The Sterling Family Law Show
The Sterling Family Law Show is where successful family law attorneys share the exact systems they used to build million-dollar practices.
Host Jeff Hughes scaled Sterling Lawyers from zero to $17M with 27 attorneys.
Co-host Tyler Dolph runs Rocket Clicks, the agency in charge of supercharging Sterling and other family law practices to success using revenue-first marketing strategies.
Together, they share the playbook for building the law firm of your dreams.
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The Sterling Family Law Show
The $50/Click Waste From Missing Negative Keywords - #167
Missing negative keywords creates budget leaks most firms never see. Here’s the theme-based framework that stopped our $50/click waste on competitor names and celebrity searches.
Wasted ad spend happens when you lack keyword theme organization across account, campaign, and ad group exclusions. Search term reports reveal budget leak prevention opportunities through competitor keyword blocking and irrelevant click prevention. P-Max campaign problems multiply without systematic negative keyword architecture—the "moat and bridge" method that protects every dollar.
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📄 CHAPTERS
0:00 - Negative Keywords: The Hidden Budget Leak
2:18 - Why Wasted Ad Spend Happens Without Structure
4:20 - Sterling's Early Days: Avoiding Upfront Waste
6:18 - Think In Themes, Not Just Terms
8:41 - The $35-$50/Click Celebrity Name Problem
11:40 - Close Variant Matching Expands Budget Waste
12:17 - Search Term Reports: The Boring Dirty Work
14:47 - The P-Max Campaign Problem Exposed
18:03 - Ad Group Exclusions: Precision Traffic Control
19:41 - The Moat And Bridge Framework Explained
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it adds up really fast. And it's a ton of budget. So soon as we got rid of them, we saw a reduction of our cost per lead, and we could reallocate that budget to go after stuff that worked instead of like all this random garbage. I am Tyler Dolph, CEO of Rocket Clicks, a full service digital marketing firm that focuses exclusively with family law firms and helping them grow their firms, attract more clients and convert more leads. Joining me today is Anthony Carls and James Patterson. Anthony is our president here at Rocket Clicks and also the co-founder of our law firm, Sterling Lawyers, which now has 32 attorneys and, over 25 offices across Wisconsin and Illinois. He brings a wealth of leadership experience, and we're very happy to have him. And, along with Anthony, we have James Patterson. James is our revenue operations director and our paid media expert here. Ryan Clicks. He's worked on hundreds of law firms. He's been in the weeds. He's managed people, done all of the things to help law firms grow. And, we are very excited to have you both on the episode today. Okay. We're going to dive into negative keywords. One of the most overlooked yet powerful tools in Google Ads and Bing ads. Hopefully you walk away knowing how to protect your ad budget and attract only those leads that matter. Guys, appreciate you being here. We are continuing our series in the paid ads category and a big, big subject today is negative keywords. And being a novice myself, when I started, here in this business, we talked a little bit about the, the importance of negative keywords, like all why why would I want to use name keywords? And, it's evolved obviously a lot over the last few years. But, James, we take over a lot of accounts, new law firm clients, and I feel like I'm always hearing about the wasted spend in these accounts. Tell us a little bit about the reason for this waste, and why negative keywords are such a necessity for failing law firms. Yeah. Negative keyword lists or even just negative keywords. Added specifically at the campaign and ad group level, where it makes sense as a huge miss by a lot of, Google Ads accounts out there. A lot of times when we take over, new, new, clients and we're taking a look at kind of how things are set up and doing our initial auditing. This is one of the first places that we'll look. Unfortunately for the past agency, it's always, really, unfortunate, presentation, to, to show the, the client where they've, mismanaged their spend and, and, spend a decent amount of dollars on maybe services that they don't actually do or just, quite frankly, junk that's irrelevant to their business at all. So we really think negative keywords are critical to having a good paying media strategy. Especially as you know, Google's got a business model too, right? Like they they want advertisers to spend hours there. There's all kinds of searches that are going on constantly that Google might match with a keyword that you're targeting. If you're not using negative keyword lists properly, you're gonna like Google, run the run the show there and decide when and where to show your ads all over the place. And what we find a lot of times is a ton of wasted spend. But I thought Google was the authority, James. I thought we should just blindly trust them. You know, turns out, you know, there might be some better ways to do it. There's, you know, we want to want to maybe at times test out some of those new features. But, jumping fully into the deep end is not something we ever advise in terms of Google's, preference of how ad accounts are set up. We totally agree. So now I know you built the very first ad account at Sterling when, you were building the law firm over there. Any perspective, that you saw over the years through the use of negative keywords, as a as an opportunity to reduce waste, you know, it's like, as a business owner, you're always looking for ways to to make more money. Well, one way you could do that is by increasing prices. Another way you can do that is by reducing expenses. Right. And wasting spend is is an expense. We I mean, we've prior to the law firm, prior opening a law firm, I had a lot of experience of paid search. It's kind of