
• PPC may require content-rich Web sites to be effective, including audio and video content that can be expensive to create;
• PPC is only one piece--and often a tiny one--of a firm's online marketing campaign;
• PPC can be time-consuming: successful pay-per-click campaigns require a lot of hands-on management and regular monitoring; and
• lawyers disagree about PPC's effectiveness, regardless of its price; some firms are doing just fine using traditional referral channels, getting most of their cases from past clients and other attorneys.

Considering these factors that weigh in favor of and against PPC will help you decide whether PPC would be useful for your firm, whether now is the right time to start a PPC campaign, and how much to invest in that campaign. Reading the case studies in the article will give you a very general idea of what you can expect from the campaign. Further, regularly monitoring and reevaluating the PPC campaign will help you determine if the campaign is worth its costs and will give you useful information about how to--and whether--to continue.

Comments

[ZK@Web Marketing Blog]

Formerly called Overture, it has great ROI for competitive and niche keywords. You must be cautious here. Some competitive keywords can have $10 CPC prices or higher to get in top 10. Be willing to still bid on competitive keywords and accept 2nd or 3rd page placement and ROI is still pretty good provided your ad text is compelling for the keyword and your site relates. Niche keywords can even have high costs as Yahoo! Search Marketing has the largest distribution but ROI results are even better. Yahoo! Search Marketing is another 1st tier network you want to be on for exposure and establishment of a viewer base. Be willing to break even on some keyword categories if it is toward that end. A highly recommended pay per click search engine.