The first person who will read your website’s copy isn’t a person at all — it’s a crawler bot program.

They’re searching for new web pages online and sorting, or indexing, them into Google’s search results pages (SERP).

This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play — following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines on the best ways to structure your website’s content so both humans and crawler programs can easily find the information online through search engines. 

Sound confusing? Attorney SEO can be a tricky field to understand. But in this article, I’ll break down what family law SEO is, how it works, and offer tips on how you can improve your law firm’s SEO to get more traffic and ultimately generate more case leads.

What does SEO mean in family law?

SEO for lawyers is a digital marketing strategy that tries to maximize the amount of traffic coming to a lawyer’s website through Google searches (and other search engines too). 

SEO optimization is a vital part of a lead generation strategy because search traffic is often the main traffic source for lawyer’s websites — the more people visit a website, the more leads can be generated continually.

The main tactic involved in law firm SEO is improving a lawyer’s search engine ranking, making their website appear higher up in relevant Google search results over their competitors.

When people online are searching Google for legal advice, such as divorce, adoption, and child custody, Google’s search algorithm will analyze billions of websites and their pages to list the most relevant search results.

In addition, Google looks at other factors such as:

• Location of the search
• Meaning, or intent, of the query
• Relevance 
• Quality
• Usability
• Context

To be listed as a relevant search result, a law firm’s website needs to improve its SEO by:

• Creating individual landing pages based on specific keywords, e.g. a “Child custody” page or a “Divorce” page
• Publishing blogs related to family law regularly
• Optimizing website for SEO by following Google’s guidelines
• Adding SSL certification
• Making the website mobile-friendly
• Boosting page loading speed
• Creating individual attorney bio pages so when people search for a lawyer, this page will appear high in the search results
• Creating an About page that talks about the law firm and its key practice areas
• Adding more videos and pictures with alt-text for video and image searches

Why you should complete an audit of your family law firm’s website for improved SEO

Often the first thing a marketing agency will do to a lawyer’s website is run a “technical SEO audit.”

A technical SEO audit will scrutinize a website’s internal organization, making sure that search engine crawlers can find the website’s content easily, and then index it. 

Some problems an SEO audit can identify and solve include:

• Wrong URLs 
• Messy header types
• Broken links
• Typos
• Poor readability scores
• Broken redirects
• Checking for mobile responsiveness
• Optimizing keywords
• Checking for duplicate content or spam content

Conduct a competitor analysis for improved family law SEO

A strategy that’s used by all marketers is to run a competitor analysis on websites that are competing for the same audience and Google traffic.

This means creating a list of other family law firms’ websites and researching which keywords they’re ranking for. 

Luckily, there are numerous content marketing tools that allow digital marketers to spy on their competitors’ website data, and don’t worry it’s perfectly legal and encouraged!

Using monitoring tools such as Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, or SpyFu, SEO professionals simply just type in the competitor’s URL domain name and gain access to this helpful information:

• Monthly website traffic
• Organic search terms they’re ranking for
• Top pages of their websites, including top blog posts
• Which keywords they’re currently buying PPC ads for
• How much they’re paying for each PPC keyword

Once SEO specialists get this competitor intel, they can formulate a plan to find underused keywords or keywords they didn’t even consider targeting.

A competitor’s top blog pages can give you an idea of the blog topics you should write about. Because these blogs have already proven they receive a decent amount of traffic. 

All you have to do is write a longer, better version of their top blogs to outperform them.

Conduct more content and keyword research for a higher monthly search traffic volume

Finding which keywords you will write about is the first step of your overall content marketing strategy. This is where law firm SEO comes into play.

The simplest way to explain SEO is basically this — adding as many relevant search terms to your website as possible without being spammy. 

When people search “divorce lawyer” Google will consider your website relevant because you’ve mentioned “divorce lawyer” so many times. 

To find these search terms that get the most search traffic, often the best place to start conducting content and keyword search is done in the competitor analysis phase. By studying others, you’ll find keywords and topic ideas that you may not have considered.

But even after the analysis is finished, you’ll still need to run additional content and keyword research.

Using the same tools, such as Ahrefs, a law firm SEO specialist can enter a “seed list” which is a giant list of relevant keywords a family law firm is targeting. Examples of keywords for family law include:

• Divorce lawyers
• Divorce attorneys
• Child custody lawyers
• Custody law
• Adoption law

Using this seed list, an SEO tool can identify other keywords and their monthly search volume to help find more keywords that add to the site to improve its SEO and visibility, such as:

• Child support
• Domestic violence
• Marriage lawyer
• Divorce law
• Alimony
• Deposition lawyer

Again, the idea is to add these relevant search terms to a family law’s website in a non-spammy way — meaning not keyword stuffing or writing “family lawyer” a hundred times on one page. 

But rather thoughtfully using these keywords in the proper way, such as writing new blog posts, or optimizing old content to include new keywords.

Optimize your website for local attorney SEO

While the most competitive law firms are targeting a broad, national-wide audience, most law firms simply want to target their nearby audience. The nearby audience is the most likely to be searching and hiring the law firm.

Optimizing local SEO is a must for family lawyers to get more phone calls, website traffic, and local leads.

This includes:

• Creating a Google Business profile for improved visibility in search
• Getting more Google Reviews to appear higher in Google Maps results
• Adding the family law’s website to local directories
• Adding the city name throughout the website, for example, “Detroit family law firm”

Kaleidico  — a marketing agency for family law firms

Kaleidico specializes in SEO for family law and other law firms, as well as those in the mortgage and fintech industries.

We are a full-service marketing agency and lead generation firm that can help lawyers:

• Redesign and revamp their website for lead generation
• Optimize website SEO to attract more traffic through Google searches
• Write legal blogs and create content marketing pieces to generate traffic
• Manage social media and email marketing campaigns
• Create PPC ads to generate leads

Are you a lawyer looking to improve your website’s SEO and online visibility to generate more leads? 

Book a Discovery Session today to learn how we can help you achieve that goal.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska.