Home » Family Lawyers » SEO for Family Law Firms: An Example Campaign That Drives Traffic & Leads

SEO for Family Law Firms: An Example Campaign That Drives Traffic & Leads

Written by: Jesse Kemmerer
Published on: 11/01/2022

When done right, SEO for family law firms can drive traffic, phone calls, and leads.

When done wrong, it just burns a hole in your pocket.

The truth is, family law SEO doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, even the most complex campaigns can be broken down into three key components:

find keywords with search volume
optimize specific pages for those keywords
build links to those pages until they rank

Sure, that might be a simplistic explanation of SEO for family law firms, but sometimes the simplest answers are the most accurate. After all, if you can’t explain what you’re doing to a five year old, do you really have a good grasp on the concept?

Today, we’re going to build an example family law SEO campaign.

I’m going to pull back the curtain on what an effective family law digital marketing campaign actually looks like so you can see how a professional would go about ranking their client for relevant keywords, gaining traffic to their website, and getting them more leads, phone calls, and cases.

For this example, lets pick a somewhat competitive market.

Location: Rockville, Maryland.

Keywords: family lawyer, divorce attorney, child custody, etc.

I’m going to show you how a SEO professional would go about finding keywords, optimizing pages for those keywords, and building links to those pages until they rank #1 in Google.

Let’s get started.

SEO for Family Law Firms: Defining Goals & How to Achieve Them

Don’t skip this section, thinking you already know what the goal is: to get more leads.

That’s not the goal; that’s the result.

The goal is whatever gets you there.

Here’s the problem: most people pick bad goals and they don’t even know it.

Your goal isn’t to get a #1 ranking for such and such keyword.

Your goal is to get more traffic.

Why? Because more traffic = more leads.

As you’ll discover in a minute, keyword rankings can sometimes do nothing at all for your business – usually because no one is even searching for those keywords.

So, for this example, our goal isn’t to rank #1 for “family lawyer in rockville md.”

Our goal is to get more traffic.

Here’s how we do it.

Local SEO vs. Organic Family Law SEO

People search for things in different ways. Sometimes, they include a location in their search, such as “family attorney in Rockville.” Other times, they’ll omit the location, searching for something like “family attorneys” or “family attorneys near me.” Google wants to serve the best results they can for each search, which is why the will often display location-specific listings in the form of the Map Pack.

Most likely, you’ve seen a Map Pack listing before. It looks like this:

Note: Notice that these listings aren’t located in Rockville. Because I didn’t include the city name in my search, Google displayed family law firms located near me.

These listings are Google Business Profiles. We’ll get to those a little later, but the authority, relevance, and proximity of these listings are what dictate who shows up and who doesn’t.

Now, lets take a look at some organic listings:

These always appear after the Map Pack listings.

Instead of Google Business Profiles, these are individual pages of family law websites.

Notice that nearly all of the listings have Rockville, MD located within them.

That will be important later, when we find some keywords to start targeting.

But for now, these two examples tell us two things:

We need to optimize our website for search terms that include the city.
We need to optimize our website and business for search terms without the city.

How the heck do we do that?

It’s easier than you might think. Remember: SEO for family law firms isn’t rocket-science.

But before we start optimizing anything, we have to know which keywords to target.

1. The Most Important Aspect of SEO for Family Lawn Firms: Keyword Research.

It’s fine to throw spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks. Fun, even.

But knowing what the heck you’re trying to accomplish (and what you can expect to get out of it) works a whole lot better as a marketing strategy.

Keyword research is the start of any good SEO for family law campaign.

Here’s how we do it.

Finding Organic Keyword Volume

We use SEMRush, but you can use Google’s keyword planner as a free alternative.

This research is perhaps the most important aspect of SEO for family law firm campaign.

It’s not as simple as tacking a location at the end of a service.

