Want to make more money in your law practice? One of the biggest keys for doing so is avoiding the pay-per-click quicksand. By this I mean that pay-per-click is a trap that many attorneys get themselves caught in. Many don’t realize they’re in it and the ones that do realize they’re in the trap simply see Google’s Adwords program as a cost of doing business. What these lawyers don’t get is that they’re stuck in a hole and, the last time I checked, you don’t get out of a hole by continuing to dig. So if you want to make money, and be a happy chap, then avoid the paid click quicksand. On the other hand, maybe you’re happy looking like this guy:
Assuming you not willing to take your last few dollars down into the sand with you, let’s make sure you get on the right path so you can start looking like this guy:
Assuming you’d rather look like the latter, let’s get to it.
Pay-Per-Click advertising is a strategy which attorneys should avoid
I’ve written before on the issue of paid search advertising. These discussions included my manifesto article on three ways for lawyers to decrease pay-per-click spending. The reason I’ve written on this topic is simple – paid search ads are a terrible idea for law firms. Let’s talk about why such ads are a bad idea and why people choose to make such a bad decision.
The problem with any paid advertising, including pay-per-click, is that you’re paying for a marketing asset that you don’t own and control. You’re simply renting ad space from someone else. Let’s use simple numbers. Say you spend $500 this month on Google Adwords and it results in five clients. You have an acquisition cost of $100 per client. Now let’s say, on average, those clients pay you $1,500 each. You brought in $7,500 in revenue ($1,500 x 5 clients) but, after the $500 in acquisition costs you really only brought in $7,000. This means that these cases aren’t as profitable as they could otherwise be. Now, at the end of the month when you pay all your overhead, you’re a little short because of those acquisition costs. The typical attorney solution for this? INCREASE THE AMOUNT OF PAID ADS TO GET MORE CASES AND INCREASE REVENUE! The result? Now you have even more cases which aren’t as profitable as they should be. Now, because you have an inflated number of unprofitable cases, you need to hire help to handle the increased workload. Then you have additional payroll. In order to meet that payroll you increase paid click spending again. And around-a-round you go. As you stay on this merry-go-round, the amount of money you make, per case handled, keeps decreasing.
This approach truly is a merry-go-round. The problem is that it’s nowhere near as much fun as this one:
Why do lawyers follow this flawed approach all too often? They do so for instant results. It’s much easier, after all, to set up an Adwords campaign and get a few clients right away. Once you start down that road, at all, good luck getting off of it. Now let’s look at another option.
Lawyers should invest in their own marketing assets rather than paying for Adwords
I’ve written many ‘a time on why lawyers need to invest in their practice as opposed to spending time and money. The idea of investing is simple. Instead of spending money to use the marketing assets of a third party (such as Adwords) you should be putting your money into something that you own and no one can take away from you. The best example of this is one’s blog. If you’re blogging correctly (I stress the “correctly” part) then your blog can drive a good deal of organic traffic. Say you spend two hours writing a quality blog post. Now say, over the next two years, it gets 500 clicks (see my discussion on whether attorneys should use AVVO for a real-world example of this). That’s 500 clicks for two hours worth of work. Assuming you spend $25 per click on a PPC campaign then that blog post will have generated traffic that you would have otherwise paid $12,500 for (500 clicks x $25 paid click cost). When’s the last time you received $12,500 worth of value for two hours worth of work? This math, alone, should send you running to the nearest computer so you can start blogging and so that PPC campaign can get shut off.
In spite of this math, interestingly, most lawyers will still continue to rely on pay-per-click. Why? Because blogging requires some work and effort. Do you want to be highly profitable? If the answer is “yes” then you need to understand that life is about choices. You can put in the effort required to run a quality law blog and you can reap the rewards. Of course, you can choose to use PPC instead. If so, then enjoy your swim in the quicksand.
Why do you feel so many attorneys choose to rely on pay-per-click instead of investing in their law blog? Chime in through the comment form below. If you have questions about our attorney web design and SEO packages then contact us online or by telephone.
Not sure I agree with you to avoid pay-per-click. Sure some words like “DWI lawyer” and “personal injury attorney” are overbid at $40+, but other areas like family law long tail keywords are a deal at less than $5 per click. Sometimes even the word “lawyer” or “attorney” can be $3 per click in a top 30 city where I practice.
A Blog can only take you so far. My website has a blog and it does generate some calls, but most people reading a blog are looking for free advice where people clicking on Adwords know lawyers pay for those ads and they expect to have to pay to speak with a lawyer. Also- I have tried turning Adwords off for certain days and have noticed a definite drop in calls.
Number 1 thing I hate about Adwords is half the clicks are marketers and other attorneys checking out their competition. I think you have to double what you pay per click to figure that is what it costs per real consumer click.
Thanks for the input James.
Even if an attorney spends only $150 a month on Adwords (using a low number) that’s still $150 that can be invested into something which provides and ongoing return which will compound over time. I would, respectfully, dispute that a blog can only take one so far and that people looking at a blog only want free advice. Our clients’ blogs are a key to their marketing strategy and drive substantial business to their respective practices.
Do you have a planned out strategy in regards to your blog?
Of course every attorney would like their site to come up top-front-page in SERPs organically, but for many of us, it’s just not that simple– especially in larger markets. Pay-per-click ads may be expensive, but they do work. If you’re going to run a calculation of how much it costs for a click, you also need to run the calculation for how long it actually takes to write content of any value, sufficient-enough to get noticed by Google’s algorithm. If you assume an attorney needs to sit down for an hour or two (at $200-300/hr) to write a decent article or blog post, suddenly pay-per-click ads start to make a lot of sense.
Hi Michael. I would suggest that the math weighs in favor of generating one’s own content instead. Let’s say one bills $300 per hour and spends two hours writing a quality piece. It’s true that the article took $600 worth of time. Now say the article gets just 100 clicks over the next 12 months. If the attorney averages a cost of $20 per click on ppc then those one hundred clicks just saved $2,000 worth of marketing expenses. In other words, one gets a $2,000 return for two hours of work in just the first year. When you add in that the post will keep getting clicks, after the first year, then it becomes the investment that keeps on payin’.
By this same rationale, all advertising is a waste of money for attorneys. Is that what you’re suggesting?
Hello John,
That’s not what I’m suggesting. There’s a big difference between renting ad space from third parties and investing in sustainable marketing assets. Rather than spending money on things such as pay-per-click, television, and other things in which the attorney does not receive ownership of an asset they should put their money into content, video, and other assets which they will own, control, and receive dividends from over a long period of time. This article discusses the point further: https://seoforlawyers1.wpengine.com/attorneys-should-own-their-marketing-assets/