How to Get Family Law Clients

Strategies for Bringing in Consistent Clients for Your Family Law Practice

So you’re looking to get more clients for your family law practice? Getting started with marketing your family law practice online can be daunting, but don’t fret! You’ve come to the right place.

Here, I’ve laid out a specific action plan for building and executing a marketing strategy for your family law firm that will generate relevant leads via inbound digital marketing channels.

Note: For the most part I have not included any “traditional” marketing methods (ie. networking, billboards, TV ads, etc.) in this post. Rather, I’ve focused on online, inbound marketing, as this is our area of expertise and what we believe to be the best method for building a sustainable lead generation engine for your family law practice over the long term.

Defining Your Target Audience & Unique Value Propositions

Before you can go about generating new clients for your law firm on the web, it’s critical that you understand who you are targeting, and why they should choose to hire you instead of someone else.

Your Target Audience

To define your target audience, spend some time answering the following questions about your ideal client:

• What demographics are shared by my ideal clients?
  • Are they a man or a woman?
  • Where do they live?
  • What do they do for a living?
  • How much money do they make?
• What kind of legal services do they require (divorce, annulment, modification, property division, business ownership, etc.)?
• What are their most pressing concerns and questions (ie. keeping custody of their kids, keeping costs down, making the process efficient, etc.)
• What are their goals? What outcome are they looking for?
• What are their biggest fears?
• What factors do they consider most when making their hiring decision (cost, the timeframe for results, your personality, etc.)?

Once you’ve answered these questions and have a strong understanding of who your target clients are, turn your attention to defining why you are the best choice to represent them.

Your Unique Value Propositions

The fact is, you can generate thousands of unique visitors to your website, but if you can’t clearly convey why your firm is their best choice, all of that traffic will be for naught.

To come up with your unique value propositions, spend some time answering the following questions:

• What’s your story? How did you get where you are?
• Why do you practice family law?
• What are you most passionate about when it comes to representing your clients?
• What specifically are your greatest strengths as a family law attorney?
• What have your past employers/clients said they appreciated most about working with you?
• Describe your most successful case outcomes:
  • What were the specifics of the case?
  • What challenges did you overcome and how?
  • Which of your unique skills/talents contributed most to the successful outcome?

For an example of a family law attorney who does a great job conveying his unique value propositions on his website, click here.

Writing Content and Optimizing for the Right Keywords

You can invest tens of thousands of dollars on your firm’s digital marketing assets – custom website design, beautiful photography, videos, graphics, etc – but if you fail to publish useful information which is optimized for keywords that your potential clients search when they need your services, your results will be lackluster.

Below is arguably the most valuable information in this entire article: choose keywords that your know result in highly relevant traffic and optimize for those keywords.

For the purpose of giving you realistic examples, we have used Illinois and Texas as the state for these target keywords. You can simply replace these states with the name of your state for your keywords.

Informational Keywords for Your Family Law Practice to Target

Example Topic 1: “Understanding Illinois Child Custody Laws”

• Primary keyword: [illinois child custody laws 2021]
• Additional keywords: illinois custody laws unmarried parents 2021, custody laws in illinois
• Example content: https://vantagegl.com/legal-blog/illinois-child-custody-laws/

Example Topic 2: “How Much Does a Divorce Cost in Illinois?”

• Primary keyword: [how much does a divorce cost]
• Additional keywords: how much does it cost to get a divorce, how much is a divorce
• Example content: https://vantagegl.com/legal-blog/average-cost-divorce-illinois/

Example Topic 3: “Is Texas a No-Fault Divorce State?”

• Primary keyword: [is texas a no fault divorce state]
• Additional keywords: no fault divorce texas, texas no fault divorce
• Example content: https://www.thelarsonlawoffice.com/no-fault-divorce/

Example Topic 4: “What Parents Need to Know About Child Custody Laws in Texas”

• Primary keyword: [child custody laws in texas]
• Additional keywords: texas custody laws, texas child custody laws, custody in texas
• Example content: https://www.bryanfagan.com/Family-Law-Blog/2016/December/11-Things-You-Must-Know-About-Texas-Child-Custod.aspx

Building Your Web Presence

Now that you understand who your target audience is and you’ve defined why they should hire you for their family law needs, it’s time to put that information on the web.

There are of course endless online channels and tactics that you could utilize to get in front of your potential customers. Below I’ve prioritized what we at Juris Digital believe to be the most effective digital properties for marketing your family law practice.

Your Family Law Website

The most important (and likely most expensive) piece of your family law firm’s marketing tool kit is your website. Unlike social media profiles or ads on legal directories like Avvo.com or Lawyers.com, your Firm’s website is an asset for your business. It is a digital property that you own and control 100%. Accordingly, it’s a critical investment.

You ought to treat your website as the cornerstone of your Firm’s marketing efforts. If digital marketing follows a hub and spoke model, your website is the hub. It is where your best content lives, and where you should direct all potential customers regardless of where they discover you.

At Juris Digital we have written extensively on what law firms need to know about creating an effective website. Below I have curated and linked to the most important of those articles that will help you understand the right process for creating your family law firm’s website:

Google My Business (ie. Google Maps/Local SEO)

The second most important web property for your family law practice is your Google My Business listing. Google My Business is the name of Google’s free tool that business owners use to manage the information about their business that is presented to the world on Google.

Because your family law firm is a local business that services local clients, it is essential that you claim and optimize your listing on Google so that people find you when they search general, local queries related to your business, for example:

To optimize your Firm’s Google My Business listing, you need to make sure to do the following:

• Fill out every field that Google provides with complete and accurate information.
• Properly categorize your business – Family Law Attorney, Divorce Lawyer.
• Upload relevant images into each Photo category that Google provides.
• Make sure that your image file names contain relevant keywords, eg: family-law-attorney-houston.jpg
• Reach out to happy clients and ask them to review your services on Google.

Google’s Local Service Ads for Family Lawyers

In 2020 Google rolled out a pay-per-lead ad offering for family law firms called Local Service Ads. You’ve probably seen these ads before without necessarily realizing it. They look like this:

These ads have quickly gained popularity because unlike traditional Google PPC ads – where you pay for each click your ad gets – local service ads are pay-per-lead, where you only get billed when your ad generates a contact.

You made it to the bottom; thanks for reading! If you have any questions about the information presented here please drop a comment below and I’ll respond in short order.

Matt Green Hi, I'm Matt. I am the Chief Strategy Officer here at Juris Digital. I love SEO, content marketing, and brand development, and I am so grateful that my job is to help exceptional lawyers deploy these marketing tools to help more people. If you have specific topics you'd like to discuss with me, please feel free to email me.