Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Pay Per Click Marketing’ Category

SOLVING THE PAY PER CLICK PROBLEM BY GETTING INTO THE ORGANIC LISTINGS

I blogged last month about the legal client who setup his own Google adwords account and made the mistake of bidding to high and wound up paying $39 for one click for the keyphrase of "chicago estate planning lawyer".

We wound up getting the cost down to $1.30 per click BUT the best solution to that problem is getting listed in Googles organic or free listings or what I call "the gift that keeps on giving". It takes time and effort to get listed in the top 10 at Google but we have achieved this and the client is now #7 for chicago estate planning lawyer, as well as #3&4 for chicago wills, #3 for chicago estate planning, among many others.

Its a good idea to still maintain the pay per click listings though because it gives the law firm more overall exposure at Google, but its not as important now and can be cut back on.   

The best way for a law firm to get good rankings in the Google organic listings is by having good content, content that changes, listings at the key directories and links from other high rankings legal sites.    If your law firm wants to achieve long term results in the search engines, contact me.

Article from the AP about a click fraud lawsuit. This is the first lawsuit Ive heard of being filed against Google and other pay per click engines.

A Texarkana gift shop that advertises on the Internet has filed a lawsuit against America Online, Google, Yahoo and other Web-centered companies alleging they knowingly overcharged the shop and other companies for "pay per click" advertising.

Lane’s alleges a conspiracy in which the companies worked with one another to create an online environment that harms advertisers.

This might be pretty hard to prove but will be interesting to see what happens.

Another article on click fraud at the pay per click engines from DM News. Great article that goes into detail about the different forms of click fraud and the fact that click fraud benefits more people than it hurts.

What is click fraud? Click fraud appears in three (or four) major forms, each with its own technique and desired income. Traditional click fraud, in which fraudsters click on advertisers’ pay-per-click ads with no intention of purchasing the advertised product or service, is mostly conducted by two groups: competitors and network partners/publishers. Competitors click on PPC ads to charge money to rival companies.

Generally, competitor click fraud occurs when a competitor clicks a couple times in a row on another company’s ad. Limited by the sheer determination of virulent competitors, such fraud is damaging only to small businesses in competitive spaces with high PPC costs.

A lawyer in New York with an average bid price of $10 could lose $300 a month from one extra fraudulent click per day. If that lawyer deals in Vioxx or mesothelioma cases, where keyword prices range from $20 to $50, he stands to lose as much as $1,500 from just one instance of click fraud per day!

This is all very true and Ive always been concerned about click fraud, but especially when handling campaigns for very expensive legal keywords, such as vioxx and mesothelioma.   

This is all just another great reason to make sure you focus on your ORGANIC search engine listings. Free listings are a lot better then paid listings and while its a good idea to have both sometimes, putting more focus on organic listings is a better move in the long run.

Good article from Clickz about rising pay per click costs.

No doubt the legal arena still has a lot of room for growth in the pay per click market and I expect many new law firms to get involved in the ongoing bidding war.

So costs will probably rise for many popular keywords over time, but its important to stay on top of the bidding and make sure that your covering all the possible keywords. There are many good values out there for keywords if you do the research.

Article from EWeek reporting on click fraud at the Pay per click search engines.

As search-based advertising grows, so too does the concern over fraudulent clicks running up advertisers’ bills and shifting the rankings of paid search listings.

This is a big concern and the article talks about how Google will sometimes email an advertiser telling them they are getting a refund for suspected click fraud. I have gotten that email before and it does make you think, how does Google figure out what is fraudulent clicks and are they missing any?

While Google and Overture do proactively inform advertisers of the click fraud they detect, the majority of the burden for finding and proving click fraud has fallen to advertisers, panelists said.

"Search engines are profiting and have not published rules that speak to an investigation or give those harmed the information to get to the bottom of problem," said Ben Edelman, an Internet privacy research and Harvard University student.

Advertisers can analyze click patterns, visitor logs and other information, but Edelman said the search engines themselves should be able to access more detailed information that could help advertisers track down click fraud and even prove it in court.

So far, click fraud has yet to be tested in court, but panelists and attendees largely agreed that they expect cases to emerge both against alleged fraudsters and possibly against the search engines.

I have not had a real problem with click fraud at Google or Overture but have detected it at the smaller pay per click engines.   

