Blog - Dominate Marketing

Google Ads: Should You Do Maximize Clicks or Maximize Conversions Bidding Strategy In 2022?

Post author By admin
Post date August 3, 2022

When setting up a Google Ads campaign, you’ll need to select a bidding strategy. A bidding strategy is essentially how you want Google to spend your budget. Basically, the goal with any bidding strategy is to keep the ad costs as low as possible and make as much money in return, and selecting the right bidding strategy is going to help you do this.

The two most common options are Maximise Clicks and Maximise Conversions. I’m going to cover these two because you are likely to be using one of them. There are a couple of other options, but they can be a bit more complex, and odds are if you don’t already know what they are you don’t need to use them.

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Maximise Clicks

First let’s go over Maximise Clicks. When you set your bidding strategy to Maximise Clicks, you are telling Google to get you as many clicks as possible for the money.

Maximise Clicks is a basic bidding strategy that often works well. It’s goal is to bring the most amount of traffic to your site, which is perfect for when you are starting out the campaign and want to see what kind of response you’ll get.

You are also able to set a cap on the cost per click, so you won’t spend more than your cap per click. This can be useful to ensure you don’t blow through your whole daily budget too quickly.

Maximise Conversions

The goal with maximise conversions is that Google will try to get as many conversions as possible. This could come at the expense of clicks, because Google may put more money into each click they think is likely to convert, so you can end up with less clicks but more conversions.

Google does need some data to make this work, so usually if you are just launching a new campaign, Maximise Conversions can be hit or miss. Sometimes it works well, but other times you need to let your campaign run for a while before Google is really able to optimize.

So Which Bidding Strategy Should You Use?

That really depends on your goals, but I’m going to assume for the purpose of this post that you just want to get the most leads or sales.

With that being the case, my recommendation is to start with Maximise Clicks, and let the campaign run for a few weeks. Ideally you want to start seeing some conversions, because this will give Google data to work with.

Once that’s happening, you can make a duplicate campaign and set the bidding strategy to Maximise Conversions, and then compare the results.

Many times you’ll find that the Maximise Conversions will work better and get your more conversions. But I have had the odd instance where it didn’t work as well and I had to switch back to Maximise Clicks. This is why I recommend testing Maximise Clicks first – so that you have a benchmark to compare against.

Also, if you just launch a Maximise Conversions campaign right away, unless Google manages to hit the nail on the head right at the beginning, you can end up spending a lot of money with little results before Google figures it out, and often that means people can’t afford to keep going and have to stop the campaign.

How Do You Set The Bidding Strategy?

If you are making a new campaign, you’ll get the select the option once you have completed the first step of creating a campaign. You will see this screen:

Click on the drop down where it says Clicks, and you will be able to select from the list:

Now, if you haven’t set up Conversions yet (see my post about How to Set Up Conversions in Google Ads here) you won’t be able to select Maximise Conversions (You can see it is greyed out in the screenshot – this is because I am using a new account). Once you set up conversions you will be able to select it.

If you already have a campaign running, you can set the bidding by going to Campaigns and clicking on your campaign from the list:

And then click “Settings” on the left, and then click on “Bidding”:

That section will drop down and you’ll see a blue link “Change bid strategy”, click that:

Then click on the drop down:

And now you’ll be able to select one of the other bidding strategies:

Summary

So, to summarise, if you are just starting out, I recommend going with Maximise Clicks, as that’s going to give you a good benchmark to work with as well as feed Google data that it will need to optimise for conversions.

Once that’s been running for a couple of weeks and you’ve had some success, try duplicating the campaign and set the new campaign to Maximise Conversions, and compare the results.

Google Ads & PPC

Expanded Text Ads in Are GONE! But Here’s How You Can Still Make Them in Google Ads In 2022…

Post author By admin
Post date July 29, 2022

Last month Google got rid of the option to create Expanded Text Ads which were the basic, plain old text ad, and instead replaced them with “Responsive Search Ads”.

Expanded Text Ads allowed you to set exactly which headlines and descriptions you wanted in which positions. Responsive Search Ads, on the other hand, give you the option to input a number headline and description variations, and Google will rotate them to find the best combination.

