Oct

3

Managing your PPC Campaign: Keyword Selection

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The second step of a successful PPC campaign is selecting your keywords. In this article, we will tackle this topic.

Check back soon for the next article in the series.

Let’s look at our imaginary attorney’s PPC strategy – John Smith, a new york city divorce & family law attorney.
John Smith’s first inclination is to start out with some keywords that might describe his business;

New York City divorce lawyer
New York City family law attorney
New York City divorce law firm

This is the biggest problem I see made by most PPC D.I.Y.’ers. While broad terms like these will generate the most traffic, it also gives you the lowest ROI.

Consider if you were a client in NYC looking for a divorce lawyer. Getting from the Upper West Side to the far reaches of Queens could be 3 hours by train – you will most certainly rule out attorneys who are outside your neighborhood. A better keyword selection would be on that can find a balance between broad and narrow keywords. In our example, the broad location section of the keyword is “New York City“, where a more specific location would be “Upper East Side“, or somewhere in between with a keyword like “Brooklyn“.

Now also consider that a practice area like divorce has many specific components that fall within the “family law” and “divorce” lawyer’s practice area. Some attorneys will focus on fathers rights, some on high net worth divorces, and others on family court specifically. In the second part of our keyword – the practice area – a broad term would be ‘divorce‘ or ‘family law‘ while a more specific term like “separation agreement” or “Father’s custody rights” are much more descriptive.

Finding a balance of broad and descriptive keywords is generally a better approach to PPC success. Start out with a list of your most descriptive keywords. If you have a bigger budget, try expanding your keyword list to include a broad location + specific practice area, or vice versa.

In some cases, a specific location plus very specific practice are might not provide enough traffic; in one case, I had an attorney who practiced cruise injury litigation. Combining that VERY specific practice area with a small town would likely yield very few leads.

Check in with your PPC campaign weekly if possible; every month at the very least. See how your keywords are performing and make adjustments as necessary.

Sep

28

Managing your PPC Campaign: Step 1

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In 2008 I conducted a study of attorney PPC campaigns managed by a third party at Yahoo and Google for the year current year. Granted, it’s nearly 2 years later, but I don’t get the impression the results have changed; at the time, PPC leads were cheaper than SEO leads in only 1 of 8 chases. This was not including the campaign management fees (The third party service provider charged $1 for every $1 spent by the client), which made PPC leads more than twice as expensive as SEO leads in many cases.

However, PPC leads CAN work, and can in some cases be cheaper than SEO leads. First, lets look at how we calculate cost per lead. Call tracking must be implemented for both SEO and PPC campaigns. A different call tracking phone number is displayed for yahoo, google and natural / SEO search results, and SEO leads should be sorted to remove a percent of the total leads that corresponds to the percentage of unique direct website visits or referrals not related to SEO efforts and also to account for searched performed for the clients name; these are leads that would have occurred without SEO.

SEO cost/ Total SEO leads = cost per SEO lead
PPC cost / Total PPC leads = cost per PPC lead

On average, the 2008 study revealed an average SEO lead cost around $20/lead and PPC leads (with management costs figured in) at nearly $45/lead. If an attorney were to perform his own PPC maintenance and management, this figure would be much closer to SEO lead cost at $25/lead, which could be further reduced if the attorney find tuned his campaigns.

This is the first article of many that will help you manage your own PPC campaigns in Bing and Google (note; Yahoo is in the process of transitioning their PPC ad service to Bing.com and will serve Bing’s ads on its search platform).

Setting up your PPC accounts

Coming shortly!