The practice of family law often involves dealing with matters such as divorce, separation of assets, child custody and other complex situations every day. When you’re dedicating your time to delivering the best for your clients, it’s understandable if SEO and other marketing activities aren’t always a top priority.
But if you’re looking to grow your law firm and your client base, having the right SEO strategy in place is essential. When done correctly, SEO for family law can help your firm to leverage the power of the Google algorithm to your advantage, boost your reputation and ensure that you can be found by potential clients online.
In our digital world, businesses need to stand out online or risk fading into obscurity. So it’s no wonder that, in a recent survey, 84% of law firms said that they planned to increase their digital marketing spend.
If you’re interested in learning about the benefits of SEO for family law but aren’t sure where to start, you’ve come to the right place.
In this blog, our SEO experts have compiled the ultimate guide to SEO for family law, as well as tips on how law firms can leverage the Google algorithm for SEO success.
What is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is a term that encompasses a range of techniques that all work together to boost a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (sometimes referred to as SERPS). The goal of SEO is to ensure that a webpage appears high up on a search engine results page when potential customers search for relevant topics and keywords. With 75% of users never looking past the first page of Google, it’s clear why SEO is so important.
As of 2022, Google processed over 3.5 billion searches per day. In order to provide the best results, Google has developed a number of sophisticated algorithms that trawl through billions of websites.
Google has over 200 ranking factors that decide a website’s ranking on a results page, including everything from the use of relevant keywords, to how user friendly a website is. However, the algorithm is always shifting and changing, and what works at one point might not in the future.
SEO experts employ a range of techniques to ensure that your webpage meets the algorithm’s shifting criteria, helping you to appear higher up in searches and be found by more potential customers. If you’re on the fence about investing in SEO, it’s worth remembering that.
Why is SEO Important?
In the past, law firms relied on word of mouth and reputation in order to ensure a steady stream of new clients. But in today’s digital world, users turn to search engines such as Google to find products and services instead, which makes having an SEO optimized website essential.
Where you rank on a Google results page is very important, as the first-ranked page on Google can expect to get 32% of the overall traffic. It’s no wonder that 61% of marketers say that generating traffic to their website and leads is their biggest priority.
It doesn’t matter how great your website is, if it is buried deep in the recesses of a Google results page, you won’t be attracting the volume of new clients that you deserve. Yes, you can pay to feature your website as an ad on Google, but many experts say that organic search is still the most important, with 53% of all website visits coming from organic search.
What are the Best Types of SEO for Family Law Firms?
There are a number of different techniques used by SEO experts in order to achieve a higher page ranking. At Social Chameleon, our team of experts will evaluate your existing website and make recommendations tailored to your needs. Some of our SEO services include:
On-site SEO
Sometimes referred to as on-page SEO, on-site SEO is the process of optimizing the content that is on your website in order to make it more search-engine friendly. You may have heard the phrase ‘Content is King’ and when it comes to SEO, this is definitely true. Websites with blog content get 55% more site visits.
The Google algorithm is intent on providing the best possible results for users, and therefore it promotes websites to users that contain relevant keywords that align with what a user is searching for.
In the early days of SEO, marketers filled websites with keywords as an attempt to get a higher ranking, sometimes at the detriment of the content on the page, known as ‘keyword stuffing’.
However, as Google algorithms have grown more sophisticated, it is not enough to just throw in a load of keywords and hope for the best. In order to turn page visits into conversions, it is vital that your content is informative and educational for potential customers, and this is especially important within professional service industries such as law.
At Social Chameleon, our team of content marketing experts will create copy that is SEO optimized, as well as being genuinely useful and interesting for your intended audience.
Off-site SEO
Off-site SEO refers to techniques that boost SEO away from your website.
A key aspect of successful SEO strategy is improving your website’s domain authority: a score that is attributed to your site, and denotes its reliability and trustworthiness. Your domain authority can be improved by increasing the number of high-quality backlinks, where your website is linked to from other websites with a good domain authority. Backlinks work like recommendations, where other well ranked websites essentially ‘recommend’ your website by linking to it. The better your domain authority score, the more likely it is that your website will be favored by the Google algorithm.
Some activities that SEO experts use to boost the number of backlinks to your site include social media, guest blogging and digital PR.
Technical SEO
User experience is an increasingly important factor that influences your website’s SEO. This includes a number of factors such as your website’s loading speed, structure and how easy it is to use and navigate. Our team of SEO experts will conduct a full audit of your website to ensure that there are no behind-the-scenes factors that might be negatively affecting your page’s ranking.
The Benefits of SEO for Family Law Firms
Increased traffic
The right SEO strategy will improve your ranking on search engine results pages, leading to increased traffic to your website.
What’s more, site traffic from SEO is more likely to result in sales; potential customers who find a website through SEO are eight times more likely to result in a sale versus traditional advertising methods.
Improved user experience
At Social Chameleon, our SEO experts use a range of tactics to help both boost your SEO and improve conversions, such as optimizing the user experience of your website and creating more useful and engaging content. These techniques make your website a place where visitors will want to return back to, ultimately increasing your chances of converting site visitors into clients.
Build brand authority
SEO tactics such as thought leadership, content marketing and digital PR don’t just help improve your website’s SEO, they also contribute to the overall marketing strategy. As well as boosting your search engine ranking, off-site SEO has the added benefit of promoting your family law firm online through other reputable sources and enhancing your reputation as a leader in your field.
Conclusion
SEO for family law can have many benefits, from helping you to stand out to potential clients, to building brand authority and outshining competitors. Now that you’ve heard some of the benefits of SEO for family law, it’s time to enlist the help of the experts to ensure that your SEO strategy is set for success.
At Social Chameleon, we have a wealth of experience providing SEO services to clients in the professional services sector, including many prominent London law firms. Our expert team has helped numerous law firms to stand out online, win more clients and solidify their reputation. So what are you waiting for? Get in touch with our expert team today.