Expanded Text Ads were much loved by marketers because they allowed you to have complete control over your ads, and test variations yourself so you know what gets the best results.

Why Google decided to remove them is anyone’s guess, but since they both have been heading in the direction of giving users less and less control over their ads for some time, it is not entirely surprising.

However!

It is still possible to create ads that behave in the same manner as Expanded Text Ads in Google Ads, giving you control over how your headlines and descriptions show. In this post (Video) I will show you how.

How to Create “Expanded Text Ads” in Google Ads

Here is how you can achieve the same result as Expanded Text Ads using Responsive Search Ads:

Create a campaign and an ad group if you don’t have one already, then go into your ads and click on the big blue “+” icon:

And then select “Responsive Search Ad”:

Now you’re in the ad creation page. Add your URL, and then go down to the headlines. Write your first headline, and then click the little pin icon next to it. This will open a pop up which gives you the option to pin this headline to a position. Select “Show only in position 1”:

Now do the same thing for headlines 2 and 3:

Once you have done this successfully, you will see the little pin icons appear in blue next to the headlines with the respective pinned position number:

Now do the same thing with the descriptions:

And, again, the pins will show with the respective position number:

And that’s it, now just hit “Save ad” and you are done.

What we’ve done here is we have only given Google one variation to show for each position of headline or description, and pinned it to that position so that is HAS to show that variation. Now that ad will always display in that order, basically resulting in an Expanded Text Ad.

You can make up to 3 Responsive Search Ads per ad group in Google Ads, so you can test up to 3 variations manually at a time. You can also use their Ad Variation tool if you want to do other variation tests.

SEO

Why You Should NOT Target Main Keywords with SEO (Especially If You Are Just Starting Out)

Post author By admin
Post date July 21, 2022

If you are starting to do Search Engine Optimisation on a website and want to get it to rank, you probably want your website to show for the main keywords – the ones with the most search volume.

Makes sense right? Get the most traffic, make the most sales.

Naturally, this is what most people do, and it does make sense.

However, in this post I will explain why this is not a good idea if you are just starting out with the website, and what to do instead.

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Firstly, What Is a Main Keyword?

So that we all know what we’re talking about, I’ll quickly explain what I refer to as “main keywords”.

Main Keywords are what I call keywords that are the “top level” keywords, the ones with the most traffic, but also the most competition. These are often short (one or two words), and rather general.

An example would be the keyword “Lawyer”, or “Lawyer Auckland”.

You can’t really get more main than “lawyer”, so that’s what I mean. Other examples of these keywords would be “plumber”, “mechanic”, “solar panels” and so on.

What’s the Problem with Main Keywords?

These keywords are usually the first keyword everybody goes for. They have the most searches, and therefore the most competition, because everyone wants to show for them.

That is also the problem with them.

Every SEO under the sun is trying to get the website they are working on on page 1 for those keywords, and most have been doing it a lot longer than you.

What this means is you have to do a better job than they are to get your website to show. This can take a long time, sometimes 12 months or more if the keyword is really competitive.

The other problem you have is that Google doesn’t just want to show any website it doesn’t “trust” for keywords that get high search volume.

This is not something you’ll hear a lot of people talk about. But think about it.

Google is trying to provide the best possible experience for its users. That means showing quality websites that give searchers what they want.

They aren’t just going to display a new website on page 1 for a high volume keyword and risk a bad user experience.

No.

You need to prove that your website is a high quality search result that searchers actually want before you are “trusted” with high search volume keywords.

So How Do You Do Get Your Website to Rank On Page 1 Of Google?

Basically, you need to work your way up.

Below every main keyword are various “tiers” of keywords getting different search volumes each month.

You need to start by targeting the lower end “long tail” keywords which are more specific, have less traffic and less competition.

These keywords are easier to rank for so you’ll be able to get your website to page 1 for these keywords a lot easier, often times with just a well written blog post with a carefully crafted headline that talks about a very specific topic.

You build up these keywords until you are getting a decent amount of traffic coming in from them all collectively.

Now your website is going to be a lot more relevant for a specific topic, let’s say Law, or a specific area of Law, depending on what keywords you rank for.

Google will also trust your website more now, because you are proving that you are giving users what they want – assuming you have good CTRs, low bounce rates, people spend time on your website and view multiple pages etc. All these things ad up.

Now it’s going to be a lot easier to rank for keywords that have higher search volumes. As you start working on those you’ll notice that your website is ranking for them, and your traffic is now increasing faster.

Basically, you repeat this process over time until your website is so relevant that it is showing up for the main keywords.

And that’s how you get your website to show up for main keywords.

The benefit of doing it this way is that while it will take some time to rank for the main keywords, you will be getting traffic, and by extension sales, from the other keywords you have been working on.

So you won’t have to spend 6-12 months or more with no results until you finally get to page 1 for a specific keyword.

Google Ads & PPC Online Marketing Tips SEO

How to Use the Google Ads Keyword Planner to Do Keyword Research

Post author By admin
Post date July 14, 2022

In this post I’m going to show you a free tool you can use to research which keywords you should be targeting with your ads and your SEO as well.

While there are paid tools out there that will give you a lot more data, the Google Ads Keyword Planner is a good free tool that is more than adequate to get started and even use on its own if you know what you are doing.

So firstly,

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What Is The Google Ads Keyword Planner?

The Google Ads Keyword Planner is a free tool that Google gives us to use within the Google Ads platform. It allows you to set the location and a few other details, and enter the keywords you want to see the search volume of, and it will tell you approximately how many people are searching these keywords every month from that location.

It will also give you a list of related keywords and their search volume. I’ll show you all this in a minute.

First, in order to access it, you need to make free Google Ads Account. You don’t have to spend any money to access this tool, you just need the account.

I’m going to walk you through how to do that quickly now, because if you go in and try to do it while following Google’s prompts, it’s going to get you to set up a “smart” campaign (here is why you shouldn’t use smart campaigns) and enter your payment details, which we don’t need for this.

Setting Up Your Google Ads Account

Go to ads.google.com, and click the “Get Started” button in the top right:

Now scroll down to the bottom and click “Switch to Expert Mode”. This will allow you to skip the whole “smart” process and just make an account:

Now on the next page, scroll down and click “Create an Account Without a Campaign”. This will allow you to skip the guided campaign creation process and create your account without payment details:

Now just fill out the correct details for your circumstances on the following page and hit submit:

And now you have a Google Ads account and can access the Keyword Planner.

Accessing the Keyword Planner

To access the keyword planner, click “Tools and Settings” in the top banner, then click “Keyword Planner”:

Now you’ll be in the Keyword Planner and will be given two main options:

– Discover New Keywords

– Get Search Volume and Forecasts

I usually just use the “Discover new keywords” option because that gives you the search volume (the same data the Get search volume and forecasts” gives you), but it also gives you a list of recommended keywords that Google thinks relate to the ones you put in.

Once you select “Discover new keywords”, you’ll see this page:

In the main search box you enter the keywords you want to look up (remember to hit “Enter” on your keyboard after typing each keyword), and underneath it there will be a location, click on that to change the location. You can also change the language by clicking where it says “English” (you would do this if you are targeting people who use a different language on Google):

When you click the location, you’ll get a pop up box that will give you the options you need to select a location. Simply enter the location(s) you want and click “Save”:

When you’ve entered all the details, press “Get Results” and you will see the results for your keyword and the list of recommended keywords:

You will see a number of columns here. I will quickly go over each one so you know what you are looking at:

Keyword: The keyword all the stats are for.
monthly searches: This is the estimate Google gives you of how many people are searching for that exact keyword each month. This is only a rough estimate, so bear that in mind, but it will give you an idea of how much search volume there is. If it shows 0-10, the keyword is probably not worth going after.
Three month change: This is the change of search volume in the last three months – so how much it has increased, decreased or if it has stayed the same. This can give you an idea if the popularity of the keyword (and the topic) is going up or down.
YoY Change: Similar to the previous one, except it’s comparing the last month with the same month last year (for example July 2022 vs July 2021). This gives you an idea of the longer term trend of the keyword.
Competition: This is how competitive the keyword is based on your location, language and other settings. Personally I wouldn’t put a lot of weight on this metric, so don’t worry too much about it.
Ad impression share: This tells you how many times your ads have shown for this keyword versus the total number of searches. So for example, if it says 50%, it means your ad only showed for only half of the searches for this keyword. This metric will only show if you have already run ads for this keyword in the account you are using.
Top of page bid range (low and high): These two columns give you a general idea of how much you can expect to pay per click for the keyword. Again, these are very rough estimates and a lot of the time you’ll find that you pay more than they show here, so they only give you a rough idea.

