Search Engine Roundtable has just reported some major news for the legal industry:
Google is possibly making its Local Services Ads (LSAs) available to personal injury attorneys.
(For those who aren’t familiar with LSAs, these are Google’s relatively new pay-per-lead ads that now appear at the top of the Google results page for specific types of searches. The ads come with a “Google Screened” badge, showing that the firm has been verified by Google.)
The big news was initially shared on Twitter by Ben Fisher, who is a Google My Business Product Expert. In his tweet, Ben shared an email that came from Google about the expansion of the ad product.
According to Ben Fisher’s tweet, the email from Google stated: “We have had such great success with attorneys in the Estate and Immigration law field, we are now expanding into Personal Injury.” The email went on to say that Google is conducting surveys with a handful of personal injury attorneys to learn more about how to best roll out LSAs for this field of law.
Google first launched its Local Services Ads as a beta test for the home services industry in 2015 and then made the ads available to the legal industry in April 2019. Currently, legal LSAs are only available for immigration and estate law attorneys in certain geographic markets (San Diego, Austin, Houston, and Atlanta).
How can LSAs help personal injury attorneys attract more clients?
The purpose of Local Services Ads is to make it easier for consumers to find trusted local service providers (i.e., personal injury attorneys) right in their local communities.
The ads also help service providers (i.e., personal injury firms) stand out to potential clients in search results and quickly win their confidence, considering that the firms have already gone through a vetting process by Google (thus earning them their “Google Screened” badge).
As you’ll notice, in addition to the “Google Screened” badge, these LSAs also have other elements that help build trust with potential clients, including the attorney’s headshot, their average star rating for Google reviews, and the number of years their practices have been open.
LSAs have the potential to bring attorneys more online visibility, more leads, and more new clients.
Here at Scorpion, we already have numerous clients who are using LSAs to attract cases, and we’re excited about the opportunity to expand this new ad format to our personal injury clients as well.
If you want to learn more about LSAs and how you can start using them for your personal injury practice, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. As an official Google LSA partner, we can walk you through the steps for getting “Google Screened” and help you get your ads set up once they become available for your market. Contact us today!