Introduction to SEO for Family Law Firms and Divorce Lawyers
SEO for Family Law Firms and Divorce lawyers and ranking your site on Google is tough.
Let’s look at some statistics.
According to Semrush, keywords like ‘divorce lawyer’ and ‘family law attorney’ have approximately 90,000 searches every month in the US alone.
These are the type of keywords that your potential clients search for.
Now, let’s imagine for a second.
What if you could turn 5% of that search volume and traffic into your clients?
In fact, according to a research by Clicta Digital, the top three websites get around 29.90% – 43.32% of total clicks.
If we do the math:
Monthly search volume(family law attorney and divorce lawyer): 90,000 searches
CTR(Click through rate): 29.90%
Conversion Rate: 3%
90,000(Search volume) x 29.90%(CTR) x 3%(CVR) = 807 clients / month
This means, if you could rank your site in the third position for the above two keywords on Google, you’ll have about 807 clients every single month.
Multiply 807 by the average service cost and you’ll get the additional organic(free) monthly revenue you get just by ranking your site on the first page.
This is what most big law firms do, but never tell anyone.
So, how do we actually achieve this?
Read through this blog post for a step-by-step guide on how to 10x your current revenue through SEO.
What is SEO for Family Law?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the enhancing of your website performance, visibility, content, speed and authority in search engines. In search engines like Google and Bing to increase website traffic and revenue. SEO for Family Law is the niche of SEO that focuses on family law practitioners. This includes websites for Family law firms, lawyers or attorneys. Family Law tackles matters of the family such as divorce, annulment, or child custody.
SEO is one of the most important digital marketing strategies for all types of businesses. That is considering the revenue and branding impact it generates.
Therefore, understanding different areas of SEO can yield numerous benefits for you and your law firm.
Though some of the technical strategies may seem complex, the basics of search engine optimization are not rocket science. Even if you are interested in consulting an SEO agency, it’s necessary to at least have some background knowledge of SEO so you can make a more educated decision.
Technical SEO for Family Law Firm websites
Getting a good rank for any type of niche, in this case, family law practice, would require specific SEO planning. It must be tailored to suit your target market. Understanding the basics of technical SEO and aspects to improve your family law firm website is the first step.
Technical SEO, in layman’s terms, involves the act of auditing and fixing all the technical issues in your website that concerns SEO.
Technical SEO covers the topics of indexation, site speed optimization, canonical URLs, schema markups, H-tags, meta tags and more.
So what does a typical SEO campaign include? What aspects would you most likely need to improve for your family law firm website?
The answer varies depending on the type of optimization your online platform would require.
Efficient SEO has been proven to be beneficial in different fields. It must be tailored accordingly to suit your own discipline. Though this might be the case, many SEO campaigns are similar and only differ in terms of execution.
Understanding SEO Technical Auditing
SEO specialists often start by doing a Technical SEO Site Audit. It is the auditing of your website to find out what needs to be optimized for SEO. One good example of what can come from an audit is analyzing auto-generated low-value pages. This can indicate a website of low quality.
Generally, law firm websites dedicated to family law and divorce lawyers contain archive pages, usually about old cases. It provides no value to users who wish to avail of your services. It can provide value to other family law lawyers as reference but not to clients.
If search engines like Google are mostly able to access pages that are of good quality and provide what users want to see, it would most likely crawl and index pages of your law firm website easily. This can also give your website higher ranking in search results.
It is important that Google crawls and indexes your website’s best version. Sometimes both the www and non-www version of a website is available which can prove to be problematic.
In some cases, a non-https version of the website may still be available. It can be available despite the fact that an SSL has already been installed. This makes your website vulnerable to online attacks. It can give anyone easy access to your client’s information which can pose legal issues.
So making sure your website is SSL-enabled, is an important part of the techncal SEO.
If you’re not sure on how to do this, speak to your website hosting provider and they should be able to help.
Enabling SSL may incur cost depending on the type of hosting providers, but even if it does, it should only cost about $5 – 50 / year.
Website Loading Speed Optimization
In this digital era, most of us are keen on having information served to us instantly with our mobile devices. Many people are particular about how they can easily access the information they need. That’s why it’s important to optimize the loading speed of your website.
Though this might seem unrelated to SEO in the family law niche, Google favors the sites with faster loading speed. Paying attention to your page loading speed can influence your rankings, conversion rate, and overall experience for users. Google even has their free tool to check on your website’s speed. This is called the Google PageSpeed Insights.