Basically, they main one you want to pay attention to is the “Avg. monthly searches”, as this tells you how much volume the keyword gets. And if you are doing SEO, most of the other ones don’t matter to you anyway.

The general rules I use are:

If the keyword has 0-10 searches, don’t waste your time.
If the keyword has 10-100 searches, it’s worth going after, it generally won’t be as competitive but you may not get enough search volume so you will have to go after the keyword variations for it to get enough volume
If the keyword has 100+, especially if it has 1000+, you have enough search volume but the competition is generally higher, so be prepared for that.

So now you should have a pretty good idea of how to use the Keyword Planner to look up keywords you are thinking of targeting to see if they’re worthwhile going after.

SEO

What Actually Is SEO and How Does It Really Work?

Post author By admin
Post date July 5, 2022

Most business owners I speak to have heard of SEO, but many don’t exactly know what it is (only that someone sold it to them once, took their money and they got nothing in return).

In this post I’m going to explain what it is, how it’s supposed to work and what it is meant to achieve.

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What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and basically means optimising your website so that Google sees it as the most relevant option for a certain keyword or keywords, which it will then show in the #1 position in the search results.

Google has an algorithm which determines this, and has been getting more and more complex as time goes on. The reason for this is that Google doesn’t want people to manipulate which results it shows, but obviously it’s quite profitable if you can figure it out, so there is a whole industry based around doing exactly that, and it’s a constant back and forth between the two:

Google sets the rules, SEOs figure it out, Google does an update (which usually slashes a bunch of rankings and invalidates the old techniques), SEOs figure out the new way to do it and on and on it goes.

By this point we are a few decades into the game and it’s a little bit complex, but I will cover some of the basics in this post.

How Does SEO Work?

Google looks at certain criteria on the website to decide how relevant it is to a particular search keyword, as well as the quality of the content on the website and whether it matches the search intent of the user (this is a big one lately). It then compares it against all the other websites it is aware of on the same topic, and lists them out from what it deems as the most relevant (#1 position) to the least relevant for a searcher’s keyword.

These days a big portion of what Google looks at is all on the website, which include things like your H1 headline, your meta title, internal links between pages and the length and quality of the content on each page. In the past backlinks (other websites which link to your website) played a major role, but these days they are less relevant then they used to be.

It also takes into account some other factors such as social media, if your website or brand name is mentioned somewhere even without an actual link, how long people spend on your website, how new your content is, how often new content gets posted, your monthly traffic, how many other keywords you rank for and several other factors. Google doesn’t specifically tell you what they look for, so all this is what SEOs have figured out through experience and testing.

So How Do You Get Your Website to #1?

Basically, you need to make your website more relevant than all the others for the keyword you want to be #1 for.

Now, that’s easier said than done, it’s a process that can take months, sometimes years in a competitive industry, because not only are you dealing with competition who are probably better than you and have been doing it for longer, but you also have to wait for Google to crawl your website, index it, and actually show it, to see if what you did was good enough before you can improve further.

So what do you do if you are just starting out with law firm SEO?

A little secret is to not focus on the main keywords (like “Lawyer”) and instead find what are called “Long tail keywords” in the SEO world, which have less searches but less competition, and rank for a bunch of those.

An example of a long tail keyword would be “family mediation lawyer in Auckland”. This keyword won’t have as many searches as “Lawyer”, but it will be easier to rank for.

Over time, you will build up a list of these “smaller” keywords that you rank for, you’ll be getting some traffic, and your website will start to creep up for the main keywords as well. That’s how you can be competitive despite being smaller and just starting out.

What Happens When You Are #1

When you finally get to page 1 after months and months of work, what you’ll notice is a huge increase in your traffic, and as a result a lot more leads or sales. The reason for this is that 95% of people never go to page 2, so all the traffic that never saw your website before will suddenly be clicking on it.

It’s basically like running Google Ads with an unlimited budget, except you don’t have to pay for it, and that the conversion rate of organic results is usually quite a bit higher than you get through ads.

