SEO Services for Family Law Firms & Divorce Attorneys

Does your law firm practice family law? Are you finding it impossible to garner leads from the internet? No matter if you are a new or established law firm, you need to be doing SEO. There is a rise in people using Google and other search sites to find information. If you do not have a quality website and are not providing helpful information, it is unlikely that qualified traffic will come.
Continue reading to see how Array Digital can help your family law practice. It does not matter if you specialize in a particular area, such as only divorce, or if you hit the whole spectrum of family law. We will create a custom digital marketing strategy tailored to your firm.

The importance of SEO for family law firms

You have likely heard the term SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. It is a process that enables you to tell the search engines, like Google, who you are, what you have to offer, and why you are a valuable resource to people who are looking for a family law firm. That sounds simple, but it’s anything but. The key thing to know about SEO is that it’s critical, and yet there is a lot of competition in most areas.
SEO is an important tool for your law firm because your competition is using it. There is so much competition with family law attorneys in most areas that consumers have several options to select in most cases. Because they have so much competition — and family lawyers offer many of the same services — you need a way to stand out. Your law firm may not be visible to your target audience in the highly competitive field of family law without SEO marketing.

To draw in potential clients to your law firm’s website, you need to encourage the search engines to see the value that you can offer to those prospective new clients. That’s where SEO and digital marketing as a whole come into play. It is a series of steps and strategies that you’ll use to help encourage the search engines to value your site, therefore positioning it high on the results page (the interface that someone sees when they search for the services you offer).

The simple fact is this. SEO done well will help your family law firm to get new clients and establish an online presence. Yet, you might be wondering when and how to start.

One of the most challenging aspects of family law SEO is the competition. When we say competition, we specifically want to look at the number of attorneys trying to rank in the search engines for the same words you are. SEO strategy has a structure built around keywords, which are the most common words that people type into the search engines to find the services they need (i.e., Miami divorce lawyer).
What’s complicated is that many times, search engine results center around general legal keywords, like “divorce attorney” or “estate planning attorney.” Yet, there are so many attorneys across the country that are using those keywords that it’s nearly impossible to rank for them. With our keyword research, though, we can pare down the results and narrow our focus to a more specific, local SEO effort.
SEO is crucial for targeting potential clients with specific keywords that align with their needs and differentiate you from competitors.
We should mention that family law is quite competitive. However, when there’s greater demand for a service, there’s greater potential for leads. At the same time, this also means the competition is more fierce, which impacts your marketing budget and the SEO strategy you deploy.

SEO strategy requires careful monitoring and a constant intake of new information, and even the most well-educated attorney will find SEO frustrating if they try to master it on their own on the weekend.

Yet, you want to be in the Google search results, and we can help you to get there.

Consider Google’s E-E-A-T.

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness have long been core components to Google’s strategy for determining how to rank websites, though “experience” is a rather new component and very important for law firm marketing.

• Experience: First-hand experience in the topic is something that attorneys need to show. The content you place on your website should showcase that experience.
• Expertise: Expertise is more about the extensiveness of the knowledge that you provide. Is it thorough and all-encompassing?
  Authoritativeness: The content you create needs to be a go-to resource for that topic. If you are a divorce attorney in New York, you need to ensure your content showcases not just what you do but what the reader needs to know about the area’s laws, reputation, and expectations.
• Trustworthiness: Attorney’s websites absolutely have to be trustworthy and built with a strong focus on providing exceptional quality.

All of these components together can help your family law firm’s website to do well in the search engines. Typically, SEO will include the use of keywords, backlinking, the right headings, and a good outline of your legal services. However, expertise is unique to you, and you should share your legal insights, recent settlements, or firm news to build authority for your online presence. Collaborating with your SEO agency to accomplish these critical components will certainly attract potential clients to your firm.

More components of SEO to incorporate into your campaign

Let’s take a step back and work on building out some insight into what goes into a successful family law website’s SEO strategy.

Local SEO for family law

Local SEO is one of the most important tools you have for navigating Google’s algorithm. It refers to the steps you can take to optimize your marketing efforts to attract potential leads who are searching for help in your area. For example, someone may search for the term “divorce lawyer near me,” and you want to be present on the search engine results pages (SERPs) whenever what they are looking for fits the legal services you offer.

One of the ways to do this is with the local pack on Google, also called the map pack. Take a moment now to Google a topic like “Chicago personal injury attorney.” When you do, you’ll see a listing of about three locations. That’s the Google local pack. Those are law firms that fit the target description that the searcher needs, according to Google.
You want to be included in this pack!

