The legal industry is among the most competitive markets to establish a strong presence in, and lawyers are typically highly skilled in marketing and maintaining an online presence. This holds true for family lawyers just as much as for other legal professionals, such as personal injury or criminal defense attorneys.
Through countless hours of testing various SEO strategies, we’ve worked tirelessly to achieve tangible results for our clients. Not every strategy delivers impressive outcomes, and what works for one business type may not be effective for another. When it comes to our lawyer clients, we’ve had to get creative and think outside the box to help them gain a competitive edge in the local SEO landscape. Below, we outline five of our top SEO strategies for divorce and family lawyers to help them succeed in their market.
1. Setting Your Google Business Profile’s Primary Category
Selecting the right primary category for your Google business profile is crucial. While it might seem logical for a family lawyer to choose ‘family law attorney’ as their primary category, we’ve observed impressive results by switching the primary category to ‘divorce lawyer.’ This change led to an almost immediate improvement in rankings for divorce-related terms without negatively affecting rankings for family law terms. In the field of family law, divorce-related keywords drive the most traffic, as this is the service people search for most often. Therefore, optimizing your listing for these specific terms is crucial.
2. The Power of Service Area Pages in SEO for Family Lawyers
The family law market is less saturated than other industries, such as dental, when it comes to service and location pages. By creating service area pages, we’ve discovered an effective way to boost visibility for our SEO family law clients in regions where they don’t have a physical office.
Some key steps to consider with this strategy include:
- When selecting a city, town, or community to create a service area page for, ensure it’s within a state where you’re licensed to practice law, and your office is close enough that potential clients from that area would feasibly hire you.
- If possible, incorporate reviews from clients you’ve assisted in that area, as well as driving directions from the community to your law office.
- Including content that addresses specific laws in that city related to family law or divorce is also beneficial.
This strategy can be especially powerful if you create service area pages for smaller communities near the urban center you operate out of, where a family law practice may not exist within the town limits. Since divorce keywords are the main drivers of traffic to a family lawyer’s site and Google business profile, this approach is one of the few ways to continue expanding your reach after dominating a local market.
3. Consider Consolidating Your Divorce Page With Your Homepage for Your Divorce Lawyer SEO Efforts
As mentioned earlier, divorce terms are the most frequently searched keywords in the family law field. We had a client whose divorce page was competing with their homepage for these valuable divorce-related keywords, leading to cannibalization and ultimately hindering their divorce lawyer SEO efforts. By merging the content from the divorce page with the homepage, we observed a significant boost in organic rankings for their primary targeted keyword without any negative impact. We’ve consistently found that it’s more effective to work with Google than to struggle against it, and sometimes, making small adjustments to your site can help Google better understand the relevance and importance of each page.
However, it’s important to note that this isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy and should be carefully considered before implementation.
4. Don’t Underestimate the Use of Long-Tail Divorce Keywords
Since most of the traffic comes from divorce-related keywords, it’s essential to explore how you can leverage long-tail keywords targeting different aspects of divorce. For example: military divorce, men’s divorce, women’s divorce, LGBTQ+ divorce, uncontested divorce, etc.
5. Create a Calculator Page to Boost Your Family Law SEO Efforts
Our search analysis for family law attorneys has shown that calculator-related keyword terms attract substantial traffic. People are often interested in estimating costs for things like spousal support or child support. We’ve created several calculator pages for our family law SEO clients, and these pages consistently rank as top sources of organic traffic and conversions.
Contact
If you’re a local business seeking assistance with your Google Business Profile listing, review strategy, or online presence on Google and other search engines, we can help. We offer SEO audits, consulting, and monthly local SEO services. Contact us today for more information.
