PPC for personal injury lawyers can help fast-track results and grow your firm’s clientele in a matter of days. However, you need to have a tested and proven strategy for your pay-per-click ads to generate leads and have a good return on investment (ROI).

In this guide, we’ll help you with solid personal injury PPC strategies that work.

What is PPC for personal injury attorneys?

Pay-per-click or PPC campaigns refer to an advertising model wherein the advertiser pays an agreed amount for each time their ad is clicked.

In this context, PPC for personal injury attorneys involves running ads that have a set budget and a target audience. It is a cost-effective way for law firms to quickly achieve online visibility and compete with other law firms within their practice area.

Search engines like Google allow advertisers to post ads to appear on top of search engine results pages when people type in a specific keyword. For instance, these ads (pictured below) appear when typing “personal injury lawyer california” in Google.

Personal injury lawyer California SERP results

Are PPC ads worth investing in for personal injury law firms?

With a strong PPC strategy, PPC ads are definitely worth the investment, especially when it provides your law firm with leads and new personal injury clients.

Unlike search engine optimization (SEO) which relies on organic traffic from search engine results, PPC campaigns rely on ad clicks to generate traffic and conversions. This allows personal injury law firms to achieve business goals without having to wait months.

Most Expensive List of Keywords for Personal Injury Lawyers

Every PPC advertising campaign needs a marketing budget, so it’s good to be aware of the most expensive PPC keywords for personal injury attorneys.

Here’s a list of keywords that show up in Google Keyword Planner for “personal injury lawyer.” The list shows you the total page bids per keyword, which should give you an idea of what to expect when setting a PPC budget.

Keyword

Currency Avg. monthly searches Competition Top of page bid (high range)
personal injury lawyer USD 500000 Low 200.00
personal injury attorney USD 500000 Low 200.70
injury lawyer USD 50000 Medium 249.95
personal injury lawyer near me USD 50000 Medium 216.12
injury attorney USD 50000 Low 245.21
injury lawyer near me USD 50000 High 262.52
personal injury attorney near me USD 50000 Medium 250.00
injury attorney near me USD 5000 Medium 310.66
personal injury law USD 5000 High 90.98
best personal injury lawyer near me USD 5000 High 188.64
personal injury lawyer brooklyn USD 5000 Medium 136.49
best injury lawyer near me USD 5000 High 218.12
best motorcycle accident lawyer in the usa USD 50 High 414.00
top rated personal injury lawyers near me USD 500 High 157.61
law firm personal injury USD 500 Medium 133.31
personal injury law firm USD 5000 Low 193.04
injury law USD 500 Medium 109.06
personal injury lawyer car accident USD 500 Medium 172.77
m&y personal injury lawyers USD 500 Low 45.89
accident injury attorneys USD 5000 Medium 180.59
accident injury lawyer USD 5000 Low 290.00
pi law USD 500 Medium 150.49
construction accident law firm USD 500 Medium 190.00
lexington personal injury lawyer USD 500 Low 49.31
accident injury lawyers near me USD 5000 High 382.50
personal accident lawyer USD 500 Low 296.43
san antonio injury lawyer USD 500 High 450.14
personal lawyers near me USD 500 High 91.83
san antonio injury attorney USD 500 Medium 450.14
personal injury defense lawyer USD 500 High 145.71
best injury lawyers USD 5000 Low 223.27
personal injury accident lawyer USD 500 Medium 243.60
best motorcycle accident attorney USD 500 Medium 177.84
top personal injury lawyer USD 500 High 152.00
physical injury law USD 50 High 250.00
top 10 personal injury lawyers USD 500 High 100.00
the law offices of dan newlin USD 500 Low 50.62
brooklyn personal injury attorney USD 500 Medium 94.49
bronx car accident lawyer USD 5000 Low 124.09
personal injury accident attorney USD 500 Medium 200.00
serious injury lawyer USD 500 Low 152.76
personal injury lawyer attorney USD 500 Medium 146.12
top personal injury law firms USD 500 High 94.51
accident and injury lawyers USD 500 Medium 325.00
the injury firm USD 500 Low 109.82
accident and personal injury lawyers USD 50 Low 142.21
car accident lawyer long beach USD 500 High 126.00
personal injury lawyer long island USD 5000 Medium 68.20
best auto accident attorney USD 5000 Low 168.25
best personal injury lawyers USD 5000 Low 182.25
personal injury firm USD 500 Low 137.70

10 Simple steps to execute a successful PPC campaign for your personal injury law firm

Your PPC campaign should have a clear goal and a solid marketing strategy to be successful. There are many factors that contribute to PPC ads that have high conversions. Here are some expert PPC tips on how to set up your ads for great performance.

