Key Takeaways:
- Improve LSA visibility by earning more Google reviews, optimizing your Google Business profile (and ensuring accuracy), and ensure your intake team is responding to calls quickly.
- Proximity to a potential client’s location heavily influences LSA placements—distance will always affect visibility, regardless of your bids.
- Refunds can be requested for wrong numbers, out-of-service-area calls, spam, and incorrect business inquiries.
- Law firms can qualify for a Google-Screened badge, not Google-Guaranteed, on LSAs—the latter is for home service businesses.
Check out our legal marketing blog for more tips, tricks, and trends.
Complete Transcript
Nick Paul, Head of Advertising: Hey, guys! It’s Nick with Nifty. It’s officially Tuesday. You know what that means—it’s time for Two-Minute Tuesday! Let’s dive in.
What’s up, everybody? One of the most common questions we get about local service ads is how can I be more competitive now that everybody’s getting the word on these things? Here are some tips and tricks that you can do as a law firm to make yourself more visible in the ad placements.
One of the first things you can do is increase the number of reviews on your Google Business. Next, you have to be responsive to these phone calls. If you miss phone calls, this is going to tank your ads. So make sure your intake team is on a hair-trigger with these. The proximity to the customer location is huge, so if you’re not seeing your ads pop up for someone who’s relatively far away from your office, it’s just the nature of it. No number of bids is going to make a difference on that.
Your business hours are huge. Making sure that the business hours are displayed on your ad is important, as well as expanding your ad schedule. Now, be careful with the ad schedule. If you’re expanding this into after-hours business and you’re not totally confident in your after-hours answering service, this can actually harm your ad because the intake team has to be on point with answering those calls. The last one is serious or repeated complaints against your business. Make sure that your firm is handling these calls well and that there are no negative reviews coming in, and your ad placement should improve.
Next up, everybody wants to know: what’s in these background checks to get into local service ads? Not that anyone has anything to hide, but there are two different background checks—there’s the business entity and there’s the business owner. In the business entity background check, they’re going to be looking at the civil litigation history of your business. In the business owner background check, it’s going to be everything you expect. Criminal background, and all that.
Another question we often get from attorneys is what can I get refunds for? We’d love to get refunds for everything on local services, but there are actually just a few categories that Google lets us get refunds on. Some of these I’ve got listed right here: wrong number or sales call. Obvious, right? If they’re calling from a location that you guys don’t serve, if they’re asking for a service you don’t deliver, if it’s a duplicate lead, a spam or bot, or if they’re calling for the incorrect business, (competitor, whatever it is), those are what we can get refunds for. That said, we can request refunds for anything. But these are the categories that technically Google lets us request refunds for.
Oh hey, you’re still here. I guess you want to know what practice areas you can get local service ads in, right? The list is huge: bankruptcy, personal injury, family law, estate planning, criminal defense. We’ve got a full list, come check it out.
Something everybody’s asking is can my law firm get Google-Guaranteed? Short answer? No. Google guaranteed is for home services like pest control, plumbers, and electricians. Google-Screened is what you want. And that’s what you can get for local services Ads for attorneys. Your law firm can get Google-Screened, not Google-Guaranteed.
So there we go! Another Two-Minute Tuesday. Local Service Ads. If you’re a law firm not doing local service ads yet, you have to wake up and get on board with this. This is a cost-per-call platform where you get refunds on bad calls. There’s going to be more Two-Minute Tuesday content, so stay tuned.