On this episode of the “Personal Injury Marketing Minute,” the spotlight is on how to make PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns and landing pages click with the right audience. While PPC campaigns can sometimes feel like a tough nut to crack in crowded markets, they can be a game-changer for the right law firm—if they’re done the right way.

Mary Blackiston joins the conversation to share her tips, tricks, and personal experiences in creating PPC ads and landing pages that actually convert.

In this episode, we cover:

• How PPC ads and landing pages work together
• Data to look at when creating language for PPC ads and
• Worst PPC/Landing Pages Mistakes

Visit Mary online here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marybblackiston/.

See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.

https://youtu.be/GxvgwMLWUmg

Transcript:

Lindsey:

Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. Traditionally, we steer clear of talking about PPC campaigns.

For many attorneys in saturated markets, PPC campaigns haven’t produced a great ROI. However, they can be incredibly useful for the right firms, but only if they’re done right.

So today, we’re going to take a deep dive into the art of creating PPC ads and corresponding landing pages that convert.

Mary: joins us today. to discuss her approach to creating PPC ad language and landing pages that are backed by research and data, increasing conversions based on the user.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

 

Mary:

Thank you for having me.

 

Lindsey:

Well, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into marketing.

 

Mary:

Yeah, so I started working in marketing about 8.8 and a half years ago now. I started working as a content marketer at a digital agency, and I stayed there for about four years.

While I was there, started to kind of dip my toes into copywriting, and that’s when I realized, hey, this is a lot of fun.

I really like doing this, but I didn’t really get into it until I broke off to do my own thing.

So that was about four and a half years ago that I, you know, became freelance, and I started to

Basically to learn everything I possibly could about copywriting. I went through copy school, which I’m not sure if you’ll are familiar with that, but basically the most comprehensive copywriting training on the internet today.

Got certified in a bunch of their courses, read as much as I could about marketing and psychology and copywriting.

And yeah, they just started putting everything into practice, working with clients. Over the last two years, I started working more and more with law firms in particular, and that work felt really meaningful to me.

I really enjoyed it, and I felt like I was making a positive impact by helping those firms. So that’s why I decided to specialize in legal marketing.

 

Lindsey:

And so how did you end up working with PPC ads and landing pages for PPC ads?

 

Mary:

Yeah, so I had one client in particular that we worked on a Google ads campaign for him, and we got some…

Amazing results. And I felt like, you know what, there’s, as I looked at more and more PC campaigns, I was like, there’s a lot that I can do to help optimize these campaigns to help these firms bring in more qualified leads.

And we can talk about that a little bit more later, some of the biggest mistakes I see. But yeah, I saw a lot of room for opportunity there.

And it’s something I really enjoy doing is kind of digging through that data and, you know, figuring out, okay, what can we do to bring in not only more clicks, but more, you know, qualified leads.

And yeah.

 

Lindsey:

And PPC is so complicated. And you’re right, there are so many things that can go wrong with it. And there are some people who are really great with the technical aspects of it.

There are people who can be great with the written content pieces of it. But before we get into too much of the weeds, let’s start with kind of an overview.

So for those of our listeners who have never used PPC, How is it set up? So how is a PPC ad written?

And where does a user go? How do they navigate to the landing page? Can you walk us through that process?

 

Mary:

Yeah, so when someone searches for something on Google, you know, there’s some ads that pop up, and then the ad takes them to a specific landing page.

The goal is for you want the ad in the landing page to feel, you know, kind of like a seamless experience, meaning the message and the tone should match people when they land on the page, should be not really any surprises.

So if the ad, for example, says like injured in a car accident, get a free legal consultation, then the landing page should continue that conversation, not suddenly talk about unrelated services.

So I see a lot of firms that like maybe actually have an ad for one thing, but then they take people to their homepage or something that’s unrelated to what.

People are searching for, or they, you know, their ads are showing for services that they don’t offer. So this is just a complete waste of your ad budget.

So, you know, you want, that’s why it’s so important to either have more, more targeted keyword type, like phrase or exact match, or add a lot of negative keywords to your campaign to make sure that’s not showing up for, you know, for those keywords.

 

Lindsey:

And so kind of, I want to, I want to jump to another question that I had in mind, but how much control do you have over the language that appears in the campaign language versus how much does Google change the language after you’ve said it?

 

Mary:

Well, when I first write the ad copy, like the headlines and the descriptions, I write the ad copy and then Google tests different combinations to determine the best placement of the copy, you know, depending on what people are searching for.

So that said, I normally prefer. To pin headlines, because I found that that can lead to the best results.