how I was brought into marketing. So we knew right away kind of how to think about this. And I would say, you know, we didn't we didn't absorb a whole bunch of costs up front that we couldn't really learn anything from, because we were targeting the right stuff. So, like, there's a lot of, you know, when you use some of Google's suggestion tools, like they're going to tell you if you're in Menomonee Falls, that you should that I'm a nominee, falls lawyer. The long tail version of that is that's lawyer for any type of lawyer. And like we've seen queries in there that are like equine lawyer, dog lawyers, cat lawyers, all kinds of nonsense that you really don't want those leads calling you or going to your website and like telling Google that this is this is something relevant that Google is not going to like, highlight it because you don't. One of the problems in these ad accounts is they're small, so you don't get most of the data, because Google will only show you a certain percentage of the data, and the rest of it's just hidden. So being attentive to your search for reports and then trying to like, surmise when you're seeing weird things in there, what what theme or what category am I not really thinking about? And I'm like just letting a bunch of stuff bleed in. So there's a lot of things that we we really did, and a lot of it from a certain perspective. That I built obviously building right. The first time is, is optimal. But I'm assuming a lot of our listeners have explored paid advertising and, are hearing us and, you know, what's this negative keyword thing? So, James, if I'm building a negative keyword list, do I just put a bunch of words that I don't think are relevant in this list or talk to us, more about how this works? Yeah. The the way that we phrases is we like to think in themes, not just terms is is really our, our ideology on it. So yeah, when you think about an account and all the potential searches that could exist, you might find yourself with this massive list of different keywords that you want to check out. The problem with that is that you don't really know if, you know, maybe a specific campaign you're running would maybe want to have one of those searches if you're going to have a conflict there. The the management side of making sure that the right keywords are in there as the as the list expands and scales over the course of time as you launch new campaigns and, you know, get more data and more search terms, reports and review and things like that, you know, what you're going to find yourself is with this massive, really unmanageable list, if you start early with categorizing the different types of terms that you want to block and tackle outside of your campaigns, you're going to have a much better time in the future. And the beauty of that approach as well is as you're defining those different themes, you can then start to, you know, specifically know where to put these search terms. So it just creates an entirely more manageable, you know, approach to it. I think, I know Tony's had a lot of experience with this as well. One of the things we do like to block out our common names and, one of the funny things that we'll see sometimes if we're bidding on, brand terms and we do want to target, like, a specific attorney's name, we might be blocking, you know, the name James Johnson or something, right? And then, lo and behold, we hire a guy named James Johnson. Right. Well, up until that point, we could be bidding for this random person wasting dollars that are potentially. But then also, as soon as we do have somebody like that come in, we can easily reference that list. It's not like, oh crap, you know, let's pull this massive list and try and figure out what's blocking this campaign from serving. We can very easily know, oh, we got that names list. That's where it's happening. Boom. You know, it's it's a lot better that way. So it's both better from, like management long term to organizing themes as well as just like being really efficient in terms of, you know, activating those lists to block and tackle things that aren't relevant to. And so just so I'm clear, if I'm searching for James Jones and he's on our keyword list and he's he's a celebrity or a Packer wide receiver or whatever, he's going to come up, our ads are going to come up, we're going to spend money on that ad Yeah. Google if anybody's search is James Jones, I want to be there. The more you likely use case Tyler is you're bidding on the term divorce lawyer in a phrase match. And then James Jones going through a divorce. And the query is actually going to be James Jones divorce lawyer, which is a, a, what would you call it, more voyeuristic type search query because they're just curious about what's happening in that divorce. They're never going to convert. But you're going to show your ad that now the user thinks you relevant for the James Jones divorce, and you're not at all. So we see a ton of that, both. The other thing we'll see is lawyer like lawyer name. So we'll see this in the celebrity side. And then we'll see with this with a lawyer name side. So a lot of people, a lot of users online will use Google as a phonebook. And they'll type in an attorney. They think they know but they don't know their number. So they'll type in. James Patterson, divorce lawyer, Menomonee Falls, and then they'll just call whoever's ads are showing up. And if they don't, if they if if James Patterson doesn't work at your firm, guess what the caller does. They hang up when they call the next one, but they clicked on your ad. You've spent $32 now, and you're probably not going to get that search query report that says you spent $35 on this really obscure keyword. That isn't going to matter. So like, you have these like death by a million cuts in these accounts that because you don't get all the data and you haven't thought and keyword themes, you just waste a ton of money, you don't know where it's being wasted. think we hear all the time, our clients