The results will often surprise you. Some keywords you might think will get loads of results, and they get very few. Other keywords will have a ton of volume, but they wouldn’t be immediately obvious as good candidates. The only thing to do is to throw away all your preconceived notions and let data be your guide.

Let’s start simple. We’re a family law attorney in Rockville, Maryland.

Sounds like a good jumping-off point.

Keyword: family law attorney rockville md

Hmm. Not a lot of volume there.

Luckily, with SEMRush we can search for related keywords to our main query, so let’s do that:

Okay, that’s a much better list.

With this, we can start building a keyword group.

Keyword groups are comprised of multiple keywords that have similar words and intent.

For instance, out of this list, we could group the following keywords:

family law attorney rockville
family law attorney in rockville
family lawyer rockville
rockville family law attorney
family law lawyers rockville
family lawyers rockville
family law rockville md
rockville family lawyers

All of these combined have a monthly search volume of 540.

Why group these keywords together?

Because when we build a page to optimize, we want to rank for as many similar keywords as possible with that page – we don’t want to compete with ourselves by having multiple pages attempting to rank for similar keywords. All of these keywords are similar enough in intent and wording that we could confidently optimize a single page around all of them.

But wait! This is just one keyword group.

I spied another keyword that looked like a great candidate – “divorce lawyers.”

Let’s look for some more related keywords.

Keyword: divorce attorney rockville

Here’s another great list. Let’s create a new keyword group.

divorce attorney rockville md
divorce attorney rockville
divorce lawyer rockville
divorce lawyer rockville md
rockville divorce lawyer
divorce lawyers in rockville md

The combined monthly search volume for these keywords is 900.

Obviously, this keyword group would require its own page.

Keep in mind: this is only two keyword groups. Depending on the amount of different services you offer, you could have ten or twenty keyword groups or more. In order to keep this article under 50,000 words, we’re going to stop at just two for the moment.

Before we move on, let’s take a look at the top result for these keywords:

This specific page (which is a listing page from a popular and competitive family law directory) gets over 200 visits per month. What’s even more telling is the real-world cost of that traffic. If you were to pay for that amount of traffic via Google Ads, you’d have a monthly cost of $3,500! Are you starting to see why SEO for family law firms really pays off?

So far, we’ve talked about doing keyword research for organic SEO for family law.

Now, let’s talk about local SEO keyword research.

Finding Local SEO Keyword Volume

Remember: everything we did above only shows half the picture. All of those keywords had the city (Rockville, MD) in the keyword, but as we already know, that’s not all people search for.

Luckily, this step isn’t quite as intensive.

All we’re going to do is eliminate the city in our search. We’re also going to use Google’s keyword planner for this, since we can specify an exact location (ie. Rockville, Maryland).

Let’s see what that looks like:

Google doesn’t give as much granularity to their keyword volume, but we can clearly see that people are searching for these terms without the city attached, too.

But wait… what does that mean for us?

We have to optimize pages for keywords that include the city and optimize separate pages for keywords that don’t include the city if we want to get traffic from both sources.

How do we do that?

Well, it starts with a beautiful website structure.

2. Planning, Organizing, & Optimizing Your SEO Content (And Its Structure!)

Okay. We have some keywords. Now, we have to write and optimize content for those keywords.

But wait! Not so fast.

SEO for family law firms can be overdone, and the results of it are pretty ugly.

You’ve probably seen it before – a website that reads more like it was written for a machine than a real human being. Will it get traffic? Maybe. But what does that matter if the traffic it does get is completely turned off by its message?

Writing for humans and writing for search engines is a balancing act. On the one hand, you want to place valuable keywords all over your page so that search engines discover them and rank you highly. On the other hand, you actually want to convince people to use your services, and an over-optimized page certainly won’t do that.

How do we walk that high-wire?

For this to make sense, let’s talk about what it means to optimize content for search engines.

Working Backwards – Understanding the Aspects of Page-Level Optimization

Search engines read the content on your website just like humans. The difference is, search engines place more emphasis on specific parts of your website’s content to help them determine what that page is about.

