How to Optimize Your Law Firm’s Paid Search Keyword List

Your law firm’s digital marketing strategy will include multiple elements, such as paid search. To get the most from your paid search, you need to ensure your keyword list is optimized. Otherwise, you can spend a great deal of money with minimal results. The good news is that it only takes a few steps to optimize the paid search keyword list for your law firm successfully.

Optimize It Manually 

You can probably find an algorithm or program to optimize your keyword list for you, but you want to do this manually, at least the first few times. This comes down to the numerous reasons that a keyword did not lead to conversions. The keyword may be fine, but you need to improve the client experience, messaging, or something else. An algorithm cannot tell the difference.

Before Optimizing

Before you start optimizing your keyword list, start by auditing the conversions. The vast majority of Google Ads accounts do not track conversions effectively, so auditing ensures you are not one of those. Start by ensuring that you import the right goals, you consistently count conversions, and the tags are active, with conversions recording. Without taking these steps, you cannot analyze that your optimization worked.

You also need to get sufficient data before optimizing to limit natural variance. The time period of data you need to look at will depend on how many clicks or how much data you have. If just a few clicks make the difference for you, then you need to gather more data.

Start by Increasing What Works

Once the prep is out of the way, start your optimization process by increasing what works. For keywords to drive sales and conversions at your law firm, you need to have the right intent and good client experience. This means that to optimize, you want to amplify the correct keywords and improve the client experience.

To choose your keywords, visit the keyword list section of Google Ads. Look at data from the last 30 days (or longer if necessary). Sort the keywords by things such as the best cost per conversion (your ROI) and the best conversion rate for high-volume keywords. Take a look at your bids as well, seeing if any high-performing keywords have low budgets or bids limiting them. If the analysis shows you need to, go ahead and increase budgets and bids.

Now, look at the themes for the top-performing keywords and expand your keywords to cover more of this theme. From there, you can refine your client experience as well as messaging. This means doing things like strategically choosing the landing page and creating ads with the term.

Then Reduce What Does Not Work

Now, you need to look at your keyword list and minimize the losses from poor-performing keywords. Start by sorting your keywords based on those that are high-cost yet either have the worst conversion rate or little to few conversions. If you have keywords that do not make sense for your law firm’s traffic, get rid of them, especially if they increase your spending. The key here is to sort based on the amount spent and then make your decisions based on the relevance.

Once the irrelevant keywords are gone, it is time to look at the relevant terms that do not drive traffic. You will need to decide what to do with them, whether that is to keep trying or to cut your losses. Account for natural variance, especially with low-traffic keywords that are part of high-priced auctions. Is that the case or do you need to fix your landing page? Or is the keyword just bad?

Finally, Optimize the Keywords With Lower Volumes

Once you complete the above two steps, it is time to optimize the keywords on your list with lower volumes. This essentially means repeating the process from the other two steps, but expanding the terms you include in your evaluation to those with lower and lower volumes. In the case of keywords without sufficient traction, decide if increasing the bid will improve your results

Takeaway 

Remember to track your data after you complete the above optimization so you can see if your efforts worked for your law firm. You will also need to repeat the entire process semi-regularly to ensure your keywords remain optimized. If your firm need’s assistance in optimizing keywords, reach out and let us know.