4 Ways to Structure Law Firm PPC Campaigns for Growth - #171

Most firms waste budget on single-channel tactics. This four-campaign structure captures clients at every buying stage—from brand defense to new market entry.

You need brand campaign strategy to defend territory at $2-4/click, competitor bidding tactics to steal market share, non-brand keyword targeting for growth, and dynamic search ads for scale. This isn't theory—it's the proven law firm PPC campaign mix Sterling deployed across 5 metros and 32 attorneys. Stop leaving cases on the table with incomplete ad account structure.

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - Paid Search Campaign Structure: Stop Leaving Cases On The Table

1:54 - Brand Protection Campaigns: Why $3 Clicks Beat $55 Clicks

6:04 - Competitor Keyword Bidding: Steal Traffic With Comparison Pages

9:43 - Non-Brand Keyword Targeting: Where The Majority Of Your Budget Goes

13:08 - Law Firm PPC Strategy: No Silver Bullet, You Need All Four

14:54 - Dynamic Search Ads Strategy: Let Google Find Keywords For You

17:30 - Paid Media Budget Allocation: When To Scale vs When To Pivot

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Chapters

• 0:00 Paid Search Campaign Structure: Stop Leaving Cases On The Table
• 1:54 Brand Protection Campaigns: Why $3 Clicks Beat $55 Clicks
• 6:04 Competitor Keyword Bidding: Steal Traffic With Comparison Pages
• 9:43 Non-Brand Keyword Targeting: Where The Majority Of Your Budget Goes
• 13:08 Law Firm PPC Strategy: No Silver Bullet, You Need All Four
• 14:54 Dynamic Search Ads Strategy: Let Google Find Keywords For You
• 17:30 Paid Media Budget Allocation: When To Scale vs When To Pivot

