Incorporating long-term keyword phrases into your SEO and PPC campaigns can improve your results!

A few years ago, using long-tail keywords for search rankings and PPC campaigns was quite popular. Although this practice has waned somewhat, it’s beginning to see a resurgence and can be highly effective for law firms. If you have gotten out of the long-tail keyword game, there are quite a few reasons to get back in.

Lower competition

Long-tail keywords are much more specific than short-tail keywords. For this reason, you can expect to have considerably less competition when trying to rank in search engines or get a top position in a PPC campaign. Although there are usually less searches, you can capitalize on the searches that your keywords get and often dominate the competition.

Specificity

Since the content that law firms create is often highly specific and focuses on a narrow area of law, long-tail keywords can be used to your advantage. There is also the geographical element because most legal clients are looking for an attorney in their local city or town. That’s why a Milwaukee serious accident attorney should create blog posts that discuss their specific area of expertise, incorporating “Milwaukee” as a keyword to drive more traffic to their website.

Higher conversions

When compared to broader, short-tail keywords, using long-tail keyword phrases tends to match people with highly relevant search and PPC results. This is because the more keywords a person enters, the more specific the search phrase is and the more specific their results will be. When potential clients find your content via a long-tail search phrase, it’s likely that they have a genuine interest. Consequently, you can expect a higher conversion rate than you would with short-tail keywords, which means you can generate leads more effectively. If you are running a PPC campaign, this can equal a higher return on your investment.

Bing Ads: definitely new and improved!

Bing Ads has recently implemented some key changes that make it more like Google AdWords. Although the company used to strive to differentiate itself from AdWords, they have been working for the past year to mimic Google’s platform more closely. In fact, you can now import your existing AdWords campaign into Bing Ads. Here are some reasons why you may want to run a PPC campaign on this platform.

An alternative to enhanced campaigns

When Google made a structural change for its enhanced campaigns, it created quite a stir among some marketers. Individuals running their campaign were forced to adapt to the structural change, and they lost an element of control as a result. In some cases, this led to a lower return on investment for companies, which understandably didn’t always sit well. Bing Ads differs because you can choose to use an enhanced campaign or stick with the old structure instead.

Higher return on investment

Since there are fewer users on Bing Ads, there is less competition. Consequently, they tend to be cheaper in almost every area, and you can expect to run your campaign for considerably less money than on AdWords. This means an attorney in New Hampshire, for example, can reach a reasonable percentage of their geographic demographic and achieve the highest possible return on investment.

New features

The top vs. other column feature shows where your ads are positioned and provides you with keyword performance reports. There is a learning series that helps beginners acclimate to Bing Ads and streamlines the educational process. Also, there is the search and filter in the opportunities tab that helps you optimize your campaigns on this platform.

These changes have brought about some definite improvements. However, it’s important to remember that Google still dominates the search market and is likely to for the foreseeable future. That’s why it’s ideal to experiment with different possibilities to produce the most return on your pay-per-click advertising efforts, whether that means running campaigns on one or two different engines.

AdWords has long been a favorite analytics tool for legal marketers to use to determine the best keywords for PPC advertising and organic search content. Google recently updated the search terms report provided by AdWords to enable marketers to find groups of common search terms related to their particular field.

This update will prove to be invaluable and save lawyers a lot of time doing search term research. For instance, catastrophic injury lawyers can search for all the terms related to the phrase “wrongful death” and see how people are using that term as part of a larger keyword phrase. As most legal marketers know, longer search terms are becoming more widely used to target increasingly savvy Web searchers.

Seasonal advertising

This search term filter can also be used for seasonal advertising and content creation. For instance, taxes are going to be different for the 2013 year than for the 2012 year. As tax time approaches both this year and next year, tax lawyers can look up search terms like “2012 taxes” to see the specific questions people have on that topic. They can then target their advertising campaign to coincide with those questions around the tax filing deadline.