There’s a much higher likelihood that someone will click on your website when you are prominently displayed.
The local pack displays your Google Business Profiles. Though it used to go by the term “Google My Business,” the current name provides a better description of what this service is and how it works. Your profile allows you to manage how your local business page shows up in Google Maps and Google Search, and gets in that local pack of three or so providers in the area.

It’s a free service and much like a business listing. It helps to ensure that potential clients looking for the legal services you offer within your local area can find your company. Claiming your profile and completing it can help improve your local SEO by moving you closer to the local pack.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is another component of the process. It focuses on optimizing metadata. Google needs to be able to find metadata in order to start ranking your website. If it does not have access to this, it cannot crawl and index it. That means that all of your law firm SEO efforts cannot pan out fully.

Technical SEO allows for this to happen. Let’s say that you write an article on changing laws in child custody in your state. That’s great and right on target for what your clients are searching. However, it cannot be indexed by Google if you don’t include metadata.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO includes the efforts you take on your website to help attract search engines. There are numerous aspects of it, but one of the most important for law firms is to have optimized service pages or practice area pages. Your site should communicate what type of services you offer, and each of those practice areas should have quality content. This helps them to show up in search engine rankings. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Do you specialize in a particular type of family law? This could be child custody agreements and modifications, going after child support, or divorce.
• Do you only work with contested divorces or military divorces?
• Do you want to get less traffic for uncontested divorces?
• Maybe you specialize in custody cases for special needs children or LGBTQ+ couples.

All of these factors play into the greater SEO strategy that you incorporate onto your website to get organic traffic.
Some of the factors that go into on-page SEO include:

• Keyword research: We need to know what people are typing into the search engines to find what you have to offer. By researching relevant keywords, our SEO agency is able to help target very specific people who need specific services.
• Landing pages: These are highly-targeted website pages specifically designed to encourage the searcher to do a particular action, whether that’s calling your firm or filling out a contact form. For legal websites, landing pages also serve the purpose of expanding your firm into different geographical locations to satisfy “near me” searches.
• Blogs: Blogs are a core component of your SEO effort because they allow you to flesh out important topics and get target keywords into the content of your page. This can influence search engine rankings when done well.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is a bit different in that it focuses on the efforts you take away from your website that can still help you to create traffic.
At the core of this is link building. Link building means placing links to your website on third-party websites. This can happen in many ways. The link to your firm on the Google map pack, for example, is a good start, but we also want to use all of the legal directories that relate to the services you offer as well. We also encourage you to secure backlinks from the websites of your alma mater, community organizations, legal research sites (i.e., National Law Review), and guest posting sites. Your SEO company should work closely with you to create a solid link-building strategy.

SEO marketing strategy for family law firms

Array Digital’s team will craft a strategy to implement for your law firm’s SEO. None of our strategies are duplicates. We tailor each of our projects to our client’s specific focus. It does not matter the type of family law or the range of your business; our goal is to create a marketing strategy specific to your law firm.

We do this with a focus on high-quality content, real-time collaboration with you, consistent insights and suggestions to improve your strategy, and ongoing touch bases to measure performance. No strategy is complete without your expertise. At Array Digital, we truly believe that the best SEO strategies are only complete when clients are directly involved in the continuing process.

While you may need your website to start producing leads for your company, you are not sacrificing any level of content, prestige, or user experience in doing so. Allow our team to craft a strategy that brings in more visitors, helping you to get more people to your site that you can help.

Are you in a niche area in family law?

Many of today’s family law firms have “niched down,” which simply means that they are focusing on a specific area of the industry. You may find yourself in a niche area of the law, and that’s certainly not a bad thing, especially if it means that you can focus your business on a specific area that’s profitable to you.

However, over time, this could change. As your business grows and new firms open, you may need to adjust your business model. You do not want to be behind in an already tough market. That’s why it is so important to start an SEO plan now and to work to build it over time.

The importance of an FAQ page

One of the tools we use to help build your law firm’s website and meet the expectations of your readers is an FAQ page. This is a key component of your marketing campaign in that it allows us to include a number of different keywords and topics that may be related to your clients while also providing high-quality content that answers your potential clients’ questions. It’s going to help contribute to the metrics of bringing in new traffic, too, because many people type specific questions into the search engines to find the help they need. If your site has an answer to that question, chances are good that they will stick around!