So basically, once you get to #1, it’s an enormous win in every regard. This is why so many businesses invest tens of thousands of dollars into SEO, because when it’s done right, it’s extremely rewarding.

Google Ads & PPC Website Tips

Want to Know How Many Leads You Are Getting? Here is How to Set Up Conversions in Google Analytics & Ads With WordPress

Post author By admin
Post date June 28, 2022

In a previous post I spoke about why you should always track conversions, in this post I’m going to show you how to actually set them up.

Ideally, you’ll want to track every time someone submits a form, clicks the phone number or clicks the email, as that will give you about as accurate data as you can get.

First I will show you how to set up the form tracking, as that is the easiest one. Then I will cover the phone number and email, but that can be a little more technical, so if you are unable to do it I will talk about what you could do instead.

If you are using WordPress then all of this should be pretty easy.

The easiest way to track when the contact form is submitted is to make it redirect to a thank you page when the person submits.

So go ahead and make a “Thank You” page. Here’s mine:

Once you’ve done that, you now need to make your form redirect to this page when someone completes and submits the form.

With most forms, there will be an option in the settings. Obviously I can’t show you every single one, but if you do a quick search online you should be able to find it.

If you are using Contact Form 7, you will need to install a plugin to be able to redirect. Here is how you do that. If you are not using Contact Form 7, skip this section.

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HOW TO SET UP THANK YOU PAGE REDIRECT IN CONTACT FORM 7 ON WORDPRESS

Go to the plugins section, and click Add New:

Then search for “contact form 7 redirect”. I like to use the one called “Redirection for Contact Form 7”:

Simply click “Install Now” and then “Activate” and the plugin will be installed.

Now you go to Contact Form 7 and select your form. You will see a tab called “Actions”. Click on it:

And now you will be able to set the redirect. Select “Redirection” from the drop down and click “Add Action”:

Then click on the one you just added and you will be able to set up the redirect. Set the title you want, and select your thank you page from the drop down. Hit save when you are done:

Now the redirect should work, so test the form and make sure it’s taking you to the Thank You page.

Now you are ready to set this up as a conversion in Google Analytics.

SETTING UP CONVERSIONS IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Go to your Google Analytics account and click the admin gear icon on the bottom right:

Then click “Goals”:

Now click “New Goal”:

Then select “Custom” and hit “Continue”:

Now name your goal (I like to put “Form Submit”) and select “Destination”, then hit “Continue”:

Now you need to put the URL of your thank you page. In the drop down on the left, I like to select “begins with” as opposed to “equal to”, because this ensures that if there happens to be a slash at the end or something else, it will still trigger the goal when using “begins with”. Also make sure to not put your full domain in, just the page URL (in my case “/thank-you”):

Then hit “Save”. You can click “Verify this Goal” if you want, but it will probably show you 0. Don’t worry if it does, I will now show you how to actually test it live now.

Select “Real Time” from the menu on the left and click “Conversions”:

Here you will be able to watch live as the conversion triggers when you load the Thank You page. Make sure you have any ad blockers or tracking blockers disabled, and either go ahead and submit the form, or just load the thank you page. You should see the conversion trigger, like this:

This means that you successfully created the form submit conversion in Analytics, and now every time someone submits the form, it will count as a conversion.

Importing the Goal Into Google Ads as a Conversion

Now that you’ve done all that you’ll want to link your Google Ads and Analytics accounts so that you will be able to import this goal into Google Ads.

Click “Tools & Settings” and select “Linked Accounts”:

Then find Google Analytics UA and click on “Details”:

Here you’ll see a list of all the Analytics accounts you are admin of. Select the one you want to link to your Google Ads account and click “Link”:

Your Google Ads and Analytics accounts should now be linked.

Now you want to go to “Tools & Settings” and click on “Conversions”:

Click on “New Conversion Action”:

Click on “Import”:

Then select “Google Analytics UA” and hit “Continue”:

And here you will see a list of Goals you set up in Google Analytics. Select the ones you want to import and hit import:

Now you’ve got your conversions in Google Ads and can set your ads to optimise for these conversions by running a “Maximise Conversions” campaign.

