The challenge
Severn Family Law is a Gloucester-based solicitors practice specialising in divorce, financial settlements and child arrangement matters. Like most family law firms, they rely heavily on new client enquiries to sustain their caseload, and Google Ads had become their primary paid marketing channel.
When senior partner Richard Okafor approached SearchMaven, the firm was spending £2,500 per month on Google Ads but struggling to justify the cost. Enquiries were coming in, but the quality was inconsistent. The team was fielding a high volume of calls from people looking for free legal advice, legal aid eligibility, or representation for matters outside the firm's area of specialism.
"We were paying for a lot of calls that went nowhere. Our fee earners were spending hours on the phone with people we simply couldn't help. The cost per useful enquiry was far higher than the headline numbers suggested."
What we did
The audit showed the account was targeting overly broad legal keywords that attracted a wide range of searchers, many of whom had no intention or ability to instruct a solicitor. The campaigns were also running nationally, meaning a proportion of the budget was going on searches from outside the firm's geographic reach.
We restructured the account with a focus on commercial intent and geographic precision:
- Keyword strategy rebuilt around high-intent terms that indicate readiness to instruct, such as "divorce solicitor Gloucester" and "child custody solicitor Gloucestershire", rather than broad terms like "family law" or "divorce advice"
- Disqualifying negatives added to block searches for legal aid, free advice, legal aid solicitors, DIY divorce kits and law firm jobs, which had been accounting for a substantial share of clicks
- Geographic targeting locked to Gloucestershire and the surrounding counties, eliminating out-of-area spend entirely
- Ad copy rewritten to set clear expectations around private client fees, discouraging callers who were primarily seeking publicly funded representation
- Dedicated landing pages created for divorce, financial remedy and children matters, each with a clear call to action and a brief outline of the consultation process
- Conversion tracking updated to measure both phone calls and contact form submissions separately, giving a clearer view of which routes clients preferred
The results
Within 60 days:
- Cost per qualified lead reduced by 58%
- Proportion of enquiries rated as qualified by the fee earning team up from 31% to 74%
- Total enquiry volume maintained at a similar level despite tighter targeting
- Monthly ad spend reduced to £1,600 while sustaining the same number of useful enquiries
"The quality of enquiries has completely changed. We are spending less and speaking to far more people who are actually ready to instruct."
Richard Okafor, Senior Partner, Severn Family Law
What we learned
Legal services is one of the sectors where lead quality matters as much as volume. The instinct for most firms is to measure cost per enquiry and try to drive it down. But for a firm billing at professional rates, an hour spent on an unqualified call is expensive. Optimising for enquiry quality rather than raw volume produced better commercial outcomes at lower cost.
The key lever was the negative keyword list. Legal searches attract a wide spectrum of intent, from people researching their options to people who need publicly funded help to people ready to pay professional fees immediately. Separating signal from noise is the whole job.