will come in and say, yeah, I tried. Paid search didn't work. Not for me. My assumption is that a lot of the times they weren't doing this, the right way, because it can be a great accelerant for law firms. We've seen it at our own firm and many of our clients firms. But it's got to be done the right way. Yeah. The yeah I was going to say that the other thing to just, you know, put out there for you know law firm owners that have had bad experiences with, with these types of things. Google is increasingly expanding its, match, you know, availability of search term. So like even 2 or 3 years ago, if you were targeting an exact keyword, you for the most part, you know, 98% of the time are only going to serve ads exactly. For that keyword you're targeting exactly how it's typed now here in 2025. It is not that way at all. There's all kinds of what they call close variants. And it's Google again, kind of taking liberties in terms of, well, that advertiser's looking for this keyword. We think this is pretty close to Tony's point with the specific attorney who doesn't work here, but it has a divorce lawyer in the name. So there's there's liberties being taken that way too. So that really the only way you can catch that, you know, proactively versus reactively is to have a really good negative keyword list organized by themes, kind of at the forefront. There. Yeah. Well, I mean, when we originally implemented this because we didn't we didn't do this right away at Sterling with the name. So something like we saw in the first, you know, probably call it six months. And I'm like, man, I hate doing these search reports with all these stupid names. Like, who are all these people? And then I started noticing, like, Alex Rodriguez went through divorce and I'm like, why don't we show for that query? And there was like a bunch of names and I started looking names up. I'm like, oh, those are those are our competitors. Like those are the those are the attorneys in town. And I'm like, perfect. All of these cost me like 35 to $50 a click and like it adds up really fast. And it's a ton of budget. So soon as we got rid of them, we saw a reduction of our cost per lead, and we could reallocate that budget to go after stuff that worked instead of like all this random garbage. That's so it's so important. It's so overlooked. It's the boring work on a paid search account, honestly. But, you know, just like a great football team, you need a good line and they're going to do the boring, dirty work. And like, this is the boring, dirty work in a paid search account. And so there's, like, an actual report that shows you every term you're bidding on is how we use. Yeah, yeah. The search term reports. That's going to be your best friend in terms of especially after you start building your your list, hopefully up front as you add to it and, you know, maybe test out different campaigns and targeting different keywords, continuously looking at your search terms report is going to be really massive to keeping those lists really well maintained and added to, as you know, search behaviors change and things like that. So you can block out a significant amount just by, you know, kind of doing the basics upfront, but you're going to want to be looking at your search terms reports to some frequency. It's going to kind of depend on, you know, what's the level of spend you have in there. What's the, the scale of the number of keywords you're targeting, things like that. Are you using primarily exact and phrase match, which is what, you know, we generally recommend with clients? Or are you primarily using broad match that's going to, you know, significantly impact the amount of search terms that you may be looking at? But definitely working with your team or agency to be looking at search terms regularly is definitely really critical to. Great. I've got all these awesome keyword lists. I'm feeling good. We're walking tackle. No, it's going to over the course of time is again, Google takes different liberties with these close variants. And so there's going to be new stuff that you're going to want to be continuously adding. The flip side to this, and we're talking a lot about exclusion and cost savings. There's also potentially opportunities in the search term report as well. Is there maybe a keyword we shouldn't be targeting? Build out a. Net new campaign where we can make, you know, the ad creative and landing page more specific to it. So it kind of works on two fronts. Both, you know, maybe potential opportunities as well as cost savings. Model. And, you know, I'm listening. I'm hearing you guys talk about I live in this like, you know, every day with you guys and I'm overwhelmed. I'm like, there's so much here that has to be done. How what advice can you give to a law firm owner who's listening in this? Who's as overwhelmed as I am? My name is. It's simply like, find an expert. Or are there little steps that they can take to to refine their list a little bit and save some money? James, you want to rant about, make sure you want me to. You know, I was given p max a tough time in their last revenue roadmap. So I think, I think it's time for you, Tony, to, to lead the We we get a lot of accounts where primarily all the budget and spend is being done on Pemex, and it's what this new. Yeah, it's it's called performance max but basically gives Google ultimate liberty to do whatever Google thinks is right. And it's where we see them most based all over the place because they will. If you're a divorce lawyer, they're going to bet on things like divorce. That's going to bring in a whole bunch of random queries, because divorce is a very broad term. And if you look at all the variants that have a divorce in it, lawyer is one of them, but it's one of like 200, 300,000. And most of them, they're not going to convert for you. So same thing with lawyer like lawyer will be part of that group. And there are tons of different types of lawyers that people search for. Like that's why