Setting Up Conversion Tracking on Phone Numbers and Emails

This one is a little bit trickier than setting up the form submit however there’s a plugin that makes it easy on WordPress.

Go back to the Add New Plugins section from earlier and search for “WP Analytics Events”. This is the one you want:

Go through the same process as before to install it and then select it from the menu on the left:

Then what you want to do is click on the “Click Tracking” tab and click “Add New Click Event”:

And now you’ll get a pop up where you can input the details. Here are the settings I use, you can copy them directly. This is for the email. If you are doing the phone number, you’ll just replace “Email” with “Phone”. Click “Add Click Event” when done:

Now we’ll need to go to everywhere that the email is and add the class “Email”. I’ll show you how to do that now.

In my case the email is in the footer, so I am going to open up the footer in Elementor. Then click on the email link you want to track, and click on the Advanced tab. There you will see “CSS Classes” with an input field next to it. In that field, type in “Email”:

Now hit Update to publish the page.

If you are not using Elementor: What you need to do is put the following code in the HTML of the <a> link:

class=”Email”

So it would look like:

<a href=”mailto:myemail” class=”Email”>My Email</a>

Then when the link is clicked it will trigger the same event.

Now go back to Google Analytics and click on the Admin gear icon at the bottom right, and the click “Goals”:

Now hit “New Goal”:

Select “Custom” and hit “Continue”:

Now name the goal and select “Event”. I like to name mine “Email Click” (or “Phone Click” if it’s the phone number). Then hit “Continue”:

Now you need to enter the exact same details you entered in the plugin on the website. They need to be exact so that the conversion fires. If you did it exactly as I did you can copy mine below.

I also like to set the match type to “Begins with” (mentioned earlier when we set up the previous conversion). Hit “Save” when you are done:

Now we’re going to test that it works. Open the “Real Time” section and click on “Conversions”, like before:

Now go to your website and click the email you just added the tracking to. If you have done it correctly you should see the conversion fire:

That’s it. You are now tracking whenever someone clicks the email link. You’ll want to do add the class “Email” on all the email links across the website, and if you want to track phone number clicks, do those as well but swap “Email” to “Phone” on all the steps.

Now you are tracking when someone submits a form, clicks the email link or clicks the phone number, and you can import all these into your Google Ads account so that your ads can optimise for when someone takes one of these actions. This is how you track and optimise your ads to get really good results.

Google Ads & PPC Online Marketing Tips

How to Decide Which Online Marketing Method You Should Do For Your Law Firm

Post author By admin
Post date June 22, 2022

If you are looking to do some online marketing for your law firm, it can be overwhelming trying to decide which method you should go for.

Google Ads, SEO, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, the list goes on.

Which is the best? Should you do them all?

In this post I am going to go through the process I use when starting marketing with a new client, and how I decide which method to go for.

For the purpose of this post I’m going to assume you’re a regular, smaller sized law firm offering general civil and commercial practice areas. If you work in a very specialised area (such as Crypto for example) that may require a slightly different approach.

So, generally speaking you’ll want fast results, especially if you are a smaller law firm or just starting out. Investing for months in an organic marketing method is not really practical, and may turn out not to work, so you don’t want to risk that right at the beginning.

That leaves us with paid methods such as Google or Facebook Ads.

Now, while paid methods may seem more expensive because you have to pay for the ads, they’ll actually end up costing less because you’ll see a return on your money and time a lot faster than most organic methods. Either that or you will find out quickly that they don’t work, and you have didn’t spend months wasting time.

Of all the paid methods, there are two that are most known and most commonly used.

You probably know what I’m going to say.

Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

These two are the giants in the online marketing world and both can work incredible well if used correctly.

So the question is which should you go for?

I will give you a brief explanation of how I see both of these and what I think each are good for.

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Google Ads

Google Ads is good if people are already looking for what you offer. These people already need what you have are have taken the time to look for it, so they are usually a lot more ready to buy than just random people scrolling through Facebook.

You can easily check how many people are searching for what you offer by using the Google Ads Keyword Planner. This is a free tool within Google Ads that lets you look up any keyword you want and will tell you approximately how many people search this keyword from the location or locations that you set. You can then use this data to decide if there is enough volume to make Google Ads worthwhile (and subsequently SEO, which I will go into in a bit).

