Paid Search or Paid Inclusion-What’s the Difference for Law Firm Marketers

Many personal injury law firms have become familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, but may not be as familiar with paid inclusion.

/lawyermarketing101.com/Kevin Quinlan/ 07/14/2009

Many personal injury law firms have become familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, but may not be as familiar with paid inclusion.

Paid search or PPC offers law firm marketers the ability to get results quickly for targeted key words and also a method to test key words for use in SEO efforts.  It can be an effective tool to breach the gap until your web SEO efforts begin to pay off.  The results of paid search appear at the top of the page above the natural search results and at the right of the page with the notation "sponsored links".  Paid search can be effective for trying to capture leads for potential cases that are a matter of breaking news, for example products liability cases based on recalls.  It can also be helpful for new terms that you have not targeted in your SEO efforts.

That said PPC can become expensive because you must bid on the key words and often many other injury attorneys are bidding on the same highly competitive terms.   Ad positioning in the search results is not based entirely on the bid price.  Google uses a metric called Ad Rank that is based on a formula using the bid price and other factors that include different measures of relevance and account history.  Effective campaigns require a high degree of testing and management to reap the best results.  Google, Yahoo and the other search engines all offer their versions of PPC.  

The majority of searchers tend to gravitate towards the natural search (SEO) results rather than sponsored links.  That may be one of the reasons why Yahoo and others offer a search marketing option called paid inclusion.  This can be a valuable source of leads that many law firm marketers don't include in their online marketing programs.  Essentially, in exchange for a fee, Yahoo and some of the other search engines will guarantee to list pages from a web site within the organic search results on the left side of the page.  Google does not offer paid inclusion.  

Yahoo has content quality guidelines that your site must comply with.  Once accepted, your pages will appear in the search results based on the relevance to the search terms submitted by the searcher.  Fees for Yahoo's basic product are based on an annual fee per URL submitted and their top inclusion product fees are based on a cost-per-click model that is determined by the content type and category rather than on a bidding process.

While we believe that SEO can be the most cost effective method to drive unique visitors to your law firm's web site for the long haul, these other tools offer alternative approaches that can also be very useful in helping your firm grow its business.

For more information on SEO, PPC or paid inclusion, contact Rene Perras.

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