How SEO and PPC Work Together to Grow Your Family Law Firm

As digital marketing evolves rapidly, family law firms must adapt to stay competitive. Combining SEO and PPC is the key to building a robust online presence. The importance of managing and growing your digital footprint for your divorce and family law firm has become a reality for most law firms. The question we continue to hear from potential clients before hiring is what area should I focus on first, SEO or PPC? The short answer is both. They complement each other and facilitate sustainable growth for law firms. SEO is long-term, but meaningful effort and PPC allows us to capture immediate leads while we work on strengthening organic presence through SEO. When combining both of these channels you achieve a powerful digital footprint that provides endless avenues for potential clients to find you and maximize your ROI.

Understanding SEO and Its Role in Family Law Marketing

The ultimate goal to keep in mind and strategize around is the long-term play of ranking for transactional keywords. We label these such as GEO + Service + Attorney or Lawyer, etc. Quick gains promised from agencies should have you worried as most of those strategies are cutting corners and being exposed within Google Core Algorithm Updates, which rollout about every 3-4 months. When SEO is done correctly, you are establishing your authority and trustworthiness, which are very meaningful from Google’s point of view.

The challenge that every family law firm faces is steady lead volume and growth year-over-year (YoY) as more law firms continue to break into the digital space. SEO requires dedicated time to allow results to be achieved. Continued site optimizations and updates to blogs and service pages are required to stay relevant and competitive. Over time you can monitor keyword rankings and analyze search data from Google Search Console to better serve your traffic the information they are seeking.

Leveraging off-site optimizations are important too, most notably your Google Business Profile for local search results. Having a well built Google Business Profile will lead to improved ranking within the Google map pack. This placement can connect with you prospects looking for your services without the costs of PPC advertising.

The Immediate Power of PPC for Family Law Firms

Leveraging the power of Google Ads for any size family law firm can help provide immediate results to help grow your firm from the start. Furthermore it can provide a jump start for more lead volume for established firms. At Cardinal Concepts, we leverage the power of search-only campaigns and Performance Max campaigns to capture search volume within the entire search funnel. This flexibility allows us to target similar high-intent keywords as mentioned above to capture search volume and convert clicks into conversions. Another benefit we have within Google Ads is leveraging custom audiences and controlling which demographics will receive our ads. This allows us to be efficient with our spending while aggressively placing our ad placement in the Absolute Top of Page Rank when the time is right.

More often than not, when I audit another existing Google Ads Account, the challenges they face are time, effort, and organizational issues not to mention if goals are not properly tracked or even set up. That curates a perfect storm for unwanted spending, wasted opportunities, and poor time management. As with all digital channels, PPC needs ongoing maintenance and strategic implementation on a daily, weekly, and monthly cadence for best results.

How SEO and PPC Complement Each Other

To quickly recap everything mentioned above,PPC can drive immediate results and SEO helps provide the long-term goals for a balanced approach. PPC allows any firm to be competitive in their market if done correctly targeting those transactional keywords and providing a meaningful ROI. Building your trust and authority takes time for SEO but this is done by continuing to provide relevant content and answers to the audience you are serving.

When reviewing data from each channel, leverage the keyword success within PPC and see where your rankings are for those terms. This will help you understand where there is an opportunity for keyword ranking advancements that could be an easy win.

When both channels are consistently maintained, the firm gains visibility that drives traffic from high-intent PPC search terms while also capturing organic inquiries, such as “How much does a divorce cost in Denver?” and other locally relevant search queries. Appearing in both paid and organic search results reinforces trust with potential clients.

Measuring the Success of SEO and PPC Collaboration

There are many different ways to consider if SEO or PPC is a success or a bust. Focusing on the right goals is crucial for the overall success of your digital marketing. Seeing an overall increase in traffic growth, conversions, and rankings is important for SEO. For PPC, areas of focus should be your conversion rate, cost per lead/acquisition, and total conversion volume.

To monitor these data points you can leverage several different platforms and third-party reporting analysis. The most important one to have is Google Analytics 4 if you don’t have it already. This will provide a lot of information on how your site is receiving traffic and housing Key Event data that you should monitor. Another Google product we leverage is Google Search Console which will provide insights as to what pages and search queries potential clients are using to find your firm. You can also perform technical SEO updates within this platform that are needed from time to time such as updating your site map of your website to Google to be crawled. We also leverage a third party reporting software called Agency Analytics, which will monitor and track keyword rankings over time.

PPC and SEO Go Hand and Hand

While a lot of people will look at these two channels as rivals and will typically pick one or the other to invest in, those who treat them as equals will be better positioned in the long haul. Both PPC and SEO play enormous roles and are equally positioned to help your firm grow if done properly. If you are facing a decline in your digital marketing, reach out to Cardinal Concepts to see how we can help your firm. With us serving our own US Legal Groups family law firms and individual clients across the nation in highly competitive markets, we can help you solidify your digital footprint within your local market by leveraging SEO and PPC together.