Google doesn’t really like it because Google likes to have control over your campaign. But pinning your headlines gives you more control over how that appears and allows you to attract like a more targeted audience.

So for example, like with one of my clients, this client helps women who have been harassed by their landlords, we noticed that a few unqualified leads have been trickling in.

So for some reason, we’ve been getting leads that had nothing to do with what he offers. So rather than let Google mix and match our ad copy, I suggested that we pin the headline Stop Housing Harassment.

So that would appear first in the ad and kind of essentially help pre-qualify leads. So my thinking was, okay, it might help, it might decrease our CTR, but it would increase our conversion rate and bring in higher quality leads.

So I was right. Click-through rate dropped from 14.29% to 4.26%. And then our conversion rate for that ad went up from 7.87% to 19.36%.

And then most importantly, the lead quality improved. So it’s all just from hitting the headlines. But then the funny thing was that our quality score, which is like what Google says, if your ads are poor or good, and it stayed poor, presumably because we weren’t listening to Google’s recommendations, but the ad actually performed better.

So it goes to show, don’t pay too much attention to the quality score. At the end of the day, it’s not a very important metric.

 

Lindsey:

Right, because what Google wants is to make money.

 

Mary:

They want people to be clicking on that ad.

 

Lindsey:

And their metric for success is how many clicks is this ad generating? And it’s not necessarily, it doesn’t have the data to show, you know, what is the…

Lead quality at the end of this and how qualified are the leads that are coming in? So they’re using the only metric they have.

And of course, it’s going to be poor, but you want to be targeting the right types of clients. And so this starts with doing research on the clients that you’re trying to target.

And that’s one of the things that I really appreciate about your method. So let’s dig into your PPC campaign development a little bit.

What research do you conduct when you’re hashing out the language for the PPC ads themselves?

 

Mary:

Yeah, so I start every project with the discovery phase and the voice of client research. So first, I hop on one or two 60-minute messaging intensive calls.

That’s what I call them with my clients. That’s where I ask a series of questions to find out more about their goals, their firm, their unique differentiators, what is their story, like the why behind what they do, the different services that they offer, and their target audience.

ahead ahead and if Bye. Then if possible, I’ll also like to speak with the intake specialist or two, since they speak a lot with the ideal client.

I also ask my client to send over any research and data from the last year, if they’ve been running any PPC campaigns.

So that could include intake call recordings or transcripts, particularly if they can be anonymized. Anonymize is great. Email exchanges with clients, and again, if those can be removing any identifying information, testimonials, conversion data, or any data on lead quality, website analytics, like that sort of thing.

And then from there, I do my own research, and that’s the voice of client research. So reviewing all the research that my client provided me with.

Also, I’m interviewing three to five of my clients’ clients, sending a survey to their email list if they have one, checking out forums or like Reddit or Facebook groups where their ideal client hangs out.

To see what questions they’re asking, the words that they use, looking at the language and all of that. And then I analyze the research and look for any trends and pull everything together into comprehensive messaging docs.

And that outlines basically the, like who the ideal client is, and the solution that my client is offering. So, yeah, it goes into a little more detail, but that’s kind of in a nutshell how the research process works.

 

Lindsey:

Well, and I think that you’re hitting the nail on the head with it, especially when you are reaching out to former clients.

Nobody’s going to be able to tell a law firm why a client is signing up with a certain law firm better than the client who signed up with that law firm.

Like a lawyer can only have so much self-awareness of what is driving the clients through the door. But when you actually talk to your former clients or existing clients about what you’re doing well about.

Where their needs are prior to coming in, what attracted them to work with this specific law firm, that’s data that is just gold when you’re trying to attract future clients.

 

Mary:

Yes, definitely.

 

Lindsey:

And so for each of these PPC campaigns that you’re writing, do you typically do like one blanket PPC campaign, like here’s an ad that we’re going to run in the one process, or do you tend to make a multitude of ads that are attracting people at different stages in their journey, trying to find an attorney?

 

Mary:

Um, well, it really depends. But to keep things simple, we, you know, normally just start with one landing page, and then a few sets of ads.

And then we can always expand from there. But it, you know, if you’re running, so starting with just one kind of really target offer.

So for example, with my We’re now working on a more targeted campaign, you know, for women who have been just assaulted.

So rather than harassed, they’ve been assaulted, experienced something physical. So we’re targeting that very specific audience. But yeah, I mean, you can go much more in depth with it.

You can also create blog posts that are, you know, like if someone’s searching for what do I do after a dog bite or something like that, we know that the person has likely, you know, been in this accident and they’re looking, they might not be looking for a lawyer yet, but they’re, they need guidance on the next step.