Create a personal injury lawyer PPC strategy

Successful PPC campaigns require careful planning and strong implementation. Have a clear goal for every ad and specify a timeline of when you should accomplish these goals.

Here are some things to think about when creating your personal injury PPC strategy:

  1. What is your goal? It can be:
    1. Brand awareness
    2. Website traffic
    3. Leads
    4. Sales/Conversions
  2. What is your PPC marketing budget? Create a monthly budget and set a limit on how much you are willing to spend on ads.
  3. What keywords are you targeting? Conduct keyword research and list a few that you think is relevant to your personal injury law firm.
  4. How will you track your results? You need a system to keep track of your PPC marketing campaign’s performance and analyze them (more on this later).

If you don’t have the time or resources, you can hire a law firm PPC marketing agency to help you create PPC marketing campaigns that generate personal injury leads.

Set up your Google Ads account

Most personal injury firms use Google Ads to run PPC ads. To do this, you need to create a Google Ads account if you don’t already have one.

Start here to launch your first PPC advertising campaign.

When your account is set up, you should see your dashboard.

Google Ads Dashboard

Choose the right campaign goal

The first thing to do when creating your personal injury lawyers PPC ad in Google Ads is to choose your campaign goal.

To create a new campaign, click on the plus icon and click New Campaign. You’ll see the list of goals in the next screen.

New Campaign in Google Ads

Here are some things to remember about each goal:

  • Sales – great for driving sales online or in store
  • Leads – users are encouraged to sign up to a newsletter or give their contact information
  • Website traffic – these ads link to a website or landing page
  • Product and brand consideration – highlights a specific product or service you want people to see
  • Brand awareness and reach – these ads are designed to introduce your brand to potential clients
  • App promotion – encourage people to download apps
  • Local store visits and promotions – suited for local retail shops
  • Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance – this is a highly customizable ad setting for advanced users

We recommend choosing “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance” to have all options available to you so you can customize every aspect of your campaign.

Set a healthy budget

You can go to your Campaign budget settings and set a daily budget to manage your ad spend.

We recommend setting your daily ad spend to $200 and up and multiply it by 30 days to get the monthly budget.

Google Ads Budget

Setting a generous budget on the first few weeks of running your PPC campaigns can help you assess your ad’s performance and how much you are willing to spend (or not spend) to keep your PPC campaign going. If you have enough data and feel that you’ve overspent your budget, you can always come back to this setting and change your budget.

Carefully vet keywords that are low competition with a high buying intent

Instead of targeting high competition keywords, focus instead on keywords with low competition but with high buying intent. Buying intent keywords like “best”, “pricing”, “near me”, and “reviews” signifies that the person is most likely to buy a product or service.

Using a free tool like Google Keyword Planner, you can check for the search volume and competition of specific keywords. In the example below, we used the Keyword Ideas feature and entered the keywords “best personal injury lawyer.”

Google Ads keyword ideas feature

As you can see, the keyword “top rated personal injury lawyers” have medium competition with 1,000 to 10,000 average searches per month. Another keyword, “top auto accident attorney” has low competition and has 100 to 1,000 average searches per month. Both these keywords have buying intent, with medium to low competition and decent search volume.

Craft persuasive copy for your PPC ad campaigns

An essential key to high-converting ads is compelling ad copy. Make an effort to write strong but concise headlines and descriptions for all your ads so it persuades people to click on the ad and take action.

It’s also important to incorporate your target keywords into your ad copy.

In this example, “best personal injury lawyers” is one of the keywords, and it’s also part of the ad’s headline.

Google Ad example

You can use Google-suggested headlines and keywords to strengthen your ad, or enter specific keywords that you’ve selected from your keyword research. Either way, you’ll need to make sure it’s included in your ad copy.

Start with manual CPC bidding

When you’re just starting out with law firm PPC, it’s best to begin with Manual CPC bidding strategy and adjust accordingly as campaign data pours in.