Content inspiration

This new feature may prove to be a useful inspirational tool for lawyers wondering what to write about in their next blog post. It helps legal professionals find out the specific personal injury queries for which people are trying to find information on Google. By tailoring the next blog post to meet the needs of searchers, your post will get more traffic and rank higher on SERP pages, exposing your blog to a larger audience of potential clients.

If you haven’t yet looked at the new search term filter feature on Google’s AdWords, give it a try today!

The Content Marketing Institute recently released an article with a helpful metaphor for two competing types of marketing. The article compares content marketing and SEO practices with buying a car or home and pay-per-click (PPC) practices with leasing a car or renting a home.

Buying vs. leasing — the basic metaphor

In the debate between buying and leasing marketing materials, content marketing consists of producing engaging blog posts, articles on other sites or other content to draw customers in and convince them that you are an expert in your field. On the other hand, PPC advertising consists of purchasing advertising space and paying each time someone uses it to get to your website.

When you use content marketing, you invest in the full content as well as its location or locations. As a business law attorney in Tulsa, you might, for instance, produce content about the legal implications of mergers or buyouts as part of your online marketing activity. You make a large up-front investment but don’t have to pay for it again. When you purchase PPC advertising, you are leasing space for your content. You pay significantly less for each customer to view your site, but you have to pay each time.

Benefits of buying and content marketing

When you buy, you create value for yourself that you can use again and again. The same page on your blog may generate new visitors on a regular basis. Once you’ve created that content marketing, you can use it as many times as you like. The main downside is that you have to invest the time and/or money in creating it. Another potential downside is that you have to invest in the webspace; when you make use of PPC, you can spread your content to a wide variety of sites across the Web.

Benefits of leasing and PPC

While it may seem that buying is always better, there are instances where PPC can be more effective. Because you don’t have to pay as much and because you are partially paying for the wider range of locations offered by PPC providers, you may be able to reach a wider audience. Similar to how you can often afford a better car on a temporary basis if you lease rather than purchase outright, you might get better results temporarily from PPC. However, if you are planning a long-term marketing campaign, content marketing is generally better.

Final thoughts

Experts recommend that you use both content marketing and PPC in your marketing efforts. Depending on your personal views toward buying and leasing, you might prefer one style over the other and focus more on that.

Google+ Local page editor is now faster, making it easier than ever for businesses to update their listings.

Earlier this year, Google rolled out a silent upgrade to the way local business pages can be edited in the Google+ social network. Since the company has exhibited ongoing efforts to tie in all its search and productivity tools and products to Google+, legal professionals who wish to increase their presence on SERPs should pay close attention to these changes.

Law offices that already have a Google+ profile can see the changes to the editor by visiting their local pages and clicking the “About” tab at the top, followed by “Edit Business Information.” Listings that have already been verified by Google will see any changes made on the editor reflected almost immediately on Google Maps. This is a very important feature for local and mobile search, and thus the following best practices should be followed:

• The name of the business on Google+ should match what prospective clients see when they visit the office. If a fraud lawyer does client intakes at an office that has a particular firm name on its shingle, then that should be the name of the Google+ local business page.
• The physical address should follow the guidelines set forth by Google Maps, and the firm’s contact information should include all social network profiles, such as LinkedIn profiles, email addresses and telephone numbers.
• The description may include some marketing copy, and the categories should reflect the identity of the law office instead of the practice areas. Custom categories are no longer allowed since Google+ is moving towards a uniform local and mobile search system.

Legal professionals who already have an old Google Local Places account will find it easier to migrate all their information to Google+. The best feature about the new editor is that changes are updated across all Google products within an hour as long as the business listing has been verified.

A recent study by Marin Software indicates what many web marketing analysts have already known for a long time: Mobile ad sales are the next frontier for getting business on the web. This study shows that mobile traffic could drive as much as one third of all paid-search click traffic by 2014. In other words, smartphones and tablets are a booming business!