The three key factors to search engine rankings can be broken down like so:

Relevance
Authority
Experience

In order to show up, your website’s page needs to be:

Relevant to what someone is searching for. This one is pretty obvious.
Authoritative on the subject, meaning other websites have linked to the specific page or the domain itself, lending credibility
Experience means your website loads quickly and doesn’t have any technical errors.

For now, we’re going to focus on relevance, as that’s where the nitty-gritty of optimization actually comes into play.

First, let’s look at some misconceptions.

4 Key Misunderstood Aspects of Optimization

Most people don’t really understand true family law SEO, so when their website designer says they offer those services, they take it at face value. However, these four key misunderstood aspects of optimization are what set apart true campaigns apart.

1. Optimization occurs at the page level.

What do we mean by that?

Let’s say this is your domain name: www.familylawexperts.com

As far as search engines go, that’s a page.

If you offered divorce representation as a service and created a new page to describe it (ie. www.familylawexperts.com/divorces/), that would be a separate page, and search engines will treat it as such. So, you need to optimize that page differently than your home page.

Which leads to our next point.

2. Each page should only be optimized for one keyword or keyword group.

People make this mistake all the time, optimizing their home page for every keyword under the sun, hoping it ranks well for all of them. The problem? There’s only so many technical aspects (we’ll get to these later) that you can optimize, and if you’re trying to fit 10-50 keywords into them, it’s never going to work – all you’re going to do is confuse the search engines. Instead, each keyword or keyword group should have its own dedicated page.

3. Site structure with strong interlinking is your best friend.

Optimizing your website’s structure is perhaps the most important thing you can do, as that will seep throughout your entire website, providing a cohesive hierarchy and allowing search engines to easily find pages throughout your website as you add them.

For instance: let’s say you have a page dedicated to divorces (www.familylawexperts.com/divorces/)

Let’s say you’ve written tons of blog posts about divorce. Sure, they should be listed under your “Blog” page. But shouldn’t they also be listed on your “divorce” page?

If you’ve already set up your website structure properly, they would be.

**4. You need to optimize for keywords with locations and keywords without.**

Remember earlier, when we discussed the two ways people will find your website when searching on Google? You’ll either show up in the Map Pack or in organic listings – and sometimes, both. The difference is, Map Pack listings are hyper-targeted to a searcher’s location, whereas organic listings are a little less so.

For instance: someone might Google “divorce attorneys near me.”

If you had a page dedicated to “divorce attorneys,” you’d be off to a great start.

However, what if all your pages were targeting “divorce attorney rockville” instead?

That’s a problem. Why? Because now, Google only associates your website with Rockville. What if someone was searching for that keyword right outside of city limits? Google’s not going to show your website – from what it can tell, everything on it has to do with Rockville!

Not only that, but think about the experience of your users. If they clicked on your “divorce” tab at the top and all they saw was references to Rockville, why would they want to contact you if they lived in one of the neighboring communities?

Your “base level” pages should target keywords without locations attached.

You should have separate pages targeting keywords with locations.

7 Aspects of Technical SEO for Family Law at the Page Level – What it Is & How to Do It

Okay, time to get into the nitty-gritty details.

In order for search engines to know what your page is about (remember: we’re optimizing pages, not just your home page!), there are a few aspects you need to focus on. They’re listed below:

1) Title tag.

This appears at the very top of your browser. It should include your main keyword.

2) URL structure.

This is the actual address of your website page. It should include your keyword. It could look something like this: www.familylawexperts.com/divorce-attorney/

3) Meta description.

This is the description you see under the listing on Google. It should also include your main keyword, as well as some copywriting or a tagline of some sort to convince people to click.

4) H1 tag.

This is a header tag – the most important one on your website. It should include your main keyword, and should appear near the top of your page.

5) H2-H5 tags.

These are more header tags. They should include secondary and tertiary keywords, or any other variations of your main keyword.