Once enough conversion data is recorded, you can move on to automated bidding strategies, particularly “Target CPA” and “Target Impression Share” can be useful.

PPC campaign settings

Gather data to optimize and adjust bids

We recommend running your first personal injury PPC campaigns for three months to collect data.

PPC Campaign start and end date

During the first two weeks of initial launch, make sure to use the highest possible bids to gain data and then make adjustments on bids and apply optimizations according to the data.

PPC Campaign period

If not enough click data is collected over this period, you can use “Maximize clicks” bidding strategy.

Campaign Bidding

After the first month or 100 clicks, you can start identifying non-performing keywords in your campaigns, pause them, and adjust bids per campaign.

PPC Campaign Clicks Report

Use Campaign segmentation

The best way to track and measure brand recognition and returning users (potential clients) is to segment your campaigns according to your branding strategy.

In the example below, we see two separate ads for one of our clients, Nuñez Law: one targets “car accident” and the other targets “truck accident.”

Nunez Law website Truck Accident page screenshot
Nunez Law website Car Accident page screenshot

For each of these campaigns, we created a segment:

Ad group

You can apply this strategy with other campaign segments such as language, like the one below:

Ad segments

The same thing can be done for segmenting Exact match and Phrase match on an ad group level.

Ad groups

Leverage locations and audiences for segmenting strategy

Places and areas that have high injury rate such as hospitals, highways, and construction sites, can be segmented by location using the Radius targeting option.

Ad campaign location

You can also use Audience targeting to focus on industries and professions that have high levels of injuries reported.

Ad campaign audience

More tips for setting up your personal injury lawyer ads

Our PPC experts recommend the following settings for your Google Ads:

  • Lower CPCs by consistently tracking non-performing keywords and removing them or making bid adjustments.
CPC
  • Location exclusion settings set to “Presence or interest: People in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your excluded locations,” and negate all states or areas not being actively targeted.
Presence or ineterest
  • Enable mobile devices in targeting your Audience – Targeting mobile devices can improve conversions and lower your CPCs. People who get injured are often on the road or outside their home during the incident and are most likely to use their phone to search for and call a personal injury attorney.
Campaign targeted devices

Create conversion-focused landing pages

When running PPC ads, it’s not enough that people click on them. The next challenge is to convert the visitor into a paying customer. This is why you need to create landing pages that are designed for conversion.

To be effective, your personal injury landing page should be able to catch the visitor’s attention and convince him to take your call-to-action, whether it’s subscribing to a newsletter or booking a free consultation.

If you need help creating and optimizing landing pages, you can hire a law firm web design company to save time and effort.

Track and measure results

After a few weeks of running your personal injury PPC ads, you can look at each ad’s performance from your Google Ads dashboard to analyze and tweak as needed.

Here are some metrics used to assess how your ads are doing:

  • CPC (Average cost per click) – This is the cost that Google charges for every time a person clicks on your ad
Average CPC
  • CPA (Average cost per action) – This measures how much you need to spend on an ad for the user to take action
Average CPA
  • Conversions – This is the number of ad clicks that resulted in a conversion. A conversion is not a fixed metric and can be anything you set it to. Google uses conversion tracking so you can define what the conversion is.
  • CTR (Click-through rate) – This refers to how many people clicked on your ad vs. how many people saw your ad but did not click. word image 61387 24
CTR

The purpose of measuring and analyzing your PPC ad’s performance is to lower your CPC and CPA and increase your CTR. There are many strategies you can take, and you can experiment by running A/B tests for your personal injury PPC ads to see what works best.

Review PPC campaigns regularly

Tracking, measuring, and improving the results of your PPC campaigns is key to running successful, high-converting ads. In addition to measuring conversion, you and your team would need to qualify your leads – ideally on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. See below an example of a call lead generated by PPC. It’s important to keep track of each lead and qualify if they were a possible client or not.

PPC campaign review

Final thoughts

Generating leads for your personal injury law firm can be challenging, but PPC ads offer you an option to gather accurate data, track each ad click and ad performance, and improve your ads as you go.

However, PPC takes time to master and applying it to a field like personal injury can be complicated. This is why it’s best for most personal injury law firms to hire a trained professional who has had experience specifically with personal injury campaigns to ensure the best possible results.