One of the many law firm marketing services that we provide to our clients is management of a pay-per-click (or sponsored ad) campaign.  Basically, if you go to Google (or any major search engine) and type in any term, you will see sponsored listings.  On Google, these are the peach-y boxes at the top and the boxes on the right hand side of the page.

While I could spend a lot of time giving away trade secrets on how to pick the “right” and “best” keywords, one thing that people who manage their own accounts often forget is the plurals.  If you use Google AdWords, you have to list every keyword you can think of and then go back and add all of the plurals.  This can be a very time consuming process.  For example, “product liability lawyer” also needs to be made into “product liability lawyers”, “products liability lawyer”, “products liability lawyers”, “product liabilities lawyer”, “product liabilities lawyers”, “products liabilities lawyer”, and “products liabilities lawyers”.  You can quickly see how you can get bogged down in this.  The reason that it is so important to have all of the variations is so that you can really track what people are typing in and adjust your campaigns accordingly.

Don’t just put in the most obvious keywords, put in some that the layperson may think to use (for example, most average people don’t throw around the term mass torts).  Then go ahead add spend the time to add a few plurals.  Once you get into your groove, you can add or take away more keywords.  But don’t let your law firm internet marketing campaign miss out on big opportunities by forgetting the plurals.