There are more than 11,000 divorce lawyers in the United States. Many of them are concentrated in regions and cities with stiff competition, making it critical to find a leading edge to connect with potential clients.
When most people want to hire a divorce lawyer, they evaluate their options in one of a few ways:
- Personal referral
- Online reviews and testimonials
- Search engines
Identifying the right mix of marketing tactics to capture a potential client’s attention in these avenues is essential. In some cases, all three of these options work together to make one law firm stand out above the rest. It’s worth putting in the time and energy to ensure that firm is yours.
Personal referrals and online reviews will always play a role in driving business, but most potential clients for your divorce law firm are likely to turn first to search. Beyond that, SEO also has a snowball effect that builds on itself over time, especially if you’re publishing relevant content used by potential family law clients in their searches.
Everyone knows they want their firm on the first page of Google search for chosen keywords, but that requires a clear SEO strategy.
Search engine optimization is an excellent way to position your firm at the top and draw in prospective clients when they are most likely to hire a divorce attorney. Discover more about how SEO drives results for family lawyers, what elements go into an SEO campaign, the best keywords and topics to target, and how to evaluate results.
Does SEO Work for Divorce and Family Law Attorneys?
An SEO campaign is part of a bigger divorce lawyer marketing plan. It can function on its own but also supports other aspects of marketing for better results across the board.
A well-executed SEO campaign can bring in both traffic and conversions to grow your family law practice. A good SEO campaign should:
- Be driven by a holistic approach across your website, directory listings, and Google My Business profile
- Include a content marketing strategy with a list of relevant keywords to target
- Have clearly established goals
- Be analyzed regularly to determine if tactics and channels are moving the firm closer to those goals
3 Key Parts of an SEO Campaign
There are three key components of an SEO strategy: technical SEO, local SEO, and content.
When all three of these are in motion, your law firm benefits from high-value traffic of people searching for a divorce attorney. All three of these might involve hiring outside SEO services for execution.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO makes it easier for Google to “crawl” your website, using the data found to contextualize what your site is about.
Some of the most common technical SEO problems include:
- Pages not optimized for a mobile experience
- Duplicate content (the same content that appears identically on separate pages)
- Images missing alt tags (explanatory tags)
- Missing meta descriptions (One sentence explainer sentences with the main keyword included)
- Title tags longer than 60 characters, which makes it difficult for Google to index the post properly
A technical SEO audit is a good starting point because it lays the foundation for the rest of your SEO work. This is usually outsourced to a technical SEO expert to audit your site to find errors and issues. Issues with your site can impede rankings, conversions, and other performance throughout your website.
A technical SEO expert will then suggest ways to remediate the issues to bring the site in line with best practices. Technical SEO issues can happen over time, but they can also result from the launch of your website.
A full audit of your site will reveal a list of all open technical SEO issues. It can take some time for the changes made as a result of that audit to take effect, but these corrections can improve website performance in SEO.
Local SEO
When a searcher types in relevant keywords like “Divorce lawyer in Las Vegas,” Google uses three main factors to determine which law firms show up towards the top of that search. Those factors are:
- Relevance
- Distance
- Prominence
This means that it’s to your benefit to send as many signals about your practice areas and city/regions served across your website, directories for lawyers, and Google My Business. By sending these signals, Google is more likely to put your firm in front of potential clients in your service area when they search for relevant terms.
A few ways to stay on top of local SEO include:
- Writing comprehensive service descriptions on your Google My Business profile
- Listing out all your practice areas on GMB and directory websites
- Keeping details like website address and hours open up to date
- Seek regular reviews from clients, especially on Google
- Add images and posts to your GMB profile regularly
Citations/Directories
Listing your law firm in directories like Justia and Avvo helps add relevant links back to your website. These listings also help expand your visibility in search results overall. However, not all directories are created equal. Listings in spammy directories could hinder your search performance.
Review Sites
Social proof goes a long way towards spreading the word about your business. Make sure you ask past clients to leave a review about their experience. These help support the perceived credibility of your firm the more reviews you have, especially if nearly all of them are from clients who had positive things to say.
Google My Business
Claiming your Google My Business profile is free and simple to do. This lets you to confirm important details like the firm’s name, physical location, open hours, and website. Follow these steps to get started with Google My Business:
- Visit https://www.google.com/business/ and claim your business profile
- List your primary business category (you can select secondary categories later, so aim for “family lawyer” or “divorce attorney”
- Add your physical location and service options
- Add contact information like your phone number
- Verify your business (receive a postcard to confirm your location)
Content
Content throughout your website should all be created with an intention behind it. That intention is not just to answer questions or to provide helpful information. Instead, your content marketing strategy should prompt readers to take action after reading.
There are a few ways to get the most out of your content marketing efforts:
- Know the difference in content archetypes (AKA practice area pages vs. blog posts)
- Develop content ideas based on a topic cluster model, where one primary page is the lynchpin for the rest of the related content on the site
- Write long-form content
- Use E-A-T (expertise, authority, trustworthiness) best practices, such as author bylines on pages and linking to credible sources
Keyword Research
Knowing the words and questions your target clients are using to find divorce attorneys guides the rest of your content marketing.
If you’re not creating content aligned with the topics and keywords most important to your audience, or if you’re writing content with no search volume, no one sees what you post. That’s useless in digital marketing.
You can do keyword research by:
- Completing a manual analysis of all the top-ranking sites in your field
- Reviewing questions asked on Avvo, Lawyers.com, and filed under “people also ask” on Google
- Using Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner
- Mindmapping with questions logged on Answer the Public
- Use the free keyword research tool Ubersuggest
- Leveraging paid tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs
Although these tools are available to you, SEO keyword research on your own is overwhelming because it requires a significant amount of time. Without a firm background in keyword research, the likelihood of choosing valuable keywords is low. Hire an SEO expert to help you with this to save time and cut down on confusion.
