When advertising online, context can be almost as important as content. Contextual advertising puts your ads in front of the people most likely to do something about them, and has become an industry that generates over $2 billion in profit annually in the United States alone. You can get in on the contextual ad bandwagon even today. By using the newest tools, like contextual video advertising, you can put your best foot forward and grow your practice within weeks or months.
Contextual Keyword Advertising: What Does It Do?
Contextual advertisements are based in the idea that when you're visiting a website containing certain keywords, you may be more interested in particular products or services. Because of this, the same search indexers that figure out whether your website should be displayed for a search for “divorce lawyer in Tampa” can also choose whether to display an ad based on those same keywords.
Let's give an example: some of the best contextual advertising for lawyers can appear on advice websites. Someone who is already looking for answers to legal questions is a lot more likely to actually want to phone a lawyer than someone doing random web searches about topics unrelated to law.
If you use keywords and phrases that will put your advertisements in front of people already looking for legal solutions, you can also segment them based on particular legal problems. This makes it even easier to target your landing pages for maximum conversions. The more segmentation you're able to develop, the less money you'll be wasting on ad viewers with no need for your services.
The Best of Both Worlds: Contextual Video Advertising
If you've done any research about marketing law firm websites, you'll know that video advertising is great at generating both clicks and conversions. It might not be surprising to you that best contextual advertising practices for attorneys today include using contextual video advertising.
A new offshoot of contextual keyword advertising, contextual video advertising works to post your law firm's video content on websites where it will be relevant. Now, before even clicking to go to your law firm's website, you can use this type of contextual keyword advertising to show your law firm to potential clients.
What's more, contextual video advertising gives you the ability to split test different videos to determine which is the best contextual advertising for generating conversions. You should always be testing your contextual keyword advertising so that you know for sure they're working according to plan.
The Worst Contextual Video Advertising Mistake You Can Make
You're sitting on your computer, quietly listening to some music you like in your expensive, noise cancelling headphones. You click on an interesting page, and BAM! Out of nowhere comes a piece of contextual video advertising so loud that you can't hear your music any more.
What do you do? Well, odds are you won't click on the contextual video advertising that interrupted your reading time. Instead of clicking any contextual keyword advertising on the page, in fact, you're quite likely to just hit the “back” button and visit a website that's more respectful of your ear drums.
Your clients are no different. Even the best contextual advertising can look awful if it starts when people aren't ready for it to. “Click to start” contextual video advertising is much less intrusive and actually more likely to generate clicks. Don't waste your best contextual advertising ideas on sites that have automatically starting video. These sites aren't likely to bring in conversions, and they may even make customers angry about your contextual video advertising.
Best Contextual Advertising Practices
When you're strategizing about how to make the best contextual advertising, you'll need to know current industry best practices. A great deal of focus in best practices for contextual keyword advertising focuses on choosing the right keywords. In general, you should make sure you're using:
Negative Keywords, which can help you weed out results for pages that have some similar keywords to what you're targeting but are actually about something quite different.
Separate campaigns for each of your target audiences.
Short Keyword Lists—keyword lists of over 50 keywords may not be targeted enough. Are you making sure that you're segmenting your ads?
Analytics and Testing, because you don't want to continue running contextual video advertising or contextual keyword advertising if you're not getting any real benefits to your bottom line.
Landing Pages that are specific to the content of the ad that brought your visitor to your website.
You don't need to use both singular and plural words when you're using contextual keyword advertising. Generic landing pages and big keyword lists are your enemies, and can drastically lower the total number of conversions you'll land with your ad campaign.
Legal Controversies Surrounding Contextual Keyword Advertising
Before your law firm decides to use any kind of contextual ads, you should be aware that some contextual keyword advertising and contextual video advertising tactics may land you in legal and ethical hot water.
Because you can choose your own keywords for your contextual keyword advertising, you may think that your best contextual advertising strategy would be to choose not only keywords related to your business, but keywords related to your competitors. However, a Wisconsin lawyer at a small law firm now being sued by his big firm competition for doing exactly that.
Contextual keyword advertising and contextual video advertising are brand new, so it's likely that legal controversies will continue to surround them for some time. You may want to ask your state bar if you have questions about best contextual advertising practices from a legal ethics perspective.
In order to make the best contextual advertising without having to worry about these controversies, it's a good idea to read up on the topic from time to time and see what's going on in your jurisdiction. You wouldn't want to run afoul of state bar ethics guidelines because you used the wrong kind of contextual keyword advertising or contextual video advertising.
