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Understanding SEO For Family Law and Divorce Lawyers

Understanding SEO For Family Law and Divorce Lawyers
An article written under Hedley Digital in collaboration with its CEO, Jay Bae
Family law SEO and ranking your site on Google is tough. 

Let’s look at some statistics. 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 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

If you could get your site to rank in the third position for the above two keywords on Google, you’ll have 807 clients every single month. 

Multiply 807 by the average service cost, and that’s the additional free monthly revenue you get by ranking your site on top on Google.

So, how do we actually do this? 

Read through this blog post for a step-by-step guide on how to 10x your current revenue through SEO.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In other words, SEO is the process of enhancing your website performance, visibility, content, loading speed and authority in Google, Bing and other search engines with the goal of increasing website traffic and ultimately, revenue.

It is one of the most important digital marketing strategies for all types of businesses considering the revenue and branding impact it generates. 

Therefore, understanding different areas of SEO for family law 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 highly necessary to at least have some background knowledge so you can make a more educated decision. 
Technical SEO
Getting a good rank for any type of niche would require specific SEO planning tailored to suit your target market. Understanding the basics of technical SEO and knowing all the aspects necessary to improve your law firm’s website would be the first step to getting started. 

Technical SEO, in layman’s terms, involves the act of auditing and fixing all the technical issues in your website.

Technical SEO covers the topics of indexation, site speed optimization, canonical URLs, schema markups, H tags, meta tags and more. Although we’ll cover some of these topics today, you may always consider consulting an SEO agency for professional help in case you find them difficult.

So what does a typical SEO campaign include and what aspects would you most likely need to improve for your 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 and must be tailored accordingly to suit your own discipline. Though this might be the case, many SEO campaigns are similar in some aspects and only differ in terms of execution.  
Understanding SEO Technical Auditing
SEO specialists often start by auditing your website to find out what needs to be optimized. One good example of what can come from an audit is analyzing auto-generated low-value pages as this can indicate a website of low quality. 

Most of the time, websites dedicated to family law and divorce lawyers contain archive pages that provide no value to users who wish to avail of your services. 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 company’s website easily. 

It’s also important to note that the best version of your website is what needs to be delivered to Google. 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 despite the fact that an SSL has already been installed. This makes your website vulnerable to online attacks and can give anyone easy access to your client’s information which can pose legal issues.
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 which is why it’s important to optimize the loading speed of your website. 

Though this might seem unrelated to SEO for family law, 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. 
Research by Pingdom shows that if it takes a website more than four seconds to load, a whopping 38% of users are most likely to click away and search for information elsewhere. 

If you are using Wordpress, speed optimization can be done easily with a few plugins like WP Rocket, NitroPack or WP Fastest Cache. These plugins help your site to cache and some of them even help your site’s images to be compressed automatically without losing the quality. 

If you are not using Wordpress, you may need to consult with your developer or SEO agency for technical support. 
Keyword Research for Family Law
Strategic keyword research can be considered one of the most important aspects of SEO. For a specific and intricate field such as family law, keyword research must be done with proper execution 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” and is now considered an old trick that marketers would use to deceive search engines for higher ranks.
How Can Keyword Research Benefit Family Law Marketing?
A good SEO specialist would know and understand how to utilize proper keywords without overemphasizing 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. SEO for family law and divorce lawyers 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. 
Utilizing Effective Keywords for Family Law Attorneys
Analyzing the volume for each keyword you're using is highly essential as this would indicate how many people are actively searching or using them in search engines. If the keywords you’re using do not get enough volume then there is little to no chance of them landing on the first pages of search results. 

Strategically implementing keywords like these would also display the website of your company’s credibility as it's able to show customers 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 requires strategic planning and may vary depending on the specific field of discipline. Writing about something trivial and random may bring confusion and can even prove to be detrimental to your site visitors. 

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 “purchase 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 should consider. 
How to Produce Well-Structured Content
You must also consider whether the content that you’re planning to publish 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. 

Good-quality content is one of the backbones of SEO no matter what field or niche you’re in. Always remember that search engines like Google can detect whether a published article is written with precision and factual information that can benefit its users.
Proper Page Indexing
Understanding how search engines like google index your pages would provide you an insight as to why they need to be optimized. A fully optimized website 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’s 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 field of discipline. 

Unoptimized pages may also lead to duplicate pages which can be detrimental when page crawlers go through your website. It may also be interpreted as a black hat technique that can negatively impact your website authority. 
Fully Optimized 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 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 your 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 linkworthiness of your law firm’s site. This is especially important when it comes to SEO for family law since client trust is a basic foundation for the services that you offer. 

A webpage 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’s website.
Strategic Link Building and Guest posting
SEO for family law and divorce lawyers can be a bit challenging but never impossible. Google determines the search rank of a page by analyzing the number of good links it contains and vice versa. 

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. Collaborating with them 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.
Website 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. 

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 customers an inside look at what type of service they will experience from your law firm.

Your 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 practicing SEO for family law 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 website but also one with high traffic and a good ranking. 
How SEO 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 that can be easily navigated to increase the engagement of your website. 

This is highly necessary if you want search engines like Google to easily crawl and index your law firm’s web pages. The way your website responds to different types of devices should also be considered. Since many people today use their smartphones and handheld devices more than personal computers, mobile traffic is now estimated to be above 50% of the overall global online traffic. 

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
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 read 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. A website that is designed for conversions must be your primary target. 

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 Can Benefit Your Family Law Career
SEO has been proven to be beneficial for any type of business. 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 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.
Understanding SEO For Family Law and Divorce Lawyers
Published:

Understanding SEO For Family Law and Divorce Lawyers

Published: