SEO for family law is highly competitive. There are many family lawyers vying for the attention of potential clients, and it’s in your best interest to stand out from the crowd.

The following family law marketing strategies are engineered to help you build a successful legal brand online, develop relationships with other family law attorneys, and attract new leads so that you can increase your client base and grow your business.

It All Starts With a Plan: Finding Your Law Firm’s Target Audience

Marketing your family law practice can be a daunting task. There are many different strategies to keep in mind and implement, which is why it’s important to have an overall strategic marketing plan that you stick with.

There are three key points to remember when developing your marketing strategy: know who you’re talking to, create a clear message for that audience, and choose the right channels of communication.

Determine Your Target Market 

Your target market is one of the most important aspects to understand when marketing your law firm. Understanding who your ideal clients are will help determine how to proceed with your marketing strategy. 

You have a law firm with the potential to help thousands of people. How do you decide which group to target? Part of your decision will be based on demographics, but there are other factors that need to be considered as well. 

These include:

  • Are you focusing on high net worth divorces?
  • Will you handle custody issues?
  • Will you help couples with adoptions?
  • Will you work with couples seeking pre- or post-nuptial agreements?
  • Do you want to work with couples seeking divorce mediation?

Narrowing down your requirements for an ideal client will help you determine “personas” to whom you will cater in your advertising and marketing efforts.

Once you know who your ideal clients are, it’s time to research the competition.

How To Use Your Competitors to Get Ahead

When it comes to creating a marketing plan for your family law firm, there’s no sense in re-inventing the wheel. This is particularly true for online marketing tactics like SEO for lawyers (search engine optimization) and PPC advertising.

There are a number of ways you can gain valuable information about what your competitors are doing. Some competitor analysis tools are free and others require specialized access to platforms like SEMRush, Moz, and Alexa.

Here are some easy ways to see what works for your competition:

  1. Identify Your Competitors. Search “family lawyer in [your city]” and replace [your city] with the city where your practice is housed. Make a list of the top 3-5 law firms that come up in the search.
  2. Identify Most Profitable Keywords. Use tools like Moz or SEMRush to determine their most profitable keywords for both organic searches and paid searches (if applicable).
  3. Identify Critical Metrics for Ranking. Use SEO Quake to find out how many pages their websites have, how many words per page, the number of backlinks they have, and whether they use paid advertising, and how many posts they have on Facebook.

Create a spreadsheet to keep track of the data. Armed with this information, you can now create a marketing plan with solid benchmarks you want to achieve.

Create Your Law Firm’s Digital Marketing Plan

A law firm digital marketing plan is a document that outlines the goals and objectives of your marketing strategies. It also includes a list of initiatives that will be implemented to achieve those goals.

A few marketing tactics for success include networking, referral sources, content marketing, social media, email marketing newsletters advertising campaigns, or anything else that provides value to potential clients.

At the very least, the following should be included in your family law marketing plan:

Depending on your marketing budget, you might consider including paid advertising, either online (like Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn), or in local sources like newspapers, airports, buses, or billboards. 

We discuss the pros and cons of law firm ads here.

Before you start on any of these strategies, you must first ensure you have a website.

Building or Optimizing Your Law Firm Website

Building a law firm website is an important part of running your business. Even though you may have the best lawyers in town, if people can’t find you, then they won’t hire you.

If you don’t have a website, it’s time to build one. 

Whether you have an existing website or are in the process of building one, ensure your site:

  • Is modern and designed to move the client through in a logical manner
  • Includes up-to-date information on your practice areas 
  • Highlights testimonials and awards
  • Shows pictures of staff
  • Places contact information in a prominent place

To check to see if your family law firm’s website is optimized, don’t forget to check its Core Web Vitals. These will tell you how fast the site loads and how responsive it is when a user engages, among other things.

Once you have the foundation complete. It’s time to break out that competitor research you did. The goal is to out-do your competitors in order to compete for those top spots in search engine results. 

This means you should have:

  • More pages on your site
  • More words on each page
  • Keyword-infused content with appropriate use of H1 and H2 headers
  • Keyword-infused meta-titles and meta-descriptions
  • Images that are tagged with your desired keywords

Once you’ve optimized your site for search engines, periodically audit your site using Moz or SEMRush. You’ll get instant insight into what’s good, what’s bad, and what you can improve.

Offsite SEO

In addition to those onsite SEO strategies we mentioned, to get your site to page one of search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll need to do a little more work on improving your site’s visibility and reputation. 

To do this:

For more information on GMB and other local SEO opportunities, check out this article we wrote: Local SEO for Lawyers Guide: 9 Steps For Law Firms To Improve Their Local Rankings [UPDATED 2021].

Create a Social Media Presence & Strategy

Use social media to build trust with potential clients with these simple tips:

  • Create social media profiles for your law firm, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., so people can follow you on their preferred platform 
  • Create a plan to post content on those platforms at least once per day, or as often as you can manage 
  • Keep in mind what is trending and try to stay relevant with current events and popular topics 
  • Engage with other users by liking posts, commenting, and sharing them if appropriate

Using tools like HootSuite or Buffer can help make this process a little easier by enabling you to schedule content out days or weeks in advance.

Create Your Content Strategy

If you want to attract more clients to your website, then writing good quality web content with relevant information will help you rank higher in search engines and convert more visitors into customers. 

Adding content is one of the easiest strategies for improving your web presence and attracting more clients.

Here’s how to do it:

  • Create a list of all practice and sub-practice areas for your firm
  • Write long-form content (1,200-2,000 words) for each practice area
  • Craft shorter-form (500-750 word) articles on more discrete areas of law and post them to your blog

At a loss for what to write about? Check out your competitors or use SEMRush’s Topic Research Tool to find the hottest topics in your area of law. 

For in-depth advice on how to optimize your content, check out our guide to Content Optimization For Attorneys

Networking for Lawyers

For many lawyers, networking is the key to being successful in their practice. Networking can be done in a variety of ways including joining bar associations, volunteering for pro-bono opportunities, and attending business or social events. 

By attending networking events or creating an event of your own, you can meet new people who may become strategic partners, excellent referral sources, or resources for expanding your offerings to your clients. 

Bonus Strategy

Many firms are finding that offering a scholarship to local students provides valuable local visibility and fosters goodwill in the community. Publish a press release announcing the scholarship, as well as announcing deadlines, winners, and follow-ups with scholarship recipients. 

Putting it All Together: Maximize Your Family Law Firm SEO Efforts

Marketing your family law and divorce litigation law firm doesn’t have to be a nightmare. By utilizing these simple strategies, you can dramatically improve your firm’s visibility and value to those clients you want to serve. 

However, if you need additional help in putting all of these strategies into practice, it’s smart to turn to the best SEO company for lawyers. At LawRank, we specialize in attorney SEO.

We help law firms just like yours improve their online presence, increase their conversion rate, and expand their client base in a matter of months. Give us a call today to talk about your family law firm’s marketing strategy and find out how we can help.