Local Geographic and Language Targeting for Online Legal Marketing

Online search engine marketing has evolved to allow you to be more effective with local search.

Did you know Google Adwords has a feature which allows you to select any combination of locations, enabling you to target your legal marketing campaigns to regions, cities and custom areas? If you want to target a particular city like Miami or Los Angeles you could do so. You can select a particular location if you know the coordinates (that’s right it will accept longitude and latitude coordinates you input if you know them), choose a point on a map and specify a radius around where you want your ads to appear or create your own custom shape on the map.

If your law practice works with a specific language group not only can you select a specific Geographic location but you can go as far as targeting a specific language as well,  like French speakers in Los Angeles or Spanish speakers in Denver, etc. According to Google, “the AdWords system looks at a user’s Google interface language setting to see if it matches one of the languages that your campaign targets. For example, only users whose Google interface language is Spanish will see ads in a campaign targeted to Spanish”.

Yahoo Search Marketing also allows you to run ads in specific zip codes. You select the zip codes where you want your ad to appear and your selected regions will appear shaded on the map with a flag to indicate the targeted region.

This type of local geographic targeting, while not perfect, is more relevant to potential clients looking for your services in the geographic area you serve and helps you with your legal advertising budget by helping you avoid spending money on ads that appear in areas where you do not do business.