4 Ways to Monitor Your Competitor’s Legal Marketing

Pablo Picasso famously said, “Good designers copy, great designers steal.” The same can be said for legal marketing. I was recently watching the Netflix documentary about JUUL that spoke to their early advertising creative that was comparable to Apple. This reminded me of “the law of mind” from The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (by no means a must-read) that stated, “It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.” They too used Apple as the example comparing it to the world’s first personal computer, the MITS Altair 880.

So how does this apply to your law firm might you ask? Legal marketing is highly competitive field due to the high client value. This can lead to a battle to the bottom in terms of who is willing to pay the most and receive the lowest return on investment just to keep the lights on. A way to combat this is by monitoring what your competitors do then simply do it better which should result in lower cost-per-rclicks and cost-per-leads allowing you to actually scale your practice profitably.

How to See Your Competitor’s Google Ads

I know all too many attorneys who search their own keywords looking to see where their and their competitor’s ads show up. This is not an accurate view, if you have advanced targeting on your campaigns you may be excluded. In addition, I have never seen a campaign with 100% search impression share in my career, meaning the ad shows up every time its keyword is searched.

What you can do to monitor your competitors on Google Ads is review the auction insights within your campaigns. This will provide a high level of visibility into which of your competitors are bidding on the same keywords as you, the overlap, and directional information on their bidding based off the top of page and absolute top of page rate.

To take it to the next level, visit the Google Ads Transparency Center, submit the URL of your competitor, and you will be able to see the exact ads they’re running. This will provide visibility into their format, messaging, and extensions which can be very enlightening. If you’d like a free market and account analysis for your practice, submit an inquiry to our team of law firm PPC experts.

Law Firm Competitor SEO Analysis

Moz and SEMrush are widely regarded as the best search engine optimization tools. Moz offers a variety of free tools and we’d recommend starting with the SEO competitive analysis tool for high-level insights. For more robust information, paid versions of each platform will be necessary. At Cardinal Concepts, we have access to multiple SEO tools and are happy to provide our own SEO analysis of your law firm and competitors.

Two additional free resources directly from the source are Google Search Console and Google PageSpeed Insights the latter of which will inform you their SEO score (0-100) and any performance issues they’re facing.

Google Chrome is my preferred browser of choice, one of the reasons being access to a plethora of powerful plugins. For SEO competitive research, I recommend the Detailed SEO Extensions by detailed.com. With the click of a button you’ll see the title tag, meta description, meta robots tag and much more of any website you’re visiting.

See Your Competitor’s Legal Marketing Social Media Ads

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has been used to share deceptive information and misinformation so they have made ad transparency a priority. The Meta Ad Library is a tool that allows researchers to view more information about the ads they see across Meta technologies. This is also a great tool to use for inspiration on a subject matter.

To see your competitor’s social media ads, to visit your competitor’s page, click the info / page link, then scroll down and click the “Go to Ad Library” button. This will show you all active ads they are currently running. If creating your own attorney social media ads seems too daunting a task, we have white-label ready campaigns that are proven winners. 

Opt-In to Law Firm Emails

This is pretty simple, visit your competitor’s website and opt-in to their newsletter, eBooks, and any other resources they may offer. If they are doing this correctly, you will be entered into an email sequence delivering multiple pieces of content over time. Email marketing for law firms is something every practice should have but I’m always surprised by the number of attorneys that don’t invest in either the platform to execute or time to create valuable email content. If you’re one of those attorneys, make it your 2024 resolution to change and contact the Cardinal Concepts team to help.

Running a high-performance law firm takes work both on and in the business. If your competitors are passing you by and you need help improving your practice, the Cardinal Concepts legal marketing team is here to help.