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads on the other hand lets you target anyone who’s on their platform whether they are looking for what you offer or not. Now, you are able to narrow that down by going after people with particular interests, as well as other factors like age, gender, location and so on.

This is fantastic if you are offering something new that people don’t actually know to look for, or if you want to expand beyond just the people who are actively searching and want to offer your services to others who may not know they need it, for example. It’s also useful if you have a huge budget and are not able to squeeze any more traffic out of Google.

So, which one should you do for your law firm?

My recommendation is to begin with Google Ads. Here’s why:

I know from experience and from talking to quite a number of lawyers that Google brings the best results for law firms.

The reason why is because there is an enormous amount of Google searches happening every month for just about every area of law.

People have legal problems and they are looking for solutions. This is a “starving crowd” who know they have a problem and want to solve it. And with Google Ads you can put yourself right in front of them.

Due to this, Google Ads is usually the best place to start with marketing your law firm, and is generally what I recommend for new clients. If you set it up right, you should be seeing results quickly, usually within the first month, and have leads coming in.

Once that’s happening, you’ve proved that Google works for you and you are getting leads. This means that it now makes sense to invest in doing SEO as well.

This is another reason I recommend doing Google Ads first. Before investing 6 months plus into SEO, running a Google Ads campaign for a month or two will show you if it’s even worth doing. This could save you a lot of headache and wasted money if you find out that for some reason you can’t get results from Google.

So that’s generally how I approach online marketing for a law firm. Like I said this applies primarily for smaller firms and firms that are just starting out who don’t have a huge budget.

I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions just hit the comments below.

Online Marketing Tips

Why Google Reviews Are Important

Post author By admin
Post date June 15, 2022

Very few things are more powerful than social proof. When people see other people doing something, especially if lots of people are doing it, they are also very likely to do it. Humans are designed to follow the pack, and as a business this can be extremely beneficial if you are on the receiving end of the social proof.

This is why reviews are very important – they are social proof through text. Reviews allow people to tell everyone else how great your firm is, so that they also want to come to you and get the same result.

When people need someone for a particular job or service (let’s say a lawyer), the first thing they do is they ask people they trust, such as friends or family, for recommendations. That’s social proof from their most trusted sources. Often it only takes one of these people to recommend someone and they’ll go straight to them. Because they trust the source.

However, if their immediate circle can’t recommend anyone, the next step is to go to a local information source (Google) and see what a large group of people they don’t know have to say. However, in this case, a very large number of positive reviews are required to equal the level of trust of one person that they already trust.

This is why getting as many good reviews as possible is crucial. If you see one 5 star review, it’s not going to mean much. But if you see 500, odds are there’s a reason for it and you are more likely to trust that you will get good service from that business.

On top of that, Google looks at reviews when it decides which businesses to show in the local results – the little box at the top of page 1 search results that shows 3 to 5 businesses with reviews, address etc. If you have poor reviews or a very small number of reviews, your chances of showing up there are slim.

This is important because of all the clicks from keyword searches looking for local businesses, around 45% of people click on one of the businesses in the local results box (known as the “Google Local Pack”). That’s almost half of the people searching! So if you are not there, or if you are showing up with a poor star rating, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of traffic.

So How Do You Get Good Google Reviews?

Ask!

Ask every client you service, especially if you got them a good result or know they are happy with your service, to leave you a review on Google.

Send them a quick email saying something like “Thanks for using [YOUR BUSINESS NAME], it’s been a pleasure working with you. If you were happy with our service we’d really appreciate an honest review.” and send them the link to your Google business listing.

You can also have “Leave a review” in your email signature with a link to your Google business profile, as well as a link on your website.

The more you can remind people, the more reviews you will get.

Google Ads & PPC Online Marketing Tips SEO

Why You Should Always Track Conversions Whether You Are Doing Law Firm SEO or PPC

Post author By admin
Post date June 7, 2022

Tracking conversions is absolutely crucial so that you know if your marketing is actually working or not. However, I still come across many businesses who don’t do it (or don’t do it correctly) and don’t actually know what results their marketing is getting.

Table of Contents

Firstly, What Are Conversions?

