Ultimate Guide to Law Firm Marketing With Google Ads 2020: PPC Mini-sites & Landing Pages (Part 3 of 4)

What are landing pages and why are they important?

Landing pages are simply dedicated URLs where you send traffic to in hopes of converting them into a lead, or to take a desired action. It can be a page on your website that anyone can visit, or you can make the page only accessible by clicking on an ad in a marketing campaign.

According to Wikipedia, a landing page, sometimes known as a “lead capture page”, “static page”, or a “destination page”, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result, marketing promotion, marketing email, or an online advertisement.

Landing pages are important because of the value that they create. In a PPC campaign the difference in case revenue between a good landing page and a bad landing page could be $100,000+ over a year. If your landing page isn’t converting, cases are literally browsing right past you and onto the next lawyer.

Key Benefits of Landing Pages

Opportunity to Pre-Sell Yourself – The primary purpose of your landing page is to sell the prospect in the first several seconds after the page loads. That’s how much time they’ll give your page to sell them on you and your firm. Otherwise, they will leave.
Convert More Clicks Into Leads for Less – Your website that is designed to rank organically on search engines will bleed conversions from paid traffic. I’ve A/B tested both options multiple times, and sending traffic to a well-designed landing page drives more conversions than sending users to a website.
Create Perceived Value & Sign More Clients – Everyone wants more high value leads, especially family lawyers. One way to do this is to invest in a design that creates a strong perceived value. This will drive high-income leads to call you, and steer lower quality leads away.
Drive Costs Down – Landing pages help create a better campaign structure and user experience, which Google rewards with higher quality scores and lower CPCs compared to your competitors.

Why You Should Use Dedicated Landing Pages Instead of Your Website

If you have an existing website, it’s important not to send paid traffic to existing pages that have been indexed by Google.

Why?

There’s potential to hurt any existing organic ranking by sending paid traffic to your website. Paid traffic behaves differently than organic traffic, so it could send mixed signals to Google’s algorithm, potentially hurting your rankings. It’s best to send paid traffic to landing pages that are non-indexable, or, even better, create a separate mini-site with landing pages that are dedicated to paid traffic.
In addition to protecting organic ranking, landing pages help convert more clicks into leads. Recall the “Search Marketing Funnel” from part 2, you’ll see that the searches that generate the most return are low-funnel and indicate a high-intent of hiring. When you combine a campaign that’s getting high-intent clicks and a PPC landing page designed to drive action you can see very high conversion rates. Think of paid landing pages like a conversion booster.
Paid landing pages discourage browsing behavior and encourage conversions. You’re paying anywhere from $10-$70+ per click (depending on the practice area & market) with PPC ads and you need to make every single one count. This goes back to content on your regular website. Your website has a ton of information. It’s designed to inform, and it’s easy for people to get caught up browsing and then leave before contacting you. PPC pages aren’t designed with information to get people to browse or rank. They’re designed to influence someone in need to take action immediately, via call or website form.

PPC Landing Page Do’s

Click-to-Call Phone Number above-the-fold (visible upon screen loading)
Header Image of yourself and/or firm partners
Showcase one practice area and/or case type per landing page, don’t over do it
Include a form, I recommend adding one form just below the fold and near the bottom of the page.
Include Call-To-Actions as you scroll down and include a click-to-call phone number at least once in the middle and at the bottom of the page
Make navigation simple and easy on mobile and desktop.

PPC Landing Page Don’ts

Don’t write too much content. You only need them to contact you for more information, because you come across as a lawyer they want to hire. A few persuasive & authoritative paragraphs will do.
Don’t make people wait for than 3-4 secs for your pages to load. Ideally, your landing pages load below 3 seconds on a mobile phone. (Test your page speed!)
Don’t use cheap website platforms like WIX, GoDaddy, or Squarespace if you are serious about generating leads online. You get what you put in. I’d recommend using WordPress.
Don’t use pop-ups. Pop-ups with paid search traffic detracts a searcher from their original goal, decreasing the chances of a conversion.
Don’t link back to your website. If you don’t have a mini-site and are just using a single landing page, don’t link to anywhere off of your page, not even your website. You don’t want to give your prospect a way to leave your landing page without converting, unless it is with the back button or closing the window.
Don’t have a ton of drop-downs in your navigation if using a mini-site.

How to Test Your Landing Page Speed

I use a few tools to test my landing page performance. It’s always good to get a second and third opinion with this kind of thing. It’s easy to test with each tool below. Simply copy/paste your URL into the toolbar and hit enter. You will be able to download a performance report from each website with directions about how to speed it up.

Here are my 3 favorite tools to test page load speed before I send any paid traffic:

Think With Google (Mobile-Only test): https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/
Google PageSpeed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
GTMetrix: https://gtmetrix.com/

Sample Mini-Sites & Landing Pages: Family Law

Here are a few mini-site and landing page templates (desktop view) that are in use for some of my clients. This is just the above-the-fold portion of the landing page. I have blocked out portions of each page to protect privacy, those sections are in grey.

You’ll also notice that 2 of the 3 clients below are gender-specific landing pages. This can be a huge differentiator when your competitors’ landing pages do not speak to the audience as well as yours. Gender-specific family law campaigns can reach upwards of 30% conversion rates (clicks-to-leads) some months.