6) Image file names, titles and ALT tags.

Your file name is, well, the name of the file. You can set the title and ALT tag of the image after uploading it to your website. These should include keyword variations.

7) SCHEMA markup

This is a piece of code on every page of your website that helps search engines better understand what it is about. Typically, family lawyers will want to use the Attorney markup.

Of course, there are some other aspects such as the use of semantic keyword, keyword density, and more, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll stop here. If you optimize those seven aspects, you’re going to be further than the vast majority of websites – even those with SEO work.

Keep in mind, though: you still have to create great content. After all, humans are the ones who will be reading your content and giving you a call – not search engines. So keep all of these things in mind, but don’t overdo it. If you page reads like it was solely written for a machine, you’re not going to get the leads you want – no matter how high your search engine rankings are.

Creating & Organizing a Lovable Website Structure For Both Humans and Robots

Now that we’ve talked a little about what it takes to actually optimize content for search engines, let’s spend a little time thinking about our website’s structure. Taking the time to do this the right way off the bat will save you dozens of hours of time down the line.

We already know that people search for keywords with and without locations.

The first thing we want to do is focus on what we’ll call top-level pages.

These are the pages that appear in your website’s main menu.

They should do two things exceptionally well:

Explain your services while convincing people to call you
Target keywords without locations attached

The first point is the most important.

Remember: people are going to pick up the phone and call you, not search engines.

Also, it’s not our intention to rank top-level pages in organic results.

For SEO for family law firm purposes, all we need these top-level pages to do is create a strong association for base-level keywords to our domain name. After all, most Google Business Profiles will have their home page listed as their website.

Location pages are where we’ll dig in with our organic SEO efforts. Why? Because location-specific keywords are the ones we’re actually trying to rank for.

Let’s take a look at those pages now.

Targeting Specific Locations the Smart Way

We already know that the bulk of our organic SEO for family law efforts revolve around keywords that contain locations. Because of that, we need to create location-specific pages targeting those keywords.

How do we do that without muddying up our website structure?

Two ways.

First, we need a location hub page where we’ll house all of these pages.

Second, we’ll need a secondary menu structure to list all of those pages.

Let’s look at our URL structure from before:

URL: www.familylawexperts.com

Now, we’re going to create a location hub for a specific area:

URL: www.familylawexperts.com/rockville-md/

On this page, we’ll link to all of the pages that are related to Rockville.

Remember our keywords from before? Here’s a quick refresher:

Keyword Group: family law rockville

family law attorney rockville
family law attorney in rockville
family lawyer rockville
rockville family law attorney
family law lawyers rockville
family lawyers rockville
family law rockville md
rockville family lawyers

Keyword Group: divorce attorney rockville

divorce attorney rockville md
divorce attorney rockville
divorce lawyer rockville
divorce lawyer rockville md
rockville divorce lawyer
divorce lawyers in rockville md

Okay, now we need pages optimized for those keyword groups.

To keep a coherent website structure, we’re going to make them sub-pages of the Rockville location hub we just created. The URL structure will look like this:

www.familylawexperts.com/rockville-md/family-law-attorney/
www.familylawexperts.com/rockville-md/divorce-attorney/

Why do it this way?

Remember: we might have dozens of keyword groups.

By utilizing a location hub page, we can add our other pages as sub-pages, making an easy-to-follow hierarchy for search engines and users to follow.

Not only that, but we can also devote some time into creating a stellar location hub, adding specifics about that location and creating hyper-relevance in the eyes of Google.

You likely service more than one location, too.

But setting up your site structure this way, you can build and optimize multiple location hubs without confusing search engines or visitors.

