SEO for Divorce Lawyers

What Is SEO?

As we mentioned above, SEO is a set of marketing practices and techniques. We design, create and analyze websites using these techniques. The point is to make our clients rank higher on Google search results pages as well as the other major search engines.

Most websites aren’t really optimized for search engines. Here are some of the things we do to increase ranking:

• Selecting words and phrases that people search for, and then incorporating those keywords into articles and webpages
• Creating descriptive captions for images and videos for search engines to index
• Writing informational articles on subjects that people are searching for
• Providing useful links to other pages on our clients’ websites

This all adds up to a better search ranking and it is something that must be done continually. SEO is an evergreen task, not something that is just done one time.

How Do Search Engines Work?

SEO practices are based on how search engines work. These powerful systems do more than match search keywords with website articles. Google’s Jacob Devlin and his colleagues developed the latest technology that seeks to process and understand natural language in 2018. Called BERT for short, it stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and is a Transformer-based machine learning technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training.

Search engines take hundreds of points of data and correlate them. The result is a simple list, but the process behind generating that list is one of the most advanced computing applications in the world.

Information about your site, about user behavior, about your site’s status relevant to other websites: Search engines use it all. Here are some examples of things that could change your rank:

• The quality of the article
• The amount of time a visitor spends on the web page
• How many websites link to your article
• How many people select your website from the search results page
• Whether people remain on your site after visiting it
• How people interact with multimedia content, such as videos
• The size of the paragraphs in the article and the presence of subheaders and tags

Building Your Website With Quality Information

One thing that many people overlook is the quality of their online content. To visitors, your website is more than an invitation to contact you. It is a source of information, a test of how credible you are, and an example of how you communicate. Thin content can impact SEO, this is why it pays off to invest in well-written content and not just put a couple of hundred words on a page and call it done.

Obviously, defining quality content involves a qualitative assessment. Here are some of the questions we consider:

• Does it speak to people with your most desirable cases?
• Does it engage the viewer or reader?
• Does it represent your brand?
• Is it easy to access and understand?
• Is it free of spelling and grammatical errors?
• Is it optimized for search algorithms?
• Is it in the correct file format and markup layout?

At FORWARD, it isn’t just one person making all these considerations. We have a team of writers, computer programmers, analysts, editors, project managers, and an SEO Director with well over two decades of experience in the field who reviews every piece of content. Everyone has something to contribute to every piece of content we publish on behalf of our clients.

On a related topic, the same rules go for the rest of your web presence — including social media. We also offer social media management services, helping you create a cohesive, profitable brand for your business across all channels.

Generating Quality Leads

One of the ultimate of goals search engines is to give people the information they’re looking for. SEO aligns your website with that mission.

This means that SEO helps you generate traffic that matches the content on your website. You get the attention of people who are looking for the exact type of services you offer.

This is the category of people most likely to spend more time on your website, a behavior that raises your search rank. They’re more likely to contact you for additional information. They’re more likely to hire you to represent them during their divorce.

FORWARD Lawyer Marketing SEO Services for Divorce Law Firms

As much as we’d like to, we can’t advertise a flat rate price or even a distinct set of services for SEO. That’s because what you need will depend on your goals, your website’s current structure and content, and so on.

We can support you in all of your online marketing goals. Here are some of the services we offer:

• Initial and ongoing personal consultations
• Personalized SEO strategy — no cookie-cutter solutions
• Website design and redesign
• SEO audits and analysis
• Blog marketing, website rewrites, website content buildouts, and other writing services
• Content optimization
• Google Analytics management, tracking, and reporting
• Chatbots and live chat services
• Video, audio, and photo content production
• Social media management
• Integration with call tracking, PPC, Facebook advertising, and more for maximum tracking and accountability

You can start small and scale up or start big — but the important thing is to start soon. Please contact us for an initial consultation at your earliest convenience.

We Doubled a Family Law Firm’s Client Retention

In the abstract, this can all get confusing. Here’s how one of our family law clients benefited directly from our services

We started with this client in February of 2018. The firm ranked quite low for all 20 of the keywords we identified as having high value. Their site didn’t show up on the first or second results page — and when was the last time you clicked past even the first page?

Fast-forward to September of 2020. We now have SEO plans for 118 keywords. Our client is on the first page for 103 of them.

That’s a big deal. To amplify their SEO results, we also instituted an ad campaign through Google’s PPC (pay-per-click) service. We tracked over 60 inquiries per month from this program alone, leading to a combined doubling of new client retention.

We rolled out targeted, sustained strategies. We set appropriate client expectations. We tracked progress. We empowered our clients to focus on what they do best — providing quality legal services.

Which Types of Divorce Law Firms Need SEO?

Anyone who wants to be found on the internet should probably invest at least some resources into SEO. Of course, that includes divorce law firms

A winning approach to SEO for divorce law tends to focus on highlighting your firm’s unique selling points, special services, and geographic location. That works for nearly any divorce concentration, such as:

• High-asset or complex-asset divorces
• Child support and alimony/spousal support
• Asset division
• Paternity, adoption, and so on
• Child custody, visitation, and parenting plans
• Emancipation of minors
• Negotiation, arbitration, or any form of alternative dispute resolution
• Divorce litigation and appeals
• Guardians ad litem
• Grandparent custody and extended family custody
• Domestic abuse and sexual abuse
• Hidden asset discovery
• Tax optimization
• Military divorce
• Same-sex divorce
• QRDOs and other specialist practices

This is not a complete list. If you don’t see your exact focus, please contact us to discuss your firm and the possible scope of any SEO efforts.

Providing a Resource for Your Clients

There’s another commonly overlooked benefit of SEO. It establishes a resource for your potential and existing clients.

It is, of course, part of your job to explain divorce law to your client so they can make the best possible decision. If you’re like many lawyers, you prefer to do this in person. However, SEO builds up your website so you can also send links to relevant topics when people have questions. It also helps to build your authority and credibility as an expert in your field.

Rather than answer all of the FAQs for each new client, you could direct them to a page specifically designed for your practice. Typically, that answers some of your clients’ general questions — and helps them express the specific concerns of their unique case.

One tactic that we like to employ with our divorce attorneys willing to do it is to create videos answering common questions people have. We then transcribe that video into written content as well so we have both video and written content.

Contact FORWARD Lawyer Marketing for a Consultation

We can start soon, but we will need to understand your goals and constraints before we recommend any specific SEO strategy. Please contact us to set up an appointment today at (888) 590-9687.