There’s a research by Pingdom about website loading speed. It says that if it takes a website more than four seconds to load, 38% of users usually click away. They will search for information elsewhere.
If you are using WordPress, speed optimization can be done easily with a few plugins. Some of these plugins are WP Rocket, NitroPack or WP Fastest Cache. These plugins help your site to cache. Some of them even help your site’s images to be compressed automatically without losing the quality.
If you’re using Wix, SEO optimization is a lot easier. Wix’s technical framework and infrastructure were already optimized and the SEO tools are built-in.
Or, if you’re not sure where to start, you can always contact us for help.
Keyword Research for Family Law
Strategic keyword research can be considered one of the most important aspects of SEO. For a specific niche such as family law, keyword research must be done with proper execution. That is to make sure that you can outrank your competitors.
It’s also important to know how to implement keywords without redundancy as this can be detrimental to your overall ranking. This type of phenomenon is called “keyword stuffing”. It is now considered an old trick that marketers would use to deceive search engines for higher ranks. It is one of the black hat strategies that can get your law firm site penalized by Google.
How Can Keyword Research Benefit Family Law Marketing
A good SEO specialist would know and understand how to utilize proper keywords without overemphasising them. Search engines like Google are now more adaptive to tricks such as keyword stuffing and can easily demote or remove your company’s web pages. You can utilize long-tail keywords which might be used by potential clients.
Long-tail keywords are often in the form of phrases and are more specific to what your target market is searching for. Specific keywords like “divorce lawyers near me” are quite prevalent in local SEO since they can generate a higher conversion value for your website. Not to mention that long-tail keywords are often intent-driven or transactional in nature, giving a higher chance of conversion.
Utilizing Effective Keywords for Family Law Attorneys
If you’re not utilizing the most effective keywords significant to your niche, in this case, “family law” and “divorce lawyer”, you will get a lower chance of getting organic traffic from Google since your prospective clients aren’t seeing your website.
Analyzing the volume for each keyword you’re using is highly essential. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can help with this. Keyword search volume would indicate how many people are actively searching or using them in search engines. If the keywords don’t get enough volume, there is little to no chance of landing on the first page of search results. You can still use those low ranking keywords if it is necessary. You can use those usually in the later part of the campaign since keywords need to be prioritized. It is being prioritized according to the cost-benefit of the creation and optimization of content such as blogs and infographics.
Strategically implementing keywords like these would also display the website of your law firm’s credibility. It is able to show clients your knowledge even in more specific aspects of the law. In a way, it can also give potential clients the impression that you offer better services than your competitors. Of course, keyword strategies go hand and hand with efficient content creation and technical writing.
Efficient Content Creation and Writing for Family Law
SEO content creation, specially for legal niche requires strategic planning. Writing about something trivial and random content may bring confusion and can even prove to be detrimental to your site visitors. Therefore, many legal contents created by law firms are written in-house by lawyers, paralegals rather than outsources professional writers.
Putting your focus on content that can actually provide information to your potential clients would yield numerous benefits to your overall ranking. Before writing an article, there are a few aspects to consider and one of them is something SEO specialists call “informational intent” and “transactional intent”.
This will help you determine the right keywords that you need to include in your articles or content. SEO for family law often revolves around informational and transactional queries. When a user types in an informational query, their primary goal is to get immediate answers or a specific piece of information.
A transactional query, on the other hand, is when a user is searching for an item they wish to purchase or a type of service they would like to avail of. Utilizing these two types of queries to your advantage when creating your content is one of the most important methods your law firm marketing team should consider.
How to Produce Well-Structured Content for Your Law Firm website
You must also consider whether the content that you’re planning to publish, either in your law firm website or social media accounts, would be enough to rank in search results. SEO specialists often eschew writing similar topics that have already been covered by big websites or media.
This is done strategically to rank higher in other topics that have not been covered but can generate traffic to your web pages. Updating your content is also highly important as others may create their content to compete with yours over time.
According to Google Raters Guidelines, Google ranks content with their E-E-A-T metrics. It means that experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust are the crucial factors in ranking your content.
Good-quality content is one of the backbones of SEO no matter what field or niche you’re in. Remember that search engines like Google can detect a published article with factual information.
Proper Page Indexing for your Law Firm website Pages
Understanding how search engines like how Google indexes your pages would provide you an insight as to why they need to be optimized and implement the best practices in proper page indexing. A fully optimized website with a high quality content would most likely land in search engine result pages.