Transcript

0:00

If your paid media strategy stops at divorce lawyer near me, you are leaving cases on the table. Let's fix that. I am your host, Tyler Dolf, the CEO of our digital marketing agency called Rocket Clicks. We work exclusively with family law firms across the country, and today I have the co-founder of our law firm, Sterling Lawyers, with me, Tony Carls. He is both the co-founder of our law firm and also the president of our agency. He is joined along with James Patterson. James runs our entire, paid media team here at the agency, and we are going to deep dive paid search today. We're going to talk about the four essential types of paid search campaigns your firm should be running. Each designed to capture a different type of traffic depending on where they're at in your search funnel and whether you're defending your turf or re, acting your brand clients. These campaigns will help you convert more clicks into more clients, whether you're defending your turf or reaching brand new clients. These campaigns will help you convert more clicks into more clients. I hope you enjoy. All right, guys, we're talking paid media today we're going to talk paid media campaign types. So, James, I know there's a lot of different campaigns that we leverage in our clients here at Rocket Clicks to help their law firms grow. And, Tony, you know, you built out kind of the roadmap and playbook for this based on the success of Sterling. Let's start from the top. Start for the beginning. I know there's kind of four major paid search campaigns, that we like to leverage. James, why don't you give us an overview of the first one, which is the brand campaigns. Yeah, for sure. Brand campaigns are definitely, a really great, campaign to have within your, ad account strategy. Reason for that is especially for, law firms that are investing heavily in upper funnel strategies or getting their brand name out there. So their opportunity to obviously capitalize on that search when it's coming in. One of the things that we, that we talked to with other family law firms is like, well, why do I need a brand campaign if I'm already ranking well for obviously branded search organically? And the thing we always like to talk about there is one of the advantages of, of, brand campaign and paid search is not only is your cost per click and cost per lead extremely affordable. You get to actually control the messaging in your ad creative as well as the landing page, right? So a lot of times when you're looking at branded search organically, you're going to be going just to the home page and things like that. With, brand Campaign, you're actually able to drive users to a dedicated landing page. If you have a unique offer that you're putting out there, for paid media audiences specifically, it's another opportunity to, call that out in your, search ad copy. So it's a really great way to, better, target those users that are coming in. Another thing we see a lot is, competitors bidding on your own brand name will actually not to to. We'll talk a little bit about that here in a moment. So it's another good way to just make sure that you're holding down the for, you will always have ad rank advantage over competitors bidding on your brand name. So again, it's really a no brainer. In a lot of ways to make sure you're getting that coverage, getting the right messaging and ultimately best experience to your your user searching for you. Tony, every now and then, we get a client that says, oh, why would I bet on my own brand? I already show up. You know, on the first, first listing. Organically. What do you what do you say to that? Well, it's similar to what James just mentioned. The. I think the biggest point is, when you bid on your own brand, your ability to get a massive search landscape advantage is not insignificant. So there's a couple types of ads that you'll see when you're searching on paid search. Most of the time, they're all equivalent in terms of size. But when you have a really high ad rank against your competitors and you're, winning in that that metric in campaigns, your landscape significantly shifts and you get a big, huge ad block at the top of the page. Your competitor then may not may not show at all, or it might be a lot smaller. Kind of diminishing the point of their ad. So it's a really good opportunity. And then, the other part is this cost, like this is one of the this is going to be one of the most cost effective campaigns that you'll run online. So if you have a brand, that you've been investing in or just building organically through service over the course of 20 years, really owning that and taking advantage of the cost savings, through these types of campaigns and making sure you get that traffic, is really helpful because these are going to be, you know, 2 or 3 or $4 clicks at most, comparatively to, you know, you know, divorce lawyer keyword, a family lawyer keyword. It's going to cost you, depending on the marketplace, 35 to $55 a click. So it's a very different experience. So if you if you're investing in a brand, it's a great, great opportunity. We run an affiliate stuff. We love when we got that in our contract because we knew we could do better landing pages, a better experience than the big corporate. And same is true here. Like you can you can customize and tailor the user experience. And drive better results. Yeah. My favorite part of that is, like, you are the most authoritative answer to your brand. So why not be there and take advantage of it? James, you teased out a second, second campaign type, which is competitor campaigns. So I think we see this all the time in our space, other competitors bidding on their competitors keywords and trying to show up for for their search terms. How do we think about competitive campaigns? Yeah. Competitor campaigns can definitely be very effective. It's not generally going to be a leading strategy within your your mix of campaign, keyword intense across your ad account. But you can definitely get some, some good results with some, good strategy and creativity here. So we just obviously talked a lot about the ad rank advantage that you get from from bidding on your own brand name. So obviously there are some instances where maybe some competitors aren't actively bidding on their brand name. So in that, in that, scenario, there is no ad rank advantage. Basically all competitors bidding on that brand name have, an equal opportunity to potentially get their ad to show on the first spot there. So that can be, something that's worth investigating right off the bat. Essentially what we're going to do is identify what our maybe the, you know, top 5 to 10 competitors that you'd want to, bid on. Take a look at, you know, pretty common variations, like the brand name themselves, maybe brand name and different geo variations and things like that. And if you do this really well, what you can do is actually create unique offers for these or unique landing page experiences to really capitalize on users, being exposed to your ad. So one of the best strategy I've seen with this is actually comparison pages. So you see this a lot, especially in the large SaaS, companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, things like that. They'll bid, directly on competitors. When they click on that, they go to this giant comparison sheet. So, for law firms, we can do, something similar there. Just, just have a very good opportunity to potentially call out what are your unique, advantages of working with your law firm versus the competitors that you're you're bidding on? when we say that this is pretty common in this space. Yeah, I would say, you know, competitor, keyword targeting is not a new strategy by any means. So it's very likely if you're an established, business in your marketplace, it's it's very likely that somebody is already actively bidding on your brand name. So we again, like to approach this as it's never going to be the leading strategy within your ad account mix, but it's definitely worth looking at. A lot of times if you do have, a better positioning than some of your competitors can be a really great opportunity to steal those, customers or any interested in a different brand. Back over to you. Yeah. I'd say the thing that's, the biggest opportunity in this space is, this is leveraged with the landing pages are pretty, unique. Like, there's not a lot of differentiation between their brand landing page, their competitor landing page, their non brand keyword landing pages. So they're not really getting the benefit of it. A great opportunity is if you're going to be if you're going to be bidding on a competitor's brand name is run a sentiment analysis using, like ChatGPT or some AI tool looking at all of their reviews. And then on the landing page, talk about the stuff that you do better than what the reviews they're going to read about that other client are. And you can like literally address if they go to Google and read the reviews of your competitor and they go to your landing page and you talk about the things that they don't do well, you're positioning