So like something like a blog post can, can help to nurture the audience to provide them with some valuable content and then have a call to action at the end that will, you know, or throughout the post that will get them to take action.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of different ways that you can do it. But I think just keeping things simple and one landing page and then, you know, expanding from there based on like the search terms that we find people are like, what are they searching for?

How can we match that intent with the landing page and that copy?

 

Lindsey:

Well, and I guess most of our listeners here are personal injury attorneys. And my broader question here is if we’re working with a personal injury attorney and they have car accidents and they have dog bites and they have motorcycle accidents and bicycle accidents, should they be running a different PPC ad campaign for each different accident type and have individual landing pages for each of those campaigns?

Or should it all be leading back to one landing page?

 

Mary:

Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, definitely want to have individual landing pages for each of your services. And that’s something that I’ve seen, like a lot of law firms do not do, they create like just send people to their homepage or something.

So the ad copy or the, you know, people are searching something into Google, and then maybe searching for like, car accident attorney, and then they’re taken to a landing page that’s just like, you know, very general.

It’s not, it’s not speaking to someone who’s just been in a car accident. So you definitely want to create targeted landing pages for each of your campaigns.

Yeah, that’s super, super important. Also, because we really want to have, be speaking to one, one audience, one reader.

That way, we can be more specific with the copy. If you’re speaking to multiple audiences, it’s, it’s much more difficult to create really persuasive, compelling copy.

That’s why homepages are often very difficult to write, because they’re speaking to so many different audiences. But landing pages, you

You can get really, really specific, and a specific copy is always going to perform better.

 

Lindsey:

Well, I can imagine you can take this into a very granular level where you, I mean, yes, of course, have a PPC ad.

If you have a motorcycle accident ad, have a motorcycle accident landing page that corresponds with that. Somebody’s in an accident, they’re searching for motorcycle accident attorney, takes them to that page, bada boom.

But you can create additional types of campaigns that have a more granular audience. So let’s say the motorcycle accident was fatal.

If you have a spouse who is looking for an attorney, a wrongful death, a fatal motorcycle accident attorney, they’re going to be looking for very different information than somebody who survived the accident and is looking for an attorney for themselves.

So creating different ads that are curated for different audiences and different landing page that can meet somebody empathetically where they’re at, you can get really creative and have a breadth of land.

Landing pages that can specifically target a certain demographic.

 

Mary:

And so it’s one of the beautiful things that you can do with ad copy.

 

Lindsey:

is, you know, an infinite well of possibility that goes into it. And I know that you take a look at the audiences as you’re researching the copy for the landing pages themselves.

So talk to me about your research process as you are looking at the demographics that you’re writing to and how you are creating the language for each landing page.

 

Mary:

Yeah. So, you know, I think I touched on the research process before, but that’s like some of what that might involve might be like reviewing all recordings or chat transcripts or, you know, any kind of communication with the client.

Testimonials that they’ve written or even if you don’t have a lot of, if the firm does not have a lot of testimonials, reviewing like testimonials for competitors to see, okay, what are these things that they really value?

What are the things that they don’t value, like, you know, to see both the good and the bad reviews that they’ve left.

And then also the client interviews are a really good way to get that voice of client research. So I like to interview like at least three of my clients’ clients, you know, the three to five is a good number to shoot for and record those calls.

And then, yeah, basically looking for, okay, what are, who is this target audience that we’re speaking to? What are their really deep-seated pain points and hesitations, motivations?

What are the things that they need to know in order to take the next step? And just, yeah, it goes into a lot of detail, but that sort of high level, the things that I look for.

When I go through the research.

 

Lindsey:

And it’s such an art because a lawyer can, of course, sit down and write a page of content. Typically, the lawyers that we work with and lawyers that we know have a tough time of taking off the lawyer hat when they’re writing information.

They are very focused on laws and what the state statutes are and the basic information, as opposed to really getting inside the head of somebody who has been through a highly traumatic experience and knowing specifically what those pain points are and writing to those in a way that says, we’re going to take care of you.

And we’re going to alleviate this pain point to the best of our ability. And here’s how we’re going to support you throughout this process.

So it’s so important to get inside the head of the person who’s actually reading this content. You’ve gotten them there.

You are speaking to them and helping them with the exact struggle that they are facing right now.

 

Mary:

Yes. Yeah. Having empathy is super important. And it’s like you said, copywriting is not the same as the writing we learn in school.

Like the way that I wrote. In college, it’s very different from writing copy. mean, writing copy is literally just writing like you speak.