Pages that have not been optimized properly would not be indexed and this can also allow undesirable aspects of your law firm website to show up for users to see. This can lead to a very poor ranking or having your competitors surpass you in search results even if you have the best quality content in your niche.
Unoptimized pages may also lead to duplicate pages which can be detrimental when page crawlers go through your website. Your website authority can have a negative impact with duplicated pages.
However, Google always updates their search and indexing algorithm to improve their user experience only by showing relevant results to users. You need to make sure you optimize and continuously improve your content.
Fully Optimized Law Firm Website Pages
Strategic keyword implementation, effective content creation, and fast-loading pages are just a few aspects that you would need to fully optimize your law firm website. Metadata is also a crucial element when it comes to a fully optimized website. Always remember that SEO for family law must also consist of technical optimization for proper indexing.
SEO specialists would often strategize how they can improve the alt tags, title, description, and keyword metadata of law firm’s web pages. It’s also important to constantly update or review these different types of metadata over time for consistency.
Another important aspect that must be considered is the link worthiness of your law firm’s site. This is especially important when it comes to SEO for family law since client’s trust is a basic foundation for the services that you offer.
A website with good quality and unbiased content would attract links from other websites. Adding relevant links with informative keywords to your content will give you more credibility and build trust among users who come across your Law Firm website.
Strategic Link Building and Guest Posting for your Law Firm Website
SEO for family law and divorce lawyers can be a bit challenging but never impossible. One of the factors that Google uses to determine the search rank of a page by analyzing the number of good links it contains and vice versa. Link building is acquiring links from 3rd party websites. Guest posting is one of the methods of link building.
According to a Link Building research by Serpstat, 55.7% said that link building brings high results for SEO. Only 6.5% gave low ratings to the effectiveness of link building.
Having other web pages linked to yours will allow search engines like Google to determine your website’s quality. Writing or publishing content that will truly provide proper insight into what people are searching for is the best way to ensure that other websites would also link to yours.
Others might consider this a tedious task but this process is extremely important when it comes to SEO for family law. With the help of an SEO specialist, you can analyze how to strategically make content that would help you earn links from related websites that offer legal advice or services. Guest posting can also allow you to build credibility that will help you earn trust from these types of online platforms.
Becoming a contributor to other websites will help your law firm get an author’s link in the author’s bio. The best way to do this when you’re practicing SEO for family law is to find other websites related to yours. This is called SEO outreach. Collaborating with similar websites by providing good-quality articles can help you build the links that you need to lead back to your website.
Though this might seem time-consuming, SEO specialists can help do this for you along with other link building methods. They can also advise something called “broken link building” which involves finding dead pages with active links and switching them with new content.
Law Firm Website Design and Development
While optimized web pages and a fast loading speed are both highly necessary when it comes to SEO for family law and marketing, it’s still important to make your website pleasing to the eye of your potential clients and easy to use. Google prioritizes its user’ experience. You should also do the same if you want to rank higher.
Since we’ve established that user experience is essential, you need to take into consideration how you would want to introduce yourself to your potential clients through the way your website looks. Web design is essential in every field and should give clients an inside look at what type of service they will experience from your law firm.
Your law firm website should always reflect how you deliver your services. A typical mistake most businesses make is having a web design agency create their website without taking into account major SEO elements. This often results in a great-looking website that doesn’t effectively rank in search results.
The best thing you can do when implementing SEO strategy for your law firm, is to hire an SEO agency that can provide you with a balance of both these two important elements. This not only leads to a credible-looking law firm website but also one with high traffic and a good ranking.
With many of your potential clients accessing your company’s website on their mobile devices, it’s understandable why paying attention to mobile responsiveness is a prerequisite in SEO for family law today.
Easy-to-Read Web Design Leads to Conversions Means More Clients for your Family Law Firm
An appealing and easily readable page layout is always a must in SEO. The more attractive and pleasing to the eye your website is, the more users would spend time scrolling and reading through your pages.
SEO for Family Law requires establishing a trustworthy space for potential clients. A poorly laid-out website can impact your law firm if it sends them in the direction of your competitors. You should prioritize targeting a website designed for conversions.
You must always have pages that can deliver a straightforward action to what potential clients wish to achieve which is why it’s always necessary to consider the user’s intent. A website designed to be easily navigable with simple yet effective interactive elements will most likely appeal to your law firm’s potential clients.
Adding optimized images to your website can also help users find your content more appealing. SEO for family law may seem complex to the general public which is why communicating to your clients with the help of images can make them better understand what you can do for them.
