5-Step On-Page SEO Plan for a Law Firm Rebrand - #223

A law firm rebrand can erase years of SEO equity overnight.

Every URL is a key in Google's database. The history of every page you've ever ranked, the authority it earned over the years, the metrics tied to it, all of that lives behind the key. 

A messy law firm rebrand throws those keys away, splitting authority across pages that should be one and leaving Google with no idea where your equity went.

The 5-step on-page SEO plan in this episode is the framework we use at Sterling to keep the bones intact through a rebrand or domain consolidation. 

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - Law Firm Rebrand: The On-Page SEO Mistakes That Cost You Months 

0:50 - Step 1: Top-Level Domain Selection That Actually Builds Authority 

3:48 - Step 2: Folder Structure as the Bones of Family Law SEO 

9:46 - Step 3: URL Slug Strategy for Multi-Location Law Firms 

12:08 - Step 4: Canonical Tags for Tracking Without Splitting Authority 

14:43 - Step 5: Mapping 301 Redirects Before You Touch a Domain  

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Tell us in the comments if you liked this episode and what other kinds of episodes you would like to see.

Transcript

0:04

domain name to purchase for your brand, and a lot of times that advice is pretty, pretty misplaced This is about your brand. You want to build your brand on this domain name. You want to build your reach Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show. Today we are continuing our in-depth exploration of website structure and SEO for family law firms. We have the co founder of our own law firm, Sterling Lawyers, Anthony Karls with us today, as well as our head of web development, Nick Perow. And today we're going to talk about top level domain structure as well as landing page strategies are first topic is top level domain structure. When I read this, Nick, I was like, what does that even mean? Give us a little preview on what it means and why it's so important to think through this as you're either rebranding or building a new website, or building your firm from Yep. So top level domain. The TLD. It's often abbreviated as. This is. This is the very end of your domain name. So you have domain name and then TLD. So com.net.us. All that. Those are top level domains. And the real key here from a top level domain standpoint is that you want to choose the top level domain that has the most authority in your space. Now generally that the best top level domain is no questions asked. Like that is still the best top level domain. Sure, if you're in the AI space. They carry a certain semantic expectation so that that top level domain, it does translate to some meaning in the eyes of the search consumer. So you want it. You want to find top level domain with you know com being the best choice typically but something in the space that you're in. So it might be law lawyer. You want to to keep it authoritative to what you do. I feel like I should say something about the domain name itself. I think over the course of. Search engine optimization and its impact on the web, domain name to purchase for your brand, and a lot of times that advice is pretty, pretty misplaced these days. So things like get the location in your domain. Well, that's that's not a great domain name for for a number of reasons. But chief among those reasons is it does not allow you to grow outside of your current location. So I really want to emphasize that you should not limit yourself by choosing a really specific to my domain name. This is about your brand. You want to build your brand on this domain name. You want to build your reach and don't limit yourself to location specific domains. It can be a real pain to try and clean up. The worst thing that happens is you buy Phoenix divorce to com and you grow so big you can't be in Phoenix anymore. That's right. Are you trying to rank in a city that's next next to it like it's going to have? It's going to have a negative impact. So like that's it's actually pretty. It's actually it's not really the point of this podcast, but it's actually a really important Anything but location. Love it. Our second point is build a simple logical URL structure around your core services. Your URLs should have a folder structure that has meaning built in, and you can think of this like. basically a file system for your website. And you want a nice, neat, tidy, organized file system. So that's saying something like you have your you have your main domain you are operating in, say Wisconsin and Illinois. Okay. Your first most important folder is the state. From there, each state is going to have a divorce page. It's going to have a child custody page. It's going to have a in alimony page, something like that. That structure is going to be repeated and logical and convey meaning just from a URL alone. I know where I am, I know where I am relative to other things like it. And the search engines are great at parsing the folder structure to understand what the topic is about. So it helps reinforce that that authority that meaning. Another way to think of it as if you took your downloaded your folder structure and you just looked at it, can you infer meaning about your website? Because if you can't, you don't have a good folder structure and you're likely somewhere in there actually competing with yourself and you don't know it because you haven't communicated effectively like this is. This is one of the things that we see on just about every site that we see. We see tons of sites that only have first level folders. Like every single page is a first level folder. So if I pull a folder structure and I look at it, it's every single URL right next to that, which means to the eyes of Google. Every single page there is just as important as every other page, or none of these pages are more important than any other page. That's actually that's the inverse of what you're saying is true. So there's no hierarchy. It's just a flat structure, and you can't infer any meaning from it. So if you're not doing a really, really, really good job doing backlinks to all of those pages in the correct priority and context, which most, most sites do not do, you are not going to rank where you want to rank, and because you're going to have to do it, you're going to since you don't have a good folder structure, you're going to have to augment it somewhere else. One is going to be backlinks and the others will be internal links. So you can still do it. But the reality is, is it's going to be it's going to be more work and much harder, and it doesn't scale as well. It's confusing from a UI, UX perspective, especially if you start going into different states and you want to keep a clean, organized structure for your users to navigate through, or for your team to navigate through on a CMS perspective. There's so many different ways that this not doing this well creates confusion and potential problems. I would say one of the symptoms of, of this sort of flattened structure, where everything is on the root of the domain, we tend to find multiple pages that are effectively covering the same topic. From a search standpoint, it's really easy to go, oh, we need a page for that. And then create a page you already have and name it something that's close to what it was already named. And it gets really hard to to pick out. Okay. What is the most important thing to your point? if you can look at your file structure and you look in your URL bar and, and, and see if there are multiple levels and that they do have a semantic meaning, I would really say like follow, state first service second sort of mentality. That's a great way to tell if it's a good service structure. And a good way to look at it like a quick, quick view. A lot of a lot of WordPress CMS is if you go look at your sitemap, you're going to see whether or not it's organizing a set, any, any type of folder structure. Anyway, you can just sort, you know, on kind of the default one from WordPress. You can sort it top to bottom, A to Z. You can see if you have a folder structure at all. If you don't, it's just going to be like everything's just kind of they're all at the top, top level root. Other ones will make it a little more pretty from an L perspective, but you'll be able to see whether or not there's any type of folder structure there. And if you're looking at it and you can't infer like ask a question like which pages about, you know, my city and divorce layer and you're probably going to find you have like 4 or 5 pages that claim to all be about the same exact thing. So it's it's really important because like, you're you're going to you're going to dilute your equity across your site because you actually don't know what's in there. It's not linked internally. Well, I mean, it's not organized in any fashion that makes makes sense. And there's not any inferred meeting by the folder structure. So I guess one thing, one thing the folks at home can do. Go to your primary location page on your website. Just visit find the page with the map. It should have a map. You should have a page with a map. It should be for your primary location, your primary office. And if you see, say, I don't know, Milwaukee divorce lawyers and that is your URL and there's no folders at all and there's no slashes separating out the the folders on the site. Then there's now if you see something like Wisconsin slash locations slash Milwaukee, you've probably got great structure. Now you got something. that's super helpful. Moving on to number three, which is use location and services in key slugs. Beat you to the punch here. Yeah. This is exactly what I was just talking about. We want to avoid trying to put all of the things in the URL itself. So yeah, this is this is your this is your location page. It's got a URL of Milwaukee divorce lawyer. That's too much. It's doing too much work. You're missing opportunities elsewhere. And you don't have a nice structure because we also don't want. Multiple pages. We don't want to repeat in the URL structure. I guess that would be new Tony, any thoughts here? Yeah, I would I would