yourself really well. So there's there's opportunities here. A lot of this is going to be positioning from a messaging perspective. If you don't do that, you know, it can still work, but it's going to work less well. That is a deep dive tone. We may have to do a whole podcast on, leveraging AI. That was that was awesome. All right, James, we've covered, we've covered brand covered competitors. What's next? Yes. So this is your your meat of your ad account strategy. By far this is going to be your non brand campaigns. So we'll actually have a podcast talking about campaign structure and do a really big deep dive into what we mean by different strategies within a non brand campaign build out. But essentially what you want to do is target your key services that you offer your key practice areas and then create different variations based off of user intent, geo locations. And other signals in which you can really pinpoint your strategy to get the best message and best landing page experience in front of users looking for, the services that you offer. So when we when we think about a mix of campaigns within an ad account, the majority of your budget's going to generally be here. This is, Tony had alluded to it, generally gonna be your most expensive in terms of a cost per click and cost per lead, of course. So these are your your hot, juicy leads that are looking for help today. And you can build out your non brand strategy to really capitalize on that demand. Yeah, 100%. I think what we say in family law is that there aren't a lot of big brands like branding hasn't been a massive priority for a lot of family law firms. So people aren't searching by their name to start out with. They're going to start high funnel, you know, divorce attorney near me, family law Milwaukee. And so if you're not there, you're missing out on, on a ton of leads for your firm. Tony, I know as we were building Sterling and, you know, thankfully, we're to a size now, our our brand has has gained some steam and build some momentum in our area. But before that, I know you were spending a lot of money on, on these non-branded keywords. Yeah. We still we still do today. We're to the point, though, where we're there's not, of our five metro areas, there's not there's not a lot of opportunity to continue to expand budgets. And that's typically how we will talk to clients about it is like this is pretty low funnel. And if you're doing good good conversion tracking that we'll we'll talk about in the later episode. You can get good or a good ROI on these if you're not doing good conversion tracking. This might not be the doing work well for you. And you might think paid paid media doesn't work. Paid search doesn't work. And it's you're right, it doesn't work if you do it wrong. Like most most things in life. So but at some point there's diminishing returns, like, you can't, you can't spend a dollar as effectively. And once you get to that point in any marketplace, you then really have two options. Assuming your waterfall is healthy and functioning well is you start investing in brand or you start, you continue to expand your territories. So non brand keywords, this is definitely where you're going to start. There's a lot of opportunity. Like James you were saying mixing and mix the structure of your account by intent. So you can leverage messaging and, budget opportunities to your advantage. Love it. Yeah, I think it's what's important as you're listening to this, is that it is. There is no silver bullet here. There is a mix of strategies that you have to use in order to grow your law firm. You don't just do brand. You don't just do commentary. Don't just do a name brand. You need a mix because different people are going to find you in different ways, and you have to be visible for them. Yeah. I mean, I would say a way to think about should I do non brand versus brand is how fast how fast do you want to see your firm grow? So do you, do you want to see a lot of growth more quickly when investing in brand? You're probably not going to see that because you don't have a lot of notoriety in the marketplace yet. But over time, that's going to become more cost effective. Than your non brand campaigns, because it's actually going to cost you less. And the staying power of your brand is going to last longer in the marketplace. But it takes a while to get there. And it's not like a while isn't a week or two weeks. It's like several months, several iterations of similar message, same brand. They really get to know the look and feel of you. And they can trust you. And that takes time. So it's really a, you know, do you want to make the investment now and then? Leverage that over, over time and see kind of growth be pretty slow at the front end but great at the end. Or do you want to grow now and kind of figure out how to balance it through so you can get to that place where you can leverage branding? So there's there's not a right answer here. It's really, what are you looking for is the right question? And what you know, what results are you looking for? Short term and long term so you can balance it well. All right, James, final point. Which is an interesting one, gets a lot of a lot of heated debate, for for this. So dynamic search ads. Give us a little background on what these are because they're a bit newer right to the scene. And how we've leveraged them for law firms. Yeah. Dynamic search ads I think are a really great strategy, especially when you're thinking about how to scale your ad account. So actually what you do here is you just give Google a URL. You're able to provide it a couple descriptions that you want to use for your ads that will display then, and essentially Google goes and based off a URL, essentially targets keywords based off of your, your website or landing page. So it's a little bit more black box. So very similar to a p max strategy where you are giving Google a lot of control here. It's definitely not to the same extent of himself as Max also. So going to serve on different, inventory display video, things like that. This is unique to, search landscape specifically. But where this can be really effective is especially for, kind of trying to understand where there might be some keyword expansion or scale opportunities. This is a really good place to look. Here, rocket clicks. We have a pretty built out playbook of keywords that we know perform well for clients. But this is still a strategy from time to time that will be worth running, especially for more mature accounts where we just want to say, hey, is there any differences in how users are searching right now that we might want to target specifically? That way we can build out then another non brand campaign or whatever the case may be, to then target those keywords that we find, performing well in DSA, and then that way we can put specific ad creative landing page on things like that. Behind it. So as these middle schoolers grow up and start using skip it and raise and stuff in their Right. Exactly. Yes. They'll come through here. Yes. Good to know. which divorce layer has the most arisen? My neighborhood. Right. So we wouldn't have found that without, Now? Yeah, 100%. I think, I think the main, main point here that James, you covered well is this is the This shouldn't be really your primary strategy. This is great for identifying and finding ideas, that you might not be leveraging. So it's a great gap filler. And then kind of it'll help. Google will do some research for you, and then you can pick out the themes and leverage them more strategically. So, it's it's great. It's great for that. It's great for continuing to scale the account, but this wouldn't be the thing that I would go to first. And run solely similar to, you know, conversations we've had in the past about p max. It's not something I would start with and run solely either. Same concept. Yeah. I think what's important is, as you're listening to this and and if you like, we have to say we are doing a deeper dive on to to more complex campaigns and, and all the things as it relates to paid search for family law firms. But at the end of the day, there's no set it and forget it strategy. If you have an agency or someone telling you, oh no, it's fine, don't worry about it. You know, we'll we'll look at it in two months. There's money being left on the on the table. And so just make sure that as you're thinking about your visibility online and how you're leveraging your marketing dollars, that it's done in a way that is, is consistent and that there's an eye on the ball as to what's happening, within your campaigns. Gentlemen, I appreciate the time. Looking forward to our continued deep dive into paid media for family law firms. If you enjoyed this episode, you will love our next episode on Keyword categories. So today we talked about campaign types. Now we're going to dive into the different keyword categories. We're going to break down how to organize your keywords to increase quality scores and lower your cost per leads. And speak directly to your client's needs. You can check that episode out right here.