Here are some more tips to follow for optimizing location-specific pages:

Use the location page as a hub for all location-related content. This is going to be important later as we add different types of content to it. All of the Rockville-targeted content should be either on this page, or linked to from this page.
Create separate menus that house all location-specific pages. These menus can be placed in the footer of your website and on sidebars of the location pages themselves, letting visitors (and search engines!) see all pages related to that location.
Use different photos for these pages. And make sure they’re targeted to the location-specific keywords. Remember our photo optimization tips from before?
Only target locations on location-specific pages. All other top-level pages should target base keywords without the locations. We don’t want to confuse Google.
Link back to top level pages frequently within location-specific pages. Example: within the body of a post for “divorce attorney in Rockville,” place links back to the top level page for that service.
House related blogs on relevant location-specific pages. While our blogs won’t be location specific, they’re still highly relevant to topics discussed in these pages, and should be placed there, too.
Copy this structure for each of the location you service. There are likely many cities and towns within your service area. Copy this structure to create pages for each one.
Place a location menu linking to all of your location-specific hub pages (ie, the location themselves) somewhere on your site. The footer is a great, unobtrusive place for this.

Everything in its place. That goes especially for websites.

By creating a better website structure, you can better serve search engines and humans.

These hyper-targeted pages are a gold mine for your family law SEO efforts.

Going a Step Further – Blogging to Generate Traffic, Authority, and Relevance

Let’s face it. Most small business blogs suck.

While blogging can be a great way to increase your website’s metrics, most people go about it the wrong way, leading to frustration, wasted time, and a clutter-filled website.

Here’s the right way to blog.

Use blogs as supporting resources – not entry pages.

An “entry page” is how someone arrives on your website. For instance, we’ve talked a lot about optimizing specific pages for local keywords. In the example above, we had the following page: www.familylawexperts.com/rockville-md/divorce-attorney/. That’s the page we’re actually trying to rank, because we’ve already discovered a keyword group that has plenty of search volume. That’s an entry page.

Blogs should be supporting resources for those entry pages, not entry pages themselves.

Let me explain.

Here’s a typical blog you might find on a local business website:

“How to Choose a Divorce Lawyer in Rockville in 3 Easy Steps.”

What’s the problem with that?

Well… we already have a page targeting that keyword: divorce lawyer in rockville.

It’s located here: www.familylawexperts.com/rockville-md/divorce-attorney/

We’ve already optimized for it.

Why would we want to compete against ourselves?

Or, worse yet, confuse Google as to which page should rank higher?

Blogs are supportive assets. They’re designed to better sell your services – not generate traffic by themselves (though they’ll sometimes do that, too).

A better article would be:

“3 Easy Steps to Choosing a Great Divorce Attorney.”

Naturally, this blog would be placed on your Blog page, where all your other blog posts are kept.

Where else should it be placed?

On your page targeting divorce lawyer in rockville (www.familylawexperts.com/rockville-md/divorce-attorney/)!

Why? Because it’s showing even more relevance to your topic.

You can (and should) link to articles on your website in more than just one place, and by linking to articles about a topic that’s relevant to the keyword we’re trying to rank for, we build even more relevance for that page (not to mention provide a better user experience).

You should write blog posts based on your services. Like so:

Top-level page: Divorce Attorney

Blog post: “The First Steps to Take When Getting a Divorce”
Blog post: “5 Qualities that Make a Winning Divorce Attorney”
Blog post: “What to Look Out for When Choosing a Divorce Attorney”

Why? All of these posts are building relevance. They’re supporting the pages we actually want to rank for – not competing with them. You can (and should) place links to these article on the pages you’re actually trying to rank.

First, write blogs that people actually want to read, and then place them where search engines want to see them.

Use blogs to build location-specific relevance.

This is one of our favorite ways to positively influence Map Pack rankings.

It’s simple, and it makes a ton of sense.

Remember our location hub page from before? (www.familylawexperts.com/rockville-md/)

How do we make that page as relevant as possible to the location it’s targeting?

Write and post blogs about events, locations, museums, restaurants, and more related to that location, and link to them from your location hub page.