we have we literally have a list of different law types that we do negatives for because that crap got into our account. So and it's not just like the big ones, like the big obvious ones are for your family firm. Get rid of personal injury. But did you think of that one? Did you think of like that? Because there's actually a fair amount of search traffic. Equine lawyers for horses like, are you really thinking about this? Dog breeding is another one. There's a decent amount of traffic for that type of term, and you just waste your money on stuff that's never going to go anywhere. So you know, and what whatever. So we get these accounts that have this set up with P max. And like the biggest opportunity is if that's what you're if that's all you're hearing from your agency, you're in a bad spot. If all you're hearing is p max, Max, Max. Next. Max. And you don't have really, really, really good conversion down the funnel like your your conversion offline from a higher isn't going back into Google, which I've never seen a client do that. We don't even have enough data. It's their own to do that. It's not going to it's not going to be optimizing for the right things. You're just going to waste a ton of money. And like, not only from like, what's logged in, but from how it's optimized. And if you're hearing you're hearing a lot of details and you're like, I don't know where to start, you're hearing from your agency that you just do p max, you have a problem. Yeah, I think that Google created to be the easy button. Is is it's very easy. Any business owner can just set up a p max campaign. That's why we make fun of it. So you have ad agencies that, like push this crap. That's their primary tactic. It's like the business owner could have set that up. Like they don't need you. Yeah, I push button, push button, waste budget. Yeah. That's wild to think about. It's so the opposite of that right is our approach. We're in the weeds. We're looking at every single word. Just to go even deeper, James, there's the ideology around, like guarding our campaigns from a even an intricate individual word standpoint. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah. For sure. So, obviously, if you're building out your campaign structure really well, you should have a specific ad groups for different, services and sub services. Right. So you might have a divorce, campaign that has an ad for mediation and then an ad group for contested. If you're not doing a good job with negative keywords, then at the ad group level, what can sometimes happen is the mediation and contested divorce. Keywords or search terms are actually going to a whole different group that you have in there. Maybe it's just divorce lawyer, you know, location. So by having the exclusions at the ad group level, you can make sure the right keywords and right searches are going to the best advocate possible. And the advantage is there is that you can give them a much better experience. Right. So then the ad creative matches what the keyword intent is supposed to be. They're not, you know, looking for divorce mediation but are now seeing contested divorce language like, well, that's not what I wanted anyways. You know, you can really kind of, you know, take that stuff into account to make sure that you're controlling the experience all the way through if you're not being careful there. Again, I'm sorry to keep, you know, talking about Google here, but Google will take liberties and kind of decide where to potentially show, your ads based off of, the keywords you're targeting. And sometimes even though you're targeting that keyword in a separate ad here, but some might show to the wrong one. So it's again, it's kind of our approach is we we would rather be really tight in terms of our exclusions and negative keyword strategy. That way we can ensure if somebody's searching for a specific search, they're getting ad creative related to that specific search, and they're getting a landing page that's then specific to that search as well. A good a good way to like, think about kind of what we just talked about. And then the first conversation I, we had about themes is like your themes are essentially like if, if your business if your paid search account is a castle, the themes are the moat around it. Like, I don't want any of that crap coming in at all. But then there's like a couple, there's like one way in and like, you want to make sure you're directing traffic. Well, and like the ad group accounts are how you like, make sure you don't fall off the bridge into the moat, like, which is what you don't want to do. Right? Because that's where the all the sharks with laser beams on their heads are sitting over your budgets getting wasted. So, you know, that's a that's a good way to think about it. Like, you need both. You need the moat around yourself, and then you need kind of the precision within the within the account to get the places to or you get the traffic to the right places. So you match creative, message. Holy cow, guys, it sounds like there's a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. And it's so easy to get caught up in and all of the intricacies and dials and buttons in the back end of an ad account. And so if you're listening to this and you're as overwhelmed as I am, please reach out to our team. We have an incredible team of experts that that lives in this stuff, and they do an amazing job. And as you heard today, the, level of expertise needs to be high. We're talking about the opportunity to save real money, when building a strong family law firm, that is going to allow you to reinvest those dollars back into to your future growth. Gentlemen, really appreciate the summary today. I appreciate the opportunity to connect. If you found this episode valuable, then you will love our next episode on specific keyword categories. How to structure your ad strategy to attract high quality family leads. Click the link to check that episode out and we will see you there.
