How Do Lawyers Spend Their Money on Advertising?

by Alex Juel on 8/21/12

* The author's posts are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Andres & Berger, P.C.

Most attorneys are familiar with Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and the high costs associated with this type of marketing. PPC advertising works like this - a business will set up an advertising account with Google, for example, and will bid on a keyword. The general idea is that the higher the bid, the higher up on the page your ad will show when someone searches Google for the keyword you're bidding on.

The reality though, is that PPC advertising is much more confusing. The cost-per-click, or CPC, you can expect to pay on a keyword depends on a variety of factors, such as landing page quality, page relevance and the conversion rate.

Let's assume that you're an advertiser and all of those things are in order. What could an attorney expect to pay for their top keywords?

The chart below was created by grouping the top keywords into categories. I reviewed around 900 keywords, removed unrelated phrases and removed the lowest cost keywords to keep things simple. I ended up analyzing a total of 380 phrases of what I believe to be the top law related phrases people are spending money on in Google Adwords.

NOTES: All amounts are estimations based on the data I had available. The % of monthly search for each category is calculated based only on the total monthly search volume (3,170,5680) of the 380 keywords I analyzed.