So I, you know, just see a lot of websites, law firm websites that use more very formal language, and that really just creates a barrier between you and the reader.

So you want to, you know, that it’s really having the opposite effect of what you what you want. know that law firm websites, maybe they’re also speaking to other lawyers, so that’s kind of have to find that the balance.

But that’s why having targeted landing pages for your audience, are super important, because you might speak to them in a different way than you would speak to another lawyer, for example.

 

Lindsey:

Well, and content writing for the PPC landing pages is different than copywriting for, you know, for the regular pages for your website, when you’re trying to use, you know, SEO best practices as the guidelines here.

And when it comes to SEO, we tend to write content that is really in depth, that covers all the information, answers all the FAQs.

And gives all the information. That Google wants to see and that anybody could possibly ask as they are searching for a specific thing.

But the BBC landing pages are created in a different way. So can you talk to us a bit about how in-depth these landing pages are and what types of information need to be on them?

 

Mary:

Yeah, so that really depends on the target audience, what the service is and all of that. But I always say it’s however long it needs to be to get the reader to take action.

So however much copy that requires, normally like the landing pages that I write for law firms tend to be like at least 4,000 words, like 4,200 to 500 words around there seems to be like the sweet spot.

So, you know, that’s addressing all of their questions that they might have. Their hesitations, pain points, everything. So it’s pretty in-depth.

And then it’s bringing all that research together. It’s also tying in persuasion techniques, you know, copywriting best practices, and, you know, what, yeah.

But basically, I like to think of the landing page as a kind of conversation with, you know, my client were sitting down, like, at a bar with a good friend, having a drink, and that friend were just in an accident.

You know, probably might not be having a drink at that time, but just, you know, what would that friend be asking, and how would you answer those questions?

So thinking about it like that is, for me, like the most helpful approach.

 

Lindsey:

And that’s a great approach to it. It’s very natural. It’s very organic. It, you know, allows you to answer questions that people would be naturally having as they have a conversation with Google to try to have this information.

These are all the right pieces of information to be including in these pages. And so we’ve got our PPC ad, we’ve got the language set there, we’ve got our landing page, we’ve the language set there.

The ad is now turned on. So what data are we using throughout the campaign process, and how does that data inform any tweaks that you’re making throughout?

 

Mary:

Yeah, so there’s a few different metrics that I look at. For example, form submissions, which is an obvious one, how many people are converting.

So right now, because it depends on the campaign right now, for one of my clients, we have a type form, and that’s helping us to bring in more qualified leads.

So we have much fewer people who end up completing the form, so much fewer conversions. But, yeah, so, but we’re hopefully bringing in more questions.

Qualified leads. So I look at for that, like the percentage of clicks that start the form, that gives us an idea of like how qualified our, our traffic or clicks are, and whether or not the copy is resonating with them.

The conversion rate, so the percentage of clicks that complete the form, and that tells us how, you know, qualified the traffic is, unless people aren’t, you know, completing the form for other reasons.

The time on the page, that is another metric I like to look at, like, and that tells me if the copy is engaging people, if people, if the time on page is like 50 seconds, that might tell you something, okay, we need to, you know, optimize the copy here.

So with one of my last clients, used Hotjar to see how people were interacting with the page and how long they spent on the page, where were they clicking around and spending time.

So that is also interesting to look at that data. We also added an exit. It’s an intense survey to find out why people left the page.

Then also like, you know, click. And click-through rate tells us how compelling or relevant our ad copy is. Search terms are, you know, really like to see what search terms, so it’s not really a metric, but just to see what search terms people are putting into Google.

So, you know, are these people like, that can tell us basically if people are searching for unrelated keywords or related keywords to your campaign, and whether or not you need to try a different keyword strategy.

And then cost per qualified lead is obviously a very important metric, so communicating with my client each week about the lead quality, because ultimately the form data can only tell us so much about how qualified those leads are.

And then most important metric, cost per case, which, you know, obviously will take us time, more time to find out, but the lead quality and cost per qualified lead will give us an idea of whether or not we’re headed in the right direction with that.

 

Lindsey:

see you next time. That’s great. And those are some great success metrics as you’re qualifying and altering your campaign.

And then clearly establishing whether or not this type of marketing is a good ROI for your firm. So let’s get into some dirt.

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making when developing PPC campaigns and landing pages?

 

Mary:

Yeah. So it’s funny. actually posted about this to LinkedIn not too long ago. But these are some of the top mistakes that I’ve seen.

