Family Law SEO - A Comprehensive Guide

For smaller law firms, digital marketing is arguably the best way to level the marketing playing field with larger practices that have more resources. The most powerful digital marketing tool you can use is SEO (search engine optimization).

SEO for family law attorneys (if done strategically) can help you position your law firm right in front of people desperately searching for legal services. 

While this technique is guaranteed to work, many attorneys have no idea where to start. 

In this article, we’ll cover the tenets of SEO for family law attorneys, which will help you establish a strong foundation for your practice’s online presence.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

At its core, SEO is a set of practices that optimize your website to increase its visibility in search engines such as Google. The goal here is to rank as high as possible for the key phrases related to your field of work and firm.

Search engines use complex algorithms that match a user’s search intent with the website that provides relevant content. Simply put, they bump up the rankings of websites with content relevant to specific keywords.

It’s not just about search terms, though. Your website also has something called domain authority - a measurement of its authority and trustworthiness. Naturally, the more authoritative your domain is, the higher it will rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).

The Essentials of SEO

SEO for family law attorneys can achieve these results through three following practices:

1. On-site SEO

On-site SEO is the cornerstone of your SEO strategy, and it's done directly on your page. Its primary objective is optimizing the main ranking factors of a website, such as keywords, meta titles, meta descriptions, images, headers, and so on.

2. Technical SEO

This practice improves the technical elements of your website and makes it faster and easier to navigate. Since search engines want to deliver relevant content but also improve user experience, they’ll reward websites that perform technically well with higher rankings.

Lastly, you’ll also have to improve your website's code and structure to ensure it's easy to crawl and index by search engine crawlers.

3. Off-page SEO

As the name suggests, this practice is about the actions you do outside your website that improve its ranking. For example, one of the main aspects of off-page SEO is link building.

When there are plenty of valuable links on other sites leading back to your website, it’s going to build up your website’s authority. This happens because search engine crawlers consider your website to have great content and provide value since many other sites are embedding your links.

Why SEO For Family Law Attorneys Is Necessary

In the past, you could market your law practice through radio spots, Yellow Pages, and bus stop benches, and it was enough to receive a steady stream of clients. Attorneys of the pre-internet era could also rely on their strong base of referrals to keep receiving new business. 

Today, search engine prominence is a lot more valuable. If you rank in the top three spots for popular family law keywords, you’ll always have a wide pool of leads.

Even the quality of leads you generate through family law marketing is much higher than you would get with a late-night TV spot. Sure, thousands of people may see your ad, but they likely aren’t looking for a family law attorney.

On the other hand, when a person Googles how to protect my assets during divorce and sees your website, they’re more likely to become a client at some point in the future.

Finally, by improving your search engine rankings, your content can give your practice a lot of exposure and establish you as an authoritative figure in the field of family law. Even if someone doesn’t call you right away, they may remember your law practice once they require your services.

SEO Tips And Tricks

Knowing a thing or two about SEO is one thing, but the execution of a strategy is something completely different. Thankfully, we’ve got a few tricks to help you get a head start on your competitors. 

1. Find the right keywords

The beginning of any SEO strategy (and also what impacts its success) is keyword research. You start by discovering which search terms your target audience uses to find family law services, then building content around those keywords.

You should be familiar with the two main types of keywords:

1. Short-tail keywords

2. Long-tail keywords

Short-tail keywords are short and broad. Think of phrases like divorce attorney, prenuptial agreement, and similar. These keywords have massive search volumes, but this makes them quite hard to rank for.

Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are more specific and targeted. For instance, how to get custody of a child. Since they’re more focused, the search volume will be significantly lower but you’ll get a lot more qualified traffic.

The two most common tools for researching keywords are Google Keyword Planner (log in to your Google Ads profile and go to Tools & Settings) and SEMRush.

2. Improve your website

Once you get your keywords, you can start working on your website. 

First, you need a consistent URL structure for each page on your website.

For example, your main page could be familylawattorney.com/family-law. All the service pages under the main page follow a similar structure - familylawattorney.com/family-law/child-custody.

Next up is making sure your site is mobile-friendly and has the correct page titles,tags, and proper HTML code to translate the structure of your website to Google search crawlers a lot easier.

You should also enhance your loading speeds, one of the biggest technical SEO metrics. It can improve the visibility of your website and help you minimize bounce rates.

Other technical elements you should deal with to speed up your website are the size of your images, caching web pages, minifying HTML and CSS, and reducing redirects.

3. Improve your content

Content brings people to your site, so you should take extra time to ensure you’re writing the right kind.

What works best for family law attorneys is answering common questions. You can appeal to a wide audience by looking at your keyword research results. Simply find which questions are common and reverse engineer blog posts around them.

Next, figure out a content strategy. There are many ways of delivering articles - what we found works best is referred to as a pillar strategy. 

It goes like this: write a pillar post between 2000 and 5000 words as a foundation, and then create new content that delves deeper into specific topics of the main post. You can then link to the main post from these smaller articles and vice versa. 

4. Increase the number of your backlinks

Once your webpage is well-polished and you’ve got killer content, you have successfully built the base of your SEO for family law. However, to outrank your main competitors, you need a bit of extra razzle-dazzle - more backlinks.

Think about this for a second. If your blog post has five backlinks and your competitors have just one, your piece of content will rank higher. 

What’s the best way to get other websites to link back to your site?

The first method involves doing nothing in hopes someone links back to you, which could take a long time and is referred to as link attraction. The other, faster method is manual link building which involves reaching out to other websites and securing links.

The easiest way to do it is through guest blogging. Simply find sites that accept contributor posts, create a valuable article, and go to town on the links.

5. Consider working with an SEO agency

SEO for family law attorneys is complex and involves a lot of moving parts and experimentation when you’re just starting out. To make matters worse, the results might not be apparent right away. In many cases, companies don’t find out their strategy is ineffective until months down the road.

To avoid losing time and money, you can partner up with an SEO agency.

SEO agencies have a lot of experience with search engines and can do a better job in a shorter time frame while delivering consistent results. 

For instance, professionals have entire teams at their disposal and can research keywords for you, optimize your website, provide backlinks, and most importantly, create content that ranks. 

SEO for family law is something you can do alone if you have enough time and enough money to spend. But if you want a good return on investment and a guarantee that your SEO strategy is effective, you’re better off working with an agency.

Building a Solid Foundation

SEO for family law firms (and any law firms in general) is tricky, but not impossible. By following these tenets of a successful SEO strategy, you’ll eventually see results online which will translate into real-life calls and booked consultations.

If you don’t have time and would rather focus your attention on practicing law, reach out to Oamii. We can provide you with a full SEO strategy tailored to your budget, and start implementing it without you even moving a finger.

Once we’ve lay out the groundwork, we can also provide you with other services such as pay-per-click advertising to drive even more traffic to your website, or reputation management, which will build your brand online and improve your local SEO.

Call 561-228-4111 or fill out our online contact form to sign up for a free consultation and we can start working together on a common goal - getting your services out there through SEO for family law!