How To Use SEM, SEO and PPC: Marketing your law firm to the right audience through both traditional and digital mediums can help potential clients become familiar with who you are and what you do, but there is a right and wrong way to do this marketing. Various marketing agencies are available to help you with your advertisement campaigns and knowing how the various terms apply to your firm can help you narrow down your choices to the best services and prices.
Definitions
Search Engine Marketing, SEM, works to increase your visibility on search engine results lists through paid advertisements tied to relevant keywords and locations. Many of these ads are the same ones used in your Pay-Per-Click, PPC, campaigns which are primarily focused on placing ads on other blogs and websites to divert traffic to your own pages. Both are part of the Search Engine Optimization, or SEO techniques used to optimize your online presence for high search engine results rankings by ensuring that your website and social media accounts contain the information that the search engine algorithms look for. Many SEM for Lawyers firms can offer plans for advertising, website optimization and much more to give you a comprehensive digital marketing plan.
Search Engine Marketing
For law firms, SEM will often look like making advertisements for a variety of related keywords and buying a spot on those results pages for those ads. Your ad agency will use SEO tools to pinpoint the keywords which best fit your firm, practice areas and even physical locations served to design clickable ads embracing those terms. These techniques look heavily at how consumers search for an attorney and which keywords they are most likely to type in trying to find you. Higher performing keyword phrases have a better chance of finding new clients but may be crowded with other firms looking to buy ad spots, so more specific phrases may be included in your ad to appeal to a wider audience with less competition.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a broad term that can encompass a variety of tools and techniques including adding keyword-rich, quality content to your website, optimizing your meta descriptions and graphics, and using search engine specific listings such as Google My Business all to give the web crawlers more quality data for the result algorithms. Search engines use bots to find data on the relevance, authority and trustworthiness of websites to rank them for any given keyword. You can use online tools to help you identify keyword phrases you should be using on your website to show up in more searches, and you can use quality content with relevant and authoritative links to increase your rankings in these searches.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-Per-Click advertising is a good way to get your firm’s name out there on a variety of websites as well as on search engine results lists in the form of a paid ad placement. This advertising method can be incredibly affordable for firms of all sizes, even though many will consider it too expensive for the result. With the changes in digital marketing, however, your ads will show up on a variety of websites for customers who are most likely to use your services instead of just clicking on the ad and then bouncing away from your website. Your advertising agency can help you set monthly budgets for these campaigns as well as refining the targeting criteria to make the marketing a success.
You do not have to know everything about SEO and related terms to have the best digital presence and marketing strategy for your law firm, but knowing a little about how these strategies work can help you better find and work with the right marketing agency. These techniques can seem too expensive for many practices, but your agency can help you set a budget that reflects your needs while getting the job done right.