You don’t have to spend a ton of time on these. We’re not actually trying to get traffic to these pages; rather, we’re trying to influence search engines into thinking our location hub is highly-specific to that location.

Each blog post should be 200-400 words.

Write 5-10 about popular places, events, or other businesses within that location.

Link to them on your location hub page.

Repeat the process for each location within your service area.

If you only do one type of blogging, this is the one to do.

It does wonder for your Map Pack rankings.

3. SEO for Family Law Firms: Building Authority the Right Way

So far, we’ve talked about finding relevant keywords people are actually searching for and planning, organizing, and optimizing pages to rank for those keywords. Now, it’s time to start talking about building authority – the third step for great keyword rankings.

Again, SEO for family law can be broken down into two aspects: local and organic. Similarly to how the optimization process is different for each of those, so is the process for building authority. Lets start with local SEO.

Building a Strong Local Business Profile

Remember how we talked about the difference between Map Pack listings and organic listings when it comes to SEO?

Building a strong local business profile is how you show up in the Map Pack.

How do we build a strong local profile?

The optimization efforts we did before help a great deal, but it’s not enough.

We need to build authority. Here’s how.

Note: your NAP stands for your business name, address, and phone number. It should not be changed. When going through these steps, make sure you list your NAP exactly the same.

1. Optimize Your Google Business Profile

Most small businesses don’t pay as much attention to their Google Business Profile as they should. Google allows you to display a wealth of information about your business.

Categories: Start specific, go general. Don’t try to stuff irrelevant categories. It does more harm than good. For a list of all categories, Google “google business categories 2022.”
Service area: Start with the city in which you’re located, and then spread out. Google allows counties, too. List as many as are relevant to you.
Description: You have 750 characters to work with. Use them all.
Products: Do you sell them? If so, fill it out.
Services: Your selected categories will automatically show up as services. However, you can provide more. If “Attorney” is your primary category, you can add custom categories beneath it such as “divorce” and “child custody,” along with descriptions.
Images: Your logo and cover image are first. Put some care into this – people will see them when your Google Business Profile shows up in Google. “At work” photos are for when you’re on the job. “Team photos” are of, well, you and your team. “Identity photos” can be of signage on trucks or vans, office signage, business cards, etc. Don’t skip this step.
Calls: You can activate call tracking to better understand how well your profile is working for you.
Reviews: If you have customers, text a few at a time and ask them to leave a review. If you don’t, ask family or friends to leave a review commenting on your good qualities, mentioning you by name instead of the company. Reviews are a ranking factor – the more you have, the better.

By simply taking the time to fill out your profile completely, you can get much more value out of it – and much, much better rankings to boot! Don’t skip this step.

Here are some other things to keep in mind:

Utilize posts to keep your profile up to date.

Google allows you to write posts to keep your profile fresh. These include offers, what’s new, and event options. The “what’s new” option in particular is a great all-purpose function: you can post links to pages on your website, new blog posts, updates about your company, and more. Get in the habit of utilizing this function at least once a week. More is better.

Google gives you a free website. Why not use it?

Google will collect all the information you’ve put into your Google Business Profile and display it on a free website. To enable this, all you have to do is click on the “Website” tab in your Google Business Profile, then click the blue button that says “Publish.”

All the work you’ve put into your profile will be displayed here, along with your core business details: your name, address, and phone number (or NAP).

You can even add additional links back to your website, giving you a quick SEO boost.

2. Submit Your Business to Data Aggregators

Data aggregators are companies that collect business information and distribute it to hundreds or thousands of websites. Certain directories only accept business information that comes directly from data aggregators. Furthermore, using data aggregators can save you dozens of hours of legwork directly submitting your business information to directories.

Here are four data aggregators you can submit your business to today:

Different aggregators allow you to submit different levels of detail about your business. Exhaust all options, submitting your logo, business categories, social media links, business photos, hours of operation, and any other details when applicable.