Its KEY to use your stats analysis programs that track traffic from the pay per clicks and make sure it adds up.  At some of the smaller engines, I just noticed that they were reporting that I got 40 clicks BUT on the stats tracking, it would show maybe 4 visitors, that just didn’t add up and I reported it and got a refund.

The paid search market will more than double from $2.6 billion in 2004 to $5.5 billion in 2009, and that growth will be driven by the "four horsemen" of vertical search, according to a new study by JupiterResearch.

The study, "Vertical Search: Early Marketers Will Reap Rewards of Low Pricing," predicts that the paid search industry will evolve similarly to media markets like television and magazines: with broad-based engines spawning a host of vertical players devoted to specific categories.

More from ClickZ: The Four Horsemen of Vertical Search

A study from Oneupweb finds that in general, longer search terms convert better than shorter ones. In particular:

• Conversion rates rose as the number of keywords increased, peaking at between 33 to 38 percent when there were four keywords in total. Then rates dropped.
   
• Single keywords searches had high conversion until company names were removed. Without these, single keyword searches then converted less than searches with two, three or four terms in them.

This makes sense and for most lawyers and law firms, usually you want to try and target the key phrases that combine your geographic area with your practice areas.

So it makes sense to bid on terms like "Chicago eminent domain lawyers" or "Illinois condemnation attorneys" instead of just "eminent domain" or "condemnation lawyers", if your a Chicago based condemnation firm.

You might not get as many clicks but odds are you will convert more of these leads into clients because someone searching just for "eminent domain", probably is just looking for free or general information opposed to hiring an attorney.

Another story from Pay Per Click Universe talks about click fraud and how it only applies to Google Adword accounts because Adwords is the only PPC to use a complex algorithm to determine how high your overall ranking is.

This is where a lot of people get confused about Google adwords. Its not as simple as Overture, where whoever bids the highest, gets the top spot.   At Google adwords, its different because your CTR / click through rate determines how high your position is.  The article goes into more detail with a good example.

"For example, if you get a 5% CTR (50 clicks out of 1000 impressions), but your maximum bid is only 50 cents, and your competitor bids 80 cents but has 1% CTR, you WILL appear higher than him. With AdWords, though, if your CTR is less than 0.5%, your ad is disabled and disappears until you make some changes to bring your CTR back up."

The story goes on to talk about how certain click fraudsters will artificially inflate the number of impressions for certain keywords and what happens is your CTR will go down and if its under .5%, your ads will be disabled and then when your sites out, someone else moves into your position.      

Now I don’t know how illegal that is since they are not clicking on ads. I would be more concerned about your competitors who might click on your keywords.

Its key to have someone pay attention to the pay per click traffic and monitor the stats and make sure the same IP address isn’t visiting your site multiple times.  This is usually only an issue when you are bidding on high valued keywords like "vioxx" or "mesothelioma lawyers".

Pay Per Click Universe is a free resource dedicated to providing unbiased information to the small-to-medium sized business owner interested in exploring the world of pay per click advertising (PPC).

They have a section where they review each of the pay per click search engines and give what it considers the top ten pay per click engines.

They don’t really list them in order but give each PPC search engine a rating. Google ad words has an overall rating of 8.4, Overture 7.5, Findwhat 4.0 and Kanoodle 1.0. Those are what I always have considered to be the top 4 and really only Google and Overture seem to produce real results. So I would probably agree with those ratings, even though I would put Google at about a 9 and Overture a 7 at best.

They give Searchfeed a rating of 8.2 and the user reviews are all pretty favorable, so that might be one to check out. I will sign up for an account and see how it works out and write a review next month.

When doing pay per click projects for my legal clients, I usually try and test out the smaller pay per click engines, but normally what I find is that I get a lot of so called clicks and visitors but no real conversions.

I’ve also had problems in the past, where the pay per click engine says I got 30 clicks at 25 cents a click BUT my stats program doesn’t back that up.   Ive never had a problem with that at Google or Overture and no doubt those two are the ones to focus on when doing a pay per click strategy.

BusinessWeek Online takes a look at the increasing cost of PPC and how some advertisers are becoming more targeted with their keyword buys .

"On Feb. 1 the search giant reported $400 million in net earnings for fiscal ’04 — a whopping 278% gain — on revenue of $3.2 billion. What accounted for the outsize profits? The high prices Google charges for search keywords, for one. "

No doubt Ive noticed over the past year that certain keywords have really been bid up to crazy amounts. An example is the keyword Mesothelioma lawyer, the top bid is around $100 per click, thats pretty high!