Publishing Content
Publishing content is essential for topical authority. It shows expertise in your practice areas and enables you to create a library of resources for potential clients to turn to. However, too many law firms look at content the wrong way.
Your blog is not a magazine that produces content regularly for dedicated subscribers. It’s a library of reference material for people looking for answers when they need them most.
It’s true that you should add new content to your website, but the final pieces shouldn’t be rushed into a production schedule so that you publish every week. Instead, start by creating a roadmap of all the pieces you’d like in your library, then figure out the time it would take to create and publish each one.
On-Page Optimization
Every page on your website should be appropriately optimized for search engines and readers. This includes a range of different things for law firm on-page optimization, including:
- Using a flat URL structure (this eliminates sub-directory folders)
- Creating great title tags
- Optimizing copy to include relevant complementary keywords on website pages
- Ensuring each meta description is accurate
- Checking and improving your website speed
- Implementing website design user experience best practices, such as simple navigation
- Using internal links to other relevant pages on your website
- Leveraging legal service schema that directly tells Google your website content belongs to a law firm
- Posting images on relevant pages and posts on your site
Link Building
Improving your law firm website rankings cannot be done without a link-building strategy since it’s one of the essential components of SEO. Link building involves getting backlinks from other websites that point to your website. Some links are harder to earn than others but may have a bigger payoff when acquired.
Some of the best ways to acquire links to your law firm’s website include social media sites, legal directories, forums, and other sites you own. More advanced link-building plans, however, require generating unique content to be posted on other websites with links inside that point back to your site.
There are many different options for building links to your divorce law firm.
Measuring Results from Search Engine Optimization
When running an SEO campaign, you should continually evaluate site performance on an ongoing basis. Start with an SEO content audit to know all the areas for potential improvement for which existing pages to keep, combine, and redirect. Most divorce law firms choose to work with an outside SEO expert for this aspect of online marketing for lawyers. However, you need to know how to ensure the agency or expert is hitting objectives.
Here are some ways to stay on top of your divorce law firm’s search engine results:
- Make sure you have a Google Analytics account that you can review at least monthly to get valuable intel like time on page, most popular pages, and more from this free tool
- Establish the most important KPIs from your marketing strategy so that you can measure the right data over time
- Sign up for an account with Ahrefs or another rank tracker so you can monitor search engine results over time (this holds your SEO expert accountable)
- Ask for monthly reporting from your SEO agency; data is currency, and you’ll be in a better position to ask the right questions and make decisions when you have it
The 100 Most Valuable Divorce Attorney Keywords
Ready to start with your divorce lawyer SEO campaign? Here are some of the most valuable divorce attorney keywords to build into your content marketing plan.
| Keyword |
Competition |
Search Volume |
CPC |
Keyword Difficulty |
| find divorce attorney |
Low |
150 |
$50.00 |
38 |
| best divorce attorney |
Low |
2,400 |
$35.00 |
28 |
| divorce lawyer |
Low |
49,000 |
$30.00 |
44 |
| family divorce lawyer near me |
Medium |
600 |
$30.00 |
60 |
| divorce lawyer consultation |
Medium |
500 |
$30.00 |
15 |
| family divorce attorney |
Low |
250 |
$30.00 |
39 |
| female divorce lawyer |
Medium |
200 |
$30.00 |
28 |
| attorneys for divorce |
Low |
150 |
$30.00 |
49 |
| divorce attorneys [city] |
Varies |
150 |
$30.00 |
20 |
| divorce attorney |
High |
36,000 |
$25.00 |
38 |
| top divorce lawyers near me |
Medium |
3,500 |
$25.00 |
36 |
| divorce attorneys |
High |
3,000 |
$25.00 |
45 |
| best divorce lawyers |
Low |
2,000 | Note the use of the term “valuable” here. Most people mistakenly focused on the highest volume, the metric used to describe how many people search for something every month. That’s not always the most valuable keyword, however.
For example, more general terms like “child custody” or “child support” have no local or state SEO component, so there’s no way to qualify that your leads are your ideal client. More targeted keywords will likely perform better.
Further, those keywords don’t always mean that the reader searching for them is ready to hire a divorce lawyer.
Instead, choose keywords with a high cost per click and the best chance of conversion for new clients.
A reliable SEO expert can help divorce lawyers find and prioritize the right keywords to target both organic SEO and paid advertising through Google Ads for divorce laywers (PPC).
Combining SEO with Other Marketing Channels
SEO is a great way to figure out which people are interested in the problems you solve. Getting these readers to your website is important for retargeting purposes, too.
Once someone has visited your site to read your content, you can retarget those prospects on social media or Google Ads with other marketing material. Since it can take multiple touchpoints to move a prospect into client status, remarketing is an excellent way to keep your law firm’s name top of mind.
Remember that SEO is not the cure-all for your divorce law firm, though. It can certainly impact some of your most important KPIs, but it should not be done in a marketing vacuum.
Instead, SEO fits into the broader law firm marketing strategy and also helps to support other channels. Make sure your marketing mix includes the right tactics and channels to target your clients in multiple places where you have the highest chance of success.
Choosing an Expert for Your SEO Campaign
SEO has many components to it, and it does require ongoing work. SEO tactics are also subject to change based on things like Google Webmaster Guidelines. For that reason, it’s helpful to use an outside SEO expert or team. Only invest in an SEO company for legal marketing when you have a good understanding of how SEO works and how to analyze results for a family law firm.
Our team of SEO experts knows the legal field deeply and is focused on what’s best for you.
When you’re ready to hire an elite SEO provider with a results page to back up their claims, contact Rankings.io for a free consultation.
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