3. Submit Your Business to Structured Citations

Structured citations are places where your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) appear in a listing format. You’re probably already familiar with some of these.

According to BrightLocal, these are the top 35 citations in the USA.

maps.apple.com	Domain authority: 100
google.com	Domain authority: 100
facebook.com	Domain authority: 96
bing.com	Domain authority: 93
yelp.com	Domain authority: 93
local.yahoo.com	Domain authority: 93
foursquare.com	Domain authority: 92
bbb.org	Domain authority: 91
mapquest.com	Domain authority: 89
yellowpages.com	Domain authority: 87
here.com	Domain authority: 86
city-data.com	Domain authority: 85
manta.com	Domain authority: 81
tomtom.com	Domain authority: 78
merchantcircle.com	Domain authority: 77
nextdoor.com	Domain authority: 77
angi.com	Domain authority: 76
justlanded.com	Domain authority: 76
citysearch.com	Domain authority: 75
superpages.com	Domain authority: 69
company.com	Domain authority: 68
us.kompass.com	Domain authority: 66
local.com	Domain authority: 66
elocal.com	Domain authority: 66
brownbook.net	Domain authority: 61
storeboard.com	Domain authority: 61
chamberofcommerce.com	Domain authority: 60
infobel.com	Domain authority: 59
spoke.com	Domain authority: 59
yellowbook.com	Domain authority: 58
hotfrog.com	Domain authority: 58
insiderpages.com	Domain authority: 57
yellowbot.com	Domain authority: 57
botw.org	Domain authority: 56
ezlocal.com	Domain authority: 56

Furthermore, here are some attorney-specific citations you can build:

justia.com
findlaw.com
lawfirms.com
nolo.com
lawyers.com
avvo.com
lawyers.uslegal.com
lawtally.com
lawyer.com
hg.org
divorcemag.com
lawguru.com
bestlawyers.com
lawlink.com

Some are free and some aren’t. All of them are great sources of relevance and authority.

4. Build Unstructured Citations for an SEO Boost

While not as immediately obvious, unstructured citations can be just as powerful as their structured counterparts. They still reference key details about your business – your NAP – but don’t group those details together.

Typically, unstructured citations are harder to come by. Not to worry – here are three easy sources to start getting unstructured citations for yourself today.

Press releases. These are great sources for unstructured citations. Services like PRNewsWire can distribute your release to hundreds of outlets.
Web 2.0 properties. Back in the day, these were used to farm cheap, spammy links. Today, they’re great sources of unstructured citations. You can post articles on sites like Medium or HubPages for free, including your business information and Google Map for bonus effect. Just be sure not to spam.
Community organizations. The local Chamber of Commerce or Moose Lodge website likely lists other businesses associated with them. If you have any local affiliations, check their website to see if you’re listed. If you’re not, just ask to be.

Unstructured citations help round out your online entity.

That’s great for SEO for family law firms.

5. Build as Many Social Profiles As You Can

How many social media platforms is your business currently on?

Likely, the answer is “not enough.”

Of course, you’d be hard-pressed to give every platform the attention it deserves. That’s okay. Simply being on the platform is a benefit in and of itself. Backlinks, remember?

Here’s 35 social media platforms you can get on right now:

Fill out your profile completely. These profiles are great sources for backlinks and unstructured citations, both of which strengthen your online entity and your family law SEO efforts.

All of these things go hand-in-hand to create a well-rounded, authoritative local business profile. Sure, it’s time-consuming and tedious, but it’s absolutely necessary to your contractor local SEO for family law efforts. Ignore this at your own peril.

Linking Building Strategies & Tactics

We’ve talked about Map Pack rankings. This is how we rank for keywords without locations.

Now, lets talk about how to build authority to our organic listings.

It’s a common misconception about SEO for family law that links should always point back to the website’s home page. This is because most website try to optimize their home page for every keyword under the sun (and we’ve already talked about why that doesn’t work).

We need to focus building links to the individual pages that we actually want to rank.

