The family law industry has a prioritization problem.
Agencies sell you everything at once. Content, links, blogs, and social media justify bigger retainers. When everything is a priority, nothing is.
Here’s the exact order of operations that produces compounding results in the first 90 days of any SEO engagement.
Why the Everything-at-Once Model Fails
SEO is really a combination of four things. Website development, content strategy, technical optimization, and off-site signals like backlinks and press releases.
Within each of those disciplines, there’s a whole lot of stuff to do. If you don’t start in the right place, you get 5% done on each thing and never really finish anything. That’s why a lot of sites don’t move when firms hire the wrong SEO agency.
They’re not prioritizing the foundation. They go right into building more content and backlinks, but the foundation is broken. The site is slow. It’s not architected correctly. Title tags are missing. Meta descriptions and schema aren’t set up, so nothing’s being read appropriately.
It doesn’t matter how many backlinks or how much content you produce if you’re doing it wrong and in the wrong order.
Agencies have had to show value so they can keep getting paid. The problem is it creates a lot of churn because, eventually, you realize you’ve paid $35,000 over several months, and the only thing you have to show for it is a bunch of blog posts.
The really gross part is that they can actually show you that traffic is growing, but it’s completely unqualified. We’ve written articles at Sterling that got massive traction and significantly increased traffic, but did absolutely nothing from a lead perspective.
You see your traffic increase, but you’re not seeing any leads come through. You’re literally wasting money to get inflated vanity metrics. You can’t pay your employees with vanity SEO metrics. You can only pay them when you get a new lead, convert that lead into a consultation, and that client pays your retainer.
Days 1-30: Technical Foundation and Google Business Profile
The first month focuses on two things in parallel. The technical foundation of your website and your Google Business Profile.
For the technical foundation, we’re looking at what’s slowing your site down. If your site doesn’t load quickly, users bounce. As robots crawl your site, they score the speed. If it’s slow, they give you bad scores on that portion of the algorithm, which gives you less visibility.
We’re also looking at technical foundations. Do you have title tags on all your pages? Do you have one H1 on all pages, or are there missing or duplicates? Do you have an appropriate schema on your location pages and attorney pages?
We go through a list of technical foundations to make sure that when the bots crawl your site, they’re getting good quality information they can actually read. They need specific key points marked up with particular HTML language, so they know exactly what your page is about rather than guessing.
In parallel, we’re looking at your Google Business Profile. We’re looking at categories, ensuring you have pictures and descriptions. We’re making sure the completeness of your business on Google Business Profile is fully complete and that what it says on Google Business matches your website.
When that happens, you start showing up more visibly on the maps just by fixing foundational things on your site and making sure what you have in maps matches what you have on your website.
Over 40% of all family law leads come from the maps. They come from a divorce attorney near me or divorce attorney plus city name. If you’re not prioritizing this low-hanging fruit, where a huge majority of leads are coming from, the timetable to showing real value that turns into cases is just extended.
This is becoming more important because AI chat platforms like OpenAI and Gemini are doing active web crawls for localized results. They’re looking for who shows up on the first page and doing a customer review assessment. If you’re not visible and you don’t have good reviews, you’re not showing up in AI.
Days 31-60: Keyword Research and Content Architecture
In the second month, we do what we call a gap analysis for the family law industry.
There are typically seven different practice types that fall under family law. Divorce, property division, child support, child custody, alimony, and so forth. If you want to rank really well in the family law space for those primary keywords that drive map search, your site is going to have to index as an authority on that topic.
We build out a gap analysis of the content on your site versus what should be there for you to be deemed an authority. We build out a content plan to start addressing those gaps and working toward making you the authority in your local area.
You want a corpus of information that validates your service. You’re lawyering for divorce cases. It’s backed up by information that supports you know what you’re talking about. What happens to the house during a divorce? What’s the process? The grounds for divorce?
If those topics aren’t covered on your site, algorithms aren’t going to see you as an authority.
Oftentimes, law firms will come to us with one service page that lists all the things on a single page. That’s not comprehensive enough.
What we’ll see is one page about divorce, talking about the process in a particular state. But then they’ll have 200 pages that are all different variants of each other. Divorce lawyer with a city, spousal support lawyer, alimony lawyer, child custody lawyer. That’s all, basically one page.
You have extraordinarily thin content on that site. You’re not telling search engines anything about who you are and what you do.
Google sees that as thin content versus describing the service you provide and giving information about how it actually works. It becomes a massive inversion of what you should see.
Most of the content on your site should be informational about what you do, how you do it, where it’s done, and what the laws are. A small subset should be about your very specific service in your location. You’re directing all of that value toward those pages with supporting information.
Think about it like citations in school. You have to cite your work to show you know what you’re talking about. Google is basically a library science algorithm. If it doesn’t think you have a good corpus of information, it’s not going to rank you. Same thing with AI.
The idea behind splitting out content is focused on specific searches. Someone only interested in learning more about alimony expects to go to a page all about alimony. Not your perspective on divorce and why you’re great for divorce.
How does alimony work in Wisconsin? How is it calculated? How do you modify alimony orders? How can you terminate alimony orders? All of those are different topics people search for. That’s all building your corpus of authority on the topic.
Days 61-90: Measurement Infrastructure
You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Once we’ve plugged the holes in the boat and stopped sinking, we start establishing baselines. We can look back on data for about 60 months in Google Search Console, longer in GA4.
We start by establishing clear benchmarks so we can view performance year over year. Same time last year versus same time this year. How are we doing from a traffic and acquisition perspective?
Now we map lead attribution to it. We can see calls and web leads coming from organic searches or Google local places interactions. That allows us to clearly see we’re increasing traffic and we’re also increasing leads. We’re actually increasing value to the firm.
There’s a very big difference between active and productive. We’re looking for attribution to leads and consultations so we can see we’re moving the firm forward in a positive direction, not just creating vanity metrics.
Sometimes you’ll see traffic go down, but leads continue to stabilize and go up. We see that often because firms previously had highly trafficked parts of their website that drew visits but no actual value.
Vanity metrics don’t pay your bills. They don’t pay your team. They don’t allow you to make decisions with your family. We want to see the business move forward.
If your current agency sends you a report every month and it doesn’t include revenue or case hires or consults, they’re missing a huge picture. Give your agency or marketing person as much data as possible about what happens when a lead comes in the door. Is it quality? Does it create a consult? Does that consult result in a hire?
Without that information, you’re flying blind on the optimizations you can make.
What Not to Do in the First 90 Days
Don’t start blogging without keyword mapping. What are you going to write about if you don’t know where the opportunities and gaps are?
Don’t buy links. If you’re buying backlinks, you’re probably going to get trapped in some Google spam algorithm. The only place you should see an agency spend money to acquire citations is something like BrightLocal, where you’re getting data aggregators and map aggregators to help support your map listings.
Don’t use AI to mass-produce content. AI hallucinates all the time. If you’re using AI to help outline and create content, it still needs to be manually reviewed by an attorney to make sure it’s accurate and follows advertising guidelines.
If you’re just mass-producing content with AI, you’re likely creating duplicate content on your site. You’ll end up hurting yourself because you’re saying the same thing over and over. You’re not actually creating good content architecture that explains the whole story.
There is an art to leveraging AI to produce good content. It’s longer prompts. It’s very specific. It gets super helpful, but it’s not just giving it a short prompt and hoping it figures it out.Building the SEO foundation is only step one. Now you need to know if it’s actually working by tracking the metrics that separate real growth from vanity metrics.
