My name is Elliot Alicea, co-founder of Empirical360 (a legal marketing agency). In this blog, I want to talk to family law attorneys about a cool concept that can work inside your firm – how to target uncontested divorce cases on Google. 

Now, two disclaimers to start: 1) Not every single lead that comes through as an uncontested divorce lead will actually qualify as an uncontested divorce case. I’m sure you’ve experienced this before – many people don’t realize what an uncontested divorce actually is, or mistakenly believe their situation fits with that solution when, upon closer examination, it doesn’t. 2) There’s not that much volume for uncontested divorce searches, so you can’t build your firm entirely on this unless you’re in a bunch of different states. 

However, because uncontested divorces may be less work and less stress for you, you may want to get those cases on the side. Let’s dive into what targeting uncontested divorces looks like on Google using a tool called the Google Keyword Planner!

The Google Keyword Planner

This tool shows you how many times people are searching online for a given product or service in your area and gives you other useful metrics you can use to make projections and data-driven decisions for your firm’s ad campaigns.

Let’s type in a few different keywords related to uncontested divorce searches to start off:

• “Uncontested divorce” (this is the broadest keyword, where most of the volumen will probably be)
• “Uncontested divorce lawyer”
• “Uncontested divorce attorney”
• “Simple divorce” (one of our attorney partners landed a client off of this keyword the other day)
• “Dissolution of marriage”

Google will provide us with a few recommendations on these keywords. It’s important to note that targeting uncontested divorce searches works best in larger cities, because these are not heavily searched keywords. Most of the time, people just search for a divorce attorney – they don’t get that specific. The more specific the search, the more volume you’re going to need in an area to actually make an impact. It’s also important to note that the best keywords are the ones with “lawyer” and/or “attorney” in them, because that indicates high intent, but the most volume is usually with the broader keywords. 

So let’s do a search in the Dallas-Fort Worth DMA, where there are a ton of people. If it’s going to work anywhere, it’ll definitely work here!

Now we can see how many times those keywords are being searched in that area. The word “dissolution of marriage” has 110 monthly searches, “simple divorce” has 10, “uncontested divorce lawyer” has 10, “uncontested divorce attorney” has 10, and “uncontested divorce”, the broad keyword, has 260. 

In order to get more information, let’s take all of the keywords from that category and add them to a plan. This is going to give us an idea of how many leads we could generate for uncontested divorce on a monthly basis. 

What our plan gives us is what a single month of advertising would look like, by the numbers, for these keywords in Dallas-Fort Worth. 

I’ve manually entered that I’m willing to pay upwards of $20 per click, but you wouldn’t always be paying that – you’ll see that if I enter that, Google tells me that I’ll be paying $10 a click on average. This means that when someone clicks my ad and goes to my website, I pay $10 (hence why it’s called pay-per-click advertising!). 

The other metric here that I’ve manually entered is our conversion rate. Typically, when 100 people visit your site or landing page, a certain percentage of them are going to convert and turn into a lead – not all of them will. For us and the lawyers we work with, that number is usually 25%. Sometimes it’s a lot higher, but that’s a safe average to assume for the purposes of this scenario. 

With those numbers, Google tells us that if you’re spending $6,400 (and that’s a lot – you definitely don’t have to spend anywhere close to that), you can get 620 clicks/people visiting your site and about 150 leads per month at a cost of $42 per lead. 

That’s a lot of numbers, but what does that really mean for you? 

The most important number there is arguably the lead cost. It’s going to take about $42 to get someone to call your firm about an uncontested divorce or fill out a contact form on your website/landing page. If that $42 lead turns into a client – and think about how much you charge for an uncontested divorce – that’s a return on investment that’s worth it.

If you go to a smaller city – let’s say, St. Petersburg, Florida, which has 817,000 people – you see that spending less (about $4,500) would result in a $39 lead cost. That’s a slightly bigger potential return on investment, though you’ll get less leads because there aren’t as many people searching. 

Targeting uncontested divorces is just something to consider, but it can work for you and it does work for our clients! You want to make sure you’re in a big enough area if you’re going to employ this strategy, though as we just showed, it is possible in certain smaller cities. 

If you have any questions about anything we discussed in today’s blog, please reach out to me at elliot@empirical360.com or watch the original video! If you want to grow your family law firm, you can book a call with me here at https://marketing.empirical360.com/book-your-strategy-call?utm_source=youtube.