Matt answers the question “How does one get value from Google Ads on Google?” This interview was conducted by Steve Fretzin for The Origination Station, the top business development e-training for attorneys.

Transcript:

Steve: One of the things that you mention is: attorneys can over spend on their Google Ads and I know you have got some ideas about how to really reduce the cost of Adwords. Can you explain more about what that looks like?

Matt: Yes, the key concept to understand when you are deciding which keywords to bid on is long tail keywords versus more short tail keywords, so what I mean by that is, if you think of 3 people that are searching on Google and the first person types in “attorney”, the second person types in “Chicago attorney” and the third person types in “Chicago bankruptcy attorney consultation”. That third searcher knows exactly what they want so they are more likely to contact you, the other advantage of showing Ads or even optimizing SEO for those long tail keywords it’s just less competitive so the bids are going to be cheaper and it will be easier to optimize for those keywords and actually get rankings on those keywords. So part of what attorneys need to do when they are running Adwords search campaigns specifically is look at those keywords that are very precise to how someone would be searching to find a firm like yours, even keeping in mind anything that you do differently that somebody might search for and really bidding on really precise keywords that are very applicable to what you do as an attorney.

Steve: But how would an attorney that is not an expert at Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click and Advertising, how would they know what those long tail keywords should be?

Matt: So the nice thing is that Google has a tool called The Google Keyword Planner which you could access through your Google Ads account. Attorneys don’t know about this tool but a lot of SEO’s know about this tool but basically what it allows you to do, is put in a keyword like “bankruptcy attorney” and this tool spits out a bunch of variations of that keyword, more precise keywords, long tail keywords and then its gives a bunch of data on cost per click, popularity of each keyword and really that should be driving the keywords that you add to your account, what your bidding on in Adwords.

Steve: Okay, interesting.