The rising importance of mobile traffic

Some of the key indicators and trends in the Marin Software report include:

• As of 2012, mobile devices accounted for nearly a quarter of all U.S. paid search clicks.
• In 2012, companies spent on average 18.4 percent of their search budgets on mobile search, with more than $4 billion spent in total across 2,000 brands.
• Mobile campaigns were found to provide higher click-through rates at lower cost per click. This is expected to change with Google’s recent Enhanced Search feature, which integrates mobile and computer-based keywords and AdWords campaigns.
• Conversions on mobile phones are still lagging, though this may be more in part due to a need for software or web design tools to make sales and other conversions more fluidly accessible through mobile advertising.

Taking advantage of trends

Covering markets in 13 countries including the United States, China, Australia and the UK, the study was comprehensive and worldwide. As a legal marketer or lawyer with an interest in marketing your firm, you need to know how to take advantage of these trends. For instance, if you are an Atlanta fatal accident attorney, one avenue for marketing expansion could be to develop innovative ways of reaching out to potential clients through mobile advertising.

Do some research, download the analytics tools you need and get started developing your mobile ad campaign today!

Learning the basics of impression share can help you hone your PPC campaign’s effectiveness.

Impression share is a new web marketing term that is used to describe the effectiveness of a PPC ad campaign. It is written as a percentage of the views that visitors have of your ads divided by the potential views across all all eligible traffic given your keywords and keyword information.

This information is useful for a number of reasons. You can use it to track how well your campaign is doing and where you need to improve. Impression share is just a number, but if you are an injury attorney in Tampa, you can conduct some analysis to dig into your impression share data and understand where you’re losing market share.

How to measure and improve impression share

Lost impression share is divided into two types of IS — IS due to budget and IS due to rank. There are several options you have if your impression share number is not high enough. You can:

• Research new keywords and expand to find new markets
• Expand your firm’s networks through social media
• Provide information in different languages
• Expand your reach to nearby counties and municipalities
• Audit ad copy for full approval to run from your AdWords or other PPC account
• Improve your advertising budget

Some of these options are more easily achievable than others. For instance, if you simply need to top up your AdWords account, you can do that with a single click. If you need to do keyword research, you may need to spend a little more time. Many of the tactics you can use to improve your search ranking can also be used to improve your impression share.

By thinking about your impression share, you can achieve a greater measure of control and improve your understanding of your market.

Before Google’s big update early this month, mobile web ads and conventional web ads were managed from completely separate systems and programs. Your mobile ad center and your desktop/laptop ad center weren’t connected. However, since the Enhanced Campaigns feature launched on Google’s AdWords tool, mobile advertising can be rolled into your conventional web advertising campaigns.

This move by Google further underscores the importance of capturing the mobile advertising market. For lawyers and law firm marketers, mobile advertising can be a key part of capturing a tech-savvy, smartphone-using market share. For example, a Phoenix personal injury lawyer would want to reach out to young professionals on the go whose primary web navigation tool is a tablet or mobile phone.

What does it mean?

Change is always scary, but we hope to help you understand what this means for you and your firm’s business. First of all, you are not required to include mobile outreach. That said, why wouldn’t you want to? You can bid on mobile search traffic as easily as you can bid on standard search traffic with Google Adwords.

Another high point is that you can use smartphone geolocation tools to your advantage and target campaigns to particular locations. This is useful for legal professionals in specific geographic areas seeking to drive local keyword traffic. You can also track how many mobile ads led to phone calls, giving you extra information on the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Of course, the downside is that you will have to spend some time reconfiguring your mobile ad campaign to fit inside AdWords’ system and parameters. Luckily, all signs seem to suggest that once you do so, Enhanced Campaigns will save you time and energy when you develop new advertising campaigns for your firm.

Where we go from here

People have complained about device segmentation in PPC ever since mobile advertising became a high-revenue business. Now that mobile and desktop/laptop ads are finally integrated, there are bound to be a few kinks and bugs to work out. Ultimately, however, we see this as a net positive for lawyers, law firm marketers and online entrepreneurs everywhere.