Online Marketing For Divorce Lawyers
Bear in mind that 1-800-DIVORCE works well with BOTH traditional real-world divorce attorney advertising (divorce ads such as those on billboards, radio, office storefront awning, public transport/taxi/bus or bench ads, mobile ads, public bathroom ads, blimp ads, etc.) OR digital online marketing for divorce lawyers (especially SEO and/or Pay-Per-Click – PPC for lawyers).
In relation to divorce advertisements and divorce marketing, our strong recommendation is to rely long-term on organic Search Engine Optimization (online divorce lawyer SEO) with an emphasis on owning and controlling all of your divorce attorney marketing assets and divorce attorney advertising.
You should own or control your branded domain name, website content, marketing content (including all blog posts and divorce attorney advertising), video content, pre-hiring online answers to consumer legal questions, all client testimonials and reviews, all branding or positioning assets, your goodwill and your email list of clients with whom you’ve had a prior professional relationship.
That doesn’t mean you should stop having either free or paid memberships at mass lawyer-finder platforms like Avvo, GMB, Justia, FindLaw, Lawyers.com, Yelp, etc. even though you essentially rent those assets and have almost no control over them and how they are used.
It means that you should understand how those systems work against you in your divorce lawyer marketing strategy and temper their use accordingly. Don’t let them own your consumer answers, i.e. your content. If you use those systems, they will inevitably own a large portion of your future goodwill and will essentially control your client list.
They will spam your client list incessantly. That’s only one of the reasons Avvo has an F-rating at the Better Business Bureau.
Your clients are going back to Avvo or LegalZoom, not you, in the future. They are the dominant brands. You are not.
Stop using your own divorce lawyer marketing strategy to pump ONLY law brands that you don’t own or control. If you use paid memberships, stop allowing your per-case profit margin to be controlled ENTIRELY by the bidding decisions of others.
Begin to develop SOME divorce attorney marketing assets that you essentially own and control exclusively. Use those divorce attorney marketing assets (including your owned divorce attorney advertising) in your own consistent long-term SEO and online divorce marketing for divorce lawyers.
That will mean that over time, your divorce lawyer marketing investments will begin to inure more to you and less to the brands of others. Also, your goodwill becomes yours and lo and behold, referrals return. Remember those? If you do, you’ve been practicing longer than Avvo has existed.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) in Divorce Lawyer Marketing
1-800-DIVORCE works well in all kinds of divorce advertisements and divorce attorney marketing, no less in Pay Per Click (PPC for lawyers) (Google’s Ads) campaigns.
1-800-DIVORCE is absolute gold in Google Ads campaigns because you can use the 1-800-DIVORCE trademark in the TITLE of your ad. Google does not allow phone numbers to be used in the titles of non-Call-Only campaign ads. But Google does not consider a mnemonic like 1-800-DIVORCE as a phone number. It’s considered a word.
So your local competitors will be kicking themselves that they don’t have this particular bonus of the actual best family law brand in the world in their divorce attorney advertising toolbox. Well, that’s what happens if you beat them to it.
Check our usage of 1-800-DIVORCE in the title of a search campaign ad. This usage consistently provides us with a 10% or higher click-through rate (CTR). You’ll notice that we use a clickable call extension also. However, consumers click on this divorce ad because they are intrigued and impressed by the 1-800-DIVORCE brand, which is mentioned 6 times in the divorce ad, while our local divorce attorney marketing competitors are just claiming to be “aggressive” and “compassionate” – without any proof of substance at all. And in their divorce ads there is not even a hint of a crap local phone number.
Essentially, consumers click through to our landing page more because they like our gimmicky semi-humorous mnemonic phone number. We get more clicks because of our phone number, and then, later on, we’ll get more calls because of our phone number. Of course, a percentage of consumers who are closer to the hiring event will call straight away.
Call-Only Ads campaigns, which are delivered only to mobile devices (about 65% of searching traffic), are also superb online marketing for lawyers – with 1-800-DIVORCE.