A conversion is a metric that you set up in Google Ads or Google Analytics (or other tracking software), which triggers when someone takes a specific action on your website. This could be something like filling out a form or clicking a phone number.

You can set anything you want to be a conversion, such as visits to a specific page, clicking a button or watching a video. The purpose of them is to measure specific actions that you are trying to get people to take.

If you are running a law firm, generally speaking you are trying to get leads. So, you’d want to track leads through your website by using conversions.

How to Set Up Conversions

How I like to set up conversions is I track form submissions, phone number clicks and email clicks. These are the 3 contact methods I usually use for websites I’m managing.

What setting this up will allow you to do is see where the leads came from (such as organic traffic, PPC, social media) and what action they took (filled out a form, clicked a phone number).

Here’s an example of what that looks like in Google Analytics:

Form submit conversions:

Phone number click conversions:

You can see how it shows you rows for Organic Search, Paid Search, Social and more. This allows you to see exactly where each lead came from. It also allows you to set your Google Ads to optimise for conversions, which can significantly increase the conversion rate of your ads.

Once you set this up, you will know exactly what kind of results you are getting from your marketing campaigns and can calculate what it’s costing you to get a lead. From there you can optimise, decide if you should scale or if something needs to be fixed.

SEO

How to Solve Keyword Cannibalization When Doing SEO

Post author By admin
Post date May 17, 2022

In an attempt to optimize your website, it’s very easy to overcapitalize and actually cause problems.

One example of this is what’s known as keyword cannibalization.

Table of Contents

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization is what happens when more than one page targets the same keyword (often inadvertently) and as a result, Google is not sure which page is more relevant for that particular keyword and in the end neither of them end up ranking very well.

A good example of this would be wills and will disputes. If you have a separate page for will disputes, it would be very easy to cause keyword cannibalization.

The reason why is because will disputes contains the word “will”, and if you were to try to target “will dispute lawyer”, now you would directly have the keywords “will” and “lawyer” on two pages, making the chance of keyword cannibalization high.

While it is possible to target both of those, you need to be aware of the risks if you are doing your own law firm SEO, and what to do if cannibalization does occur.

How to Check For Keyword Cannibalization

One way you can check if your site is suffering from keyword cannibalization is to check if two pages are ranking for the same keyword. If they are, this is usually a sign that there is crossover. This method won’t always work, as Google doesn’t usually rank two pages from the same website for a keyword. However occasionally you will see it happen.

Another thing that could indicate keyword cannibalization is if only one page is ranking but it’s not the page you wanted.

If either of these two isn’t happening, then you will have to manually go through your website and see if there are multiple pages targeting the same keyword.

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization

One of the methods you can use is to combine the two pages that are conflicting. Then you redirect the old pages to the new “super page”. By combining the content and making one big “super page”, you are more likely to end up with a page that is ranking well. And by redirecting the old pages, you are passing on all the relevance from backlinks etc onto the new page.

Another option is to just redirect one of the pages to the other, more relevant page.

Either of these two are likely to solve the problem and help the new page ranking better than what was happening before.

In the future, when making new pages, always keep in mind keyword cannibalization and consider adding to a current page if the topic is very close to a page that you already have on there.

Maximise Clicks

Maximise Conversions

So Which Bidding Strategy Should You Use?

How Do You Set The Bidding Strategy?

Summary

How to Create “Expanded Text Ads” in Google Ads

Firstly, What Is a Main Keyword?

What’s the Problem with Main Keywords?

So How Do You Do Get Your Website to Rank On Page 1 Of Google?

What Is The Google Ads Keyword Planner?

Setting Up Your Google Ads Account

Accessing the Keyword Planner

What Is SEO?

How Does SEO Work?

So How Do You Get Your Website to #1?

What Happens When You Are #1

HOW TO SET UP THANK YOU PAGE REDIRECT IN CONTACT FORM 7 ON WORDPRESS

SETTING UP CONVERSIONS IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Importing the Goal Into Google Ads as a Conversion

Setting Up Conversion Tracking on Phone Numbers and Emails

Google Ads

Facebook Ads

So, which one should you do for your law firm?

So How Do You Get Good Google Reviews?

Firstly, What Are Conversions?

How to Set Up Conversions

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

How to Check For Keyword Cannibalization

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization

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