Rise above your competitors at the local stage

Family law cases happen every day. There is no shortage of families seeking an attorney in this area. Yet, without a digital marketing strategy in place, they won’t find your firm in the search results.

When you utilize SEO for your family law website, it helps you be seen, positioning your law firm in front of the people who need you the most.

As legal SEO experts, our team works to understand who your most likely local clients are, and then we work to create a strategy to help you land in the top positions of Google. That’s where people see you, learn about you, and click to visit your website.

Array Digital tracks your family law SEO performance

Where do you stand right now? To know exactly where that is, you’ll need some help. Our SEO professionals work on your family law campaign meticulously. We are transparent with any issues that may arise. We keep you informed.

Remember, too, that SEO is a journey, one that takes time to build and flesh out. If you want fast results to get some leads in the next few days, consider pay-per-click or PPC ads. They are expensive and profit short-term results. The long game is SEO, but it delivers high-quality leads on an ongoing basis better than anything else.

For the best results, we recommend diversifying your digital marketing campaign via our multiple proven tactics. Our sales team can guide you through the best solutions for your law firm.

Keep in mind that if you want to rank first for a target keyword like “Los Angeles custody attorney,” you will have to keep other metrics and small wins in mind before hitting that very competitive goal. Ranking for terms like “how to prepare for a CPS interview” via blogs will help build topical authority for your services and link back to them. It’s this type of hard work that goes into the process of building success with law firm SEO.

Three SEO tips for family law services

What is it going to take to create a website design that gets your phone number ringing off the hook? Consider these tips.

One: Separate practice area pages

If you practice in several different areas of family law, such as divorce, military divorce, and child custody, you need to create practice pages for each of these areas. Don’t try to combine multiple services on one page. That’s going to provide opportunities for you to use title tags, metadata, and keywords for a wider range of topics, too.

Two: Create content answering relevant questions

Create content that answers questions that you know your likely website visitors are going to ask you when they do call you! Long tail keywords are rising in popularity as more people start to type sentence-length questions into the search bar. Most questions start with either “how” or “why.” If you answer those, you’re on your way to targeting those potential clients.

Three: Optimize website speed

Your website must be fast. Responsiveness improves user experience, which is a critical component in E-E-A-T, as we discussed earlier. If the speed of your website is low, the average person isn’t going to wait around for it to load. Instead, they will click away and turn to your competitor.

Common SEO mistakes your family law firm should avoid

There are a few mistakes that tend to cost firms. Avoid these when writing optimized content:

Keyword stuffing

Don’t do it. Too many keywords bunched together on your pages are not going to get you ranked for them. Rather, it will infuriate real people who come to your site to find answers to their questions.
Instead, write content for human readers first. Then, you can add in supporting keywords where they naturally fit.

Keyword cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization occurs when you have two different pages on your website that cover the same topic. For example, two pages on divorce that focus on the same specific laws in your state don’t help your site. These two pages are cannibalizing each other. You are working against yourself to rank in the search engines.

User experience

When people visit your site, they need to be able to navigate easily, understand what you have to offer, and effortlessly manage the process of getting information and submitting a request for a call. If your site is hard to read, difficult to navigate, or doesn’t load properly, that’s going to impact results.

The future of SEO for family lawyers

Ranking for family law keywords will definitely become more challenging in the near future. You have several tools available to help you build your presence, and that includes coupling good SEO practices with social media marketing, content marketing, and even PPC. Yet, the longer you wait, the harder ranking well becomes.

You’re not alone in the need to build a successful website that draws in traffic. Other law firms are doing the same thing. Yet, know this: Those who started digital marketing years ago have a tremendous advantage. Google has placed their site as a legal authority, and they have likely gained superb backlinks that accelerate their ability to rank new content well. Do not be surprised by an SEO strategy taking over a year to gain traction.

But the good news is that starting today is better than tomorrow. By beginning your SEO campaign now, you are one step ahead of any competition that has not done so yet. You also can navigate the process now before it becomes much more intense in the future.

Successfully making, measuring, and modifying your family law SEO

As a marketing agency that’s built our business around the success of our law firm clients, Array Digital is the team to turn to whenever you make the decision to move ahead with SEO. There’s no doubt you should.
We have had tons of success with family law firms. Most of our legal clients are within the family law, personal injury, business, and criminal law sectors. That gives you the ability to tap into some of the best resources available today.

We know how to get family lawyers ranking.
Get started now. Call us at 757-333-3021 or fill out our contact form. Let’s talk about building your law firm’s SEO future with confidence.