Pay-Per-Click divorce marketing can be a beneficial way to begin a new divorce lawyer marketing campaign and get a few cases in the pipeline faster than with SEO alone.
Industry colleague, Phil Frankel at 1-800-HURT-911, has done extensive A/B testing on the value of listing a toll-free mnemonic phone number in the titles of Google ads. And Phil provides data about his own PPC results with 1-800-HURT-911 to prove this point.
Phil also points out, as we do above, that the great value of memorable toll-free vanity numbers like 1-800-DIVORCE and 1-800-HURT-911 in Google Ads campaigns is that Google considers the vanity “number” as a word, not a number. So with 1-800-DIVORCE, you would be able to include that word in the title of your Google Ads, as demonstrated above. Phone numbers are specifically prohibited from Google Ad titles.
If you position your 1-800-DIVORCE activity just right, you’d have the advantage of being able to include a single word in your divorce ad title that would be your firm name, your brand, your phone number and your website. Not bad for just 13 characters in your divorce lawyer marketing.
Bear in mind that 1-800-DIVORCE service now comes automatically with a built-in geographically-targeted Google Ads campaign (PPC for lawyers) established and managed by Legal Marketing Systems.
BTW, in SEO you are also able to use your phone number in your SEO organic page titles, but no one does because the title is valuable real estate and no one wants to waste that real estate with a crappy phone number. Put 1-800-DIVORCE into your SEO page titles and it will stand out like a beacon on the search engine results page.
Perhaps the main thing to remember here is that 1-800-DIVORCE improves your calls and click numbers no matter what you do. Whether PPC for lawyers already works for you or it’s a new divorce lawyer marketing idea for you, it’ll work much better with 1-800-DIVORCE. All divorce attorney advertising works better with 1-800-DIVORCE.
Does Your Divorce Attorney Marketing Agency Have a Conflict?
As lawyers, we are trained to see conflicts of interest anywhere and everywhere they exist on behalf of our clients. That recognition apparently does not extend to blatant conflicts of interest that exist for the sole benefit of digital agencies we hire to handle our SEO and/or PPC divorce marketing and to promote our practices and bottom lines through divorce attorney marketing.
Is your law firm paying a digital divorce marketing agency that is padding its bottom line at the cost of yours? If your third-party legal marketing agency has any other family law firm clients in your town, you are paying someone who is trying to get your competitors’ websites and ads ranked higher than yours.
Have you asked your SEO/PPC divorce marketing agency whether you are their ONLY lawyer client in your town? Would you trust them to answer accurately? Is their current client list available for your inspection? Would you believe them when they tell you that they do their best for each law firm client? Should you believe that they keep the divorce marketing gains of each divorce law firm client compartmentalized so that no other local firm benefits from improvements made in your account?
It’s easy to determine the answer to all of these questions. It’s, “no.”
Stop paying any SEO, PPC, lead-gen or other online divorce marketing for family lawyers agency that is also paid by any of your divorce attorney marketing competitors.
It Doesn't Matter If YOUR Divorce Attorney Marketing Agency Has a Conflict
It’s a cut-throat industry. ALL digital agencies have access to various paid tools sold by Google and others that reveal any gains you or your digital agency make in any of your digital assets or divorce attorney advertising.
Every gain (keywords, titles, descriptions, tags, slogans, content, videos, divorce advertisements, etc.) made in your divorce lawyer marketing account(s) is almost immediately publicly accessible and will be given freely to your local competitors by your digital agency, if they have a conflict, but also is seen publicly and given to your local competitors by their own cut-throat digital agencies?
Yes, you are paying your digital agency to keep your local competitors level with you. Your divorce lawyer marketing strategy is designed to keep you level with your competitors in more ways than one.
But other digital agencies are constantly selling their services to your local competitors using the value of gains made on your accounts and those of others. That’s value for which you paid.
The only silver lining is that you are also given the gains of other local lawyers by your cut-throat digital agency. Have you wondered why, no matter what brilliant content you write or how spiffy your videos are, your competitors quickly cover them with lightly spun content that keeps the meaning but camouflages your copyright?
Have you ever wondered why your returns on all divorce attorney marketing investments are equalized and ever-diminishing in a relatively flat market?
You have no digital assets or divorce attorney advertising that are proprietary or private to you. All of your digital efforts are immediately reproducible by all of your local competitors.
Don’t worry too much about that. This almost complete homogeneity doesn’t work for your competitors either.
Ever wondered why your digital agency hasn’t improved your bottom line results since … you hired them? You’re welcome.
1-800-DIVORCE immediately puts an end to that theft and sharing of your good digital ideas. 1-800-DIVORCE itself is not reproducible in any way but also any time you develop a piece of content, a video, a slogan, an SEO/PPC title or description, make sure that 1-800-DIVORCE is all over it and completely through it.
You will finally have digital content and divorce advertisements and assets that set you apart and cannot be duplicated by anyone.
Stop Confusing Your Target Clients
“The … lesson is that firms should not waste time and resources trying to promote all its practice areas. They should determine what they are really known for (their brand) and focus their marketing efforts narrowly on one or two practice areas.” – Lawyerist
No one looks at more family law websites and divorce attorney marketing on a monthly basis than we at 1-800-DIVORCE. We see many problems. Perhaps the most common in marketing for divorce lawyers is that a majority of lawyer websites that offer family law services do so only as one of many offerings on a “jack-of-all-trades” website.
Now, as lawyers, we well understand the traditional value of what we refer to euphemistically as a “full-service” law firm, but what we think about our own brand is immaterial. The only perspective that counts is what our targeted family law clients think and do as a consequence of seeing a confusing and diversionary menu of services at a time when they are emotional and looking for one solution only.
If your divorce attorney marketing is subjecting your targeted family law clients to information about personal injury, DWI, bankruptcy, criminal defense, estate planning and social security law, how can you be surprised or disappointed that your website produces few family law clients? The modern consumer perceives specialization as cost-effective, experienced, wise, creative and skilled. She seeks specialization.
There’s also an economic failure here as well as a classic positioning failure. “Boil the Ocean” marketing hasn’t worked since the ’80s. Consumers in EVERY vertical seek specialization. And if “boil the ocean” marketing worked, who the heck could afford it?
Here’s another indication that something’s wrong and it’s your “jack-of-all-trades” website. If you have less than 100 organic visitors coming to your website monthly, Google is telling you your website sucks. Google knows you are confusing your web visitors! So it doesn’t send you any.
Family law target clients will quite reasonably regard PI cases as bigger paydays and criminal cases as being more critical to someone’s actual freedom. Therefore, they reasonably conclude that you would always place greater value on those other cases. This causes conflict in the minds of your target clients and drives them away.
If you don’t want or don’t care to handle family law, take it off your website! You’re confusing your PI, bankruptcy, criminal and estate planning clients too. You will tend not to be very experienced or skilled at family law, and your potential clients know that. This harms whatever you perceive your brand to be.
Inversely, if you see the value of either building a pure family law powerhouse or feeding a general practice or preferred specialized practice with cheaply acquired and easily satisfied family law clients, you should also see the value of presenting your family law services as a branded practice specialty.
So what to do? Duuuh! Get the best family law brand in the world by signing up to become the exclusive 1-800-DIVORCE lawyer in your town. Then cause your favorite web designer to design a family law-specific microsite or landing page at https://1800Divorce.com/Your-Town and forward all of your divorce lawyer marketing outreach to that family law site.
Then un-clutter family law from your general practice site and all of your divorce attorney advertising to make it more focused also.
Your target clients are looking for a specialist. They see value for themselves and their cases in your specialization. You see a detriment in limiting yourself to one specialty. Guess which perspective counts. You don’t have to be a specialist, but you must be perceived as one. 1-800-DIVORCE causes you to be perceived as a specialist.