In general, if all optimization efforts are roughly equal, Google is going to prefer the page that has the most authority (aka the most backlinks pointing to it).

Keep this in mind when we talk about some link-building tactics.

Another common misconception is that you need hundreds of thousands of links.

Wrong.

If you can even get dozens of links quickly and easily, they’re going to be trash – and could actually do more harm than good.

Here’s the dirty little secret: one good link can move that needle.

The problem is, it’s hard to even get one good link.

Luckily for you, we have some good options you can try.

3 Link-Building Tactics for Family Law SEO That Actually Work

We’re going to talk about link-building tactics that actually work. You know, stuff a non-SEO professional could actually do on their own.

Sure, it takes a ton of work. But all good things do, right?

Let’s get started.

1. Reach out to local businesses.

Almost no one does this, and I don’t know why.

You likely already have relationships with local businesses in your area. There’s probably a few restaurants you frequent. I bet if you thought hard enough, you could think of other businesses you have a relationship with.

Reach out to them. Ask if they would like to include a link to your website – in turn, offer to include a link to theirs.

Remember those location hub pages we built? Wouldn’t that be a great candidate to house a few links to other businesses (while also building relevance to your area)?

It takes some work, but this should be your go-to tactic to build relevant, hyper-local links.

Send out a couple dozen emails. Talk to the owners you know personally.

Not everyone is going to agree.

But remember: one good link is hard to come by.

This will likely get you a handful, almost immediately.

2. Reach out to similar businesses (with a great offer).

This is perhaps your best option, though it requires considerable more work.

For this example, we’re a family lawyer in Rockville, MD.

If I were building links for this website, I would contact attorneys in another state, somewhere far away – lets say California, for this example.

We don’t compete… but we could definitely help each other.

The pitch is simple: Offer to write a blog posts (with links pointing back to your website’s pages, of course) for the other attorney to post on their website. In exchange, they can do the same to place on your website. The result? We both get a piece of blog content for free, as well as a targeted and highly relevant backlink.

Win-win.

You’ll have to send dozens of cold outreach emails. Be prepared to only get a response rate of 5-15% – and a lower percentage of that will actually follow through. Building links isn’t easy.

You’re trading time for these links, but I promise, these links are more valuable.

3. Reach out to local and national associations.

Are you a member of the Better Business Bureau?

How about your local Chamber of Commerce?

Would your web designer link to the website they’ve built?

Are you a member of any other associations?

Get creative with this. There are links right under your nose; you just have to sniff them out. Think about all of your memberships, associations, and vendors. Most likely, they have places on their website where they link to members. Reach out to them to see if you can get on that list. Sometimes, all it takes is an email.

Here’s what almost no one will tell you: most links are trash.

All of those structured citations we built? Google doesn’t really care about them.

All of those social profiles? Yeah, Google doesn’t really care about them, either.

Do they help? Sure. But by themselves, they won’t move the needle.

These links will. If you use these three tactics and manage to get a handful of links out of it, count yourself as a winner. Good links are hard to come by. They take work to build.

Here’s the thing: the work pays off.

SEO for Family Law Firms: Wrapping Up

This article ended up being longer than I intended it to be.

The truth is, SEO for family law firms is complex. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. That being said, there are still principles to follow. I described those principals earlier, but let’s take a look at them:

Step one: find keywords.
Step two: optimize a page on your website for those keywords.
Step three: build links to that page until you’re #1.

Almost 7,000 words later, we’ve described the intricacies of those three aspects pretty well.

Even after this insanely long article, there are things we haven’t covered (like some other advertising options for your family law firm).

That’s okay.

You don’t need to know everything.

Like everything else, the basics will get you 90% of the way to success.

If you’re doing this on your own, don’t try to over complicate things.

Don’t beat yourself over the head about keyword density, semantic keywords, over-optimized header tags, and more.

Don’t pay $100 for someone to build 1,000 links to your website overnight.