Not having landing pages until people are searching for us. So back to what we were talking about. If someone searches for dog bite lawyer, don’t send them to your homepage, you know.

Have a, or worse, send them to like Clarkson landing page, which I think I’ve actually seen people do too.

So, you know, have the landing page be tailored to what people are searching for. Visitors expect to land on a page that…

You know, speaks to what they’re searching for. So if they have to go on a scavenger hunt looking for the information they need, most people are just going to click off the page and, you know, won’t even bother.

So, and also Google rewards relevance. So the more aligned your page is with the search intent, the better your ads will perform.

Then also treating the landing page like one long blog post. So I see like a lot of law firms, you know, that the pages are not formatted like, like landing pages, they’re kind of just wide margins, big chunks of text, not a lot of photos and the copy just isn’t formatted in a very readable, engaging way.

So instead, I had always advised clients to go with, you know, just shorter paragraphs, you know, smaller margins, varied layouts, bullet points, like bold and italicized keywords, but just having a lot of.

White space throughout that sort of thing. So just structuring it like a landing page and not a blog post.

Not taking into account stage of awareness. So, you know, someone searches for your car accident services, they’ve probably just been in a car accident.

So they don’t need and I see a lot of like landing pages that have, you know, they’re, they’re more like, more read like blog posts, you know, they’re like not taking into account the stage of awareness.

So they’re talking about like, causes of car accidents, but people who’ve just been in a car accident don’t need to know the causes of car accidents, they want to know how you can help them.

So that’s another thing I see a lot. And then just kind of we, we, we language. So, you know, people really don’t care about how long you’ve been in business, the millions that you’ve gotten for their clients.

Many people don’t even like think about money as a motivator. So they, they just, they care about like, okay.

their problem, how you can help them. So whenever possible, a good rule of thumb is to turn every sentence around to start with you.

So that is just like a subtle shift that will help your readers to see themselves in their messaging. And that will ultimately build trust and make them more likely to take action.

And then, yeah, I still have a few more, but I don’t know.

 

Lindsey:

No, no, I would love any information that you have to share.

 

Mary:

Yeah, there’s a, I guess, that kind of similar to what we were talking about, but a lot of legal jargon that’s optimized for SEO, but not for conversions.

So, for example, yeah, just using kind of words that, like, we are a comprehensive legal firm, primarily focused and, you know, like, people don’t care, you know, so get to the point.

What is it that you’re offering? How can you help people? How is it going to benefit them? So like that type of

Language might work well for, like, an academic paper or law textbook, but it’s not moving your reader forward, so it doesn’t belong on the landing page.

It doesn’t, so I like to think, like, Joseph Sugarman, a famous copywriter, like, says that every line of copy should be, like, a slippery slide.

So every line of copy should take your, you know, should make your reader want to keep reading. So that’s kind of a good thing when you’re, just read the copy and be like, does this, you know, make the person, like, make, you know, or get someone else to read your copy, and, like, does this make them want to keep reading?

If not, then probably doesn’t belong on your page. And then speak to your readers as if they were a good friend, use a voice of client research to mirror the language that they use.

Then the last kind of thing that I see, that I can think of, least, is not having an about story.

see a lot of, I mean, some law firms do this, but I see a lot that don’t have this, and that’s…

A huge missed opportunity because sharing a compelling story and like the why behind what you do, that creates trust and it builds a connection with the reader.

And yeah, people at the end of the day, people hire people, not faceless firms. So sharing like why this is so important to you, why you butt into what you do can really go a long way.

 

Lindsey:

And I think that those are all some really great tips. And I think that there are some opportunities there that a lot of lawyers overlook.

So if there was one thing that lawyers could do today to help as they write a landing page for a PPC ad, what is the one best tip that you could give them?

 

Mary:

It’s hard to pick just one. I mean, I think, yeah, voice of client research, but that’s pretty time consuming.

I mean, if you want kind of the So if you don’t want to hire a copywriter, you just want to do it yourself, checking out Reddit is a really great place to get some voice of client research on a budget and a time crunch.

So that can go a really long way to helping with your copy and create that copy.

 

Lindsey:

Get to know your clients, like whether they are your clients that you are interviewing as an exit interview or you’re going to Reddit to find out what other people think.

 

Mary:

Ask the questions.

 

Lindsey:

Don’t assume that you know where they’re coming from or what the pain points are. Really talk to them and ask some good questions.

So thank you so much, Mary. I really appreciate your time joining us today and sharing all your information. And if you send us the link to your LinkedIn article or any other resources that you have, we’ll be happy to share them in the podcast notes.

 

Mary:

Thank you.