How SEO for Family Law can Benefit Your Clients
Before anyone can become an actual client after visiting your website, they must first have a great user experience. Paying attention to your site structure and architecture is necessary for SEO for family law. The goal is to create a structure of information. Create an easily navigable Information. Your website must have increased website engagement and more users are spending time. This is highly necessary if you want search engines like Google to easily crawl and index your law firm’s web pages.
According to a Google research entitled “What Users Want Most from Mobile Sites Today“, 48% of people who visited a non-mobile optimized website reported feeling frustrated and annoyed.
You should consider the way your website responds to different types of devices. Many people today use their smartphones and handheld devices rather than their personal computers. 50% of the overall global online traffic estimated were coming from mobile traffic. Google now implements a “Mobile First” indexing which prioritises contents on mobile making it more important to make your website optimized for mobile.
How SEO Can Benefit Your Family Law Career and Firm
SEO has been beneficial for any type of business. According to Forbes Agency Council, SEO is one of the most important factors if you’re looking to increase your digital reach and stable revenue. Family law is an intricate subject that lays a strong foundation in client relationships.
Getting your message to the world and how you can help you and your law firm’s potential clients is highly important. Establishing a strong sense of knowledge will help ensure people that your company can help them through a difficult time in their life.
SEO for Family Law can help you send this message to a wider range of potential clients. When done correctly, you can easily establish a good impression between you and your future clients simply through your law firm’s online presence.
Google plays an important role when it comes to how people find the services they are looking for. SEO for Family Law can help you get the exposure your law firm deserves in order to give your clients the best type of service that they can get. Get help today with your Family Law SEO.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does SEO stand for in law?
SEO for Law Firms, or also known as Legal Practice Search Engine Optimization, is the use of a niche-specific strategy and techniques to optimize a law firm or an attorney’s website to improve search engine rankings in search engines like Google and Bing.
Why is local SEO important for law firms?
Local Search ranking is important for law firms. It puts the firm in front of potential clients using these search engines.
What A-levels do I need for family law?
While A-level law is not a mandatory prerequisite for pursuing a law degree, certain universities do have specific requirements regarding A-level subjects, such as law, English, and history. Therefore, it is crucial to thoroughly review the entry requirements of your desired university before submitting your application.
What is SEO in property?
SEO for the real estate industry involves optimizing your online content to attract organic search traffic, as opposed to relying solely on paid online advertising like Google Ads. This optimization process applies to various forms of content, including your website, social media platforms, and mobile apps, enabling you to enhance your visibility and reach among potential clients searching through search engines.
What is the term for SEO?
SEO – Stands for search engine optimization and refers to the tactics used to optimize your website page to reach and maintain a high ranking on search engines for particular keywords.
What is SEO best practice?
SEO best practices encompass a range of tasks aimed at enhancing the search engine rankings of a website. These practices typically involve on-site optimization, keyword research, and building backlinks to the site.
How much should I pay someone for SEO?
Usual monthly retainer for SEO will cost around $500 to $1,500) per month. For those paying by the hour, $75 to $100 is the most popular hourly rate. For one-off SEO projects, $2,501 to $5,000 per-project is most common.
What is SEO and why does it matter?
SEO, an acronym for search engine optimization, refers to the practice of enhancing both the quantity and quality of traffic to a website by leveraging organic search engine results.
The primary objective of implementing SEO strategies for businesses is to generate organic traffic, which involves users clicking through to the website from a search engine results page (SERP).
What is the most important factor of SEO?
Relevant, high quality content is now what matters to SEO in 2023 and beyond. However, technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO are still important.
What are the best benefits of local SEO?
Benefits of Local SEO
- Increased visibility in local search results
- Targeted reach to local customers who are actively searching for your products or services
- Higher chances of appearing in Google’s “Local Pack” or “Map Pack” listings
- Improved online presence and brand awareness within your local community
- Enhanced credibility and trust among local customers
- Higher likelihood of attracting foot traffic and driving local sales
- Cost-effective marketing strategy compared to traditional advertising methods
- Better alignment with mobile usage and voice search trends
- Ability to compete with larger businesses on a local level
- Access to valuable insights and data on local customer behavior and preferences
Who writes SEO?
An SEO copywriter is a skilled professional in the field of SEO copywriting, proficient in applying industry best practices and standards to written content with the goal of increasing website traffic. These individuals possess expertise in various types of copy, including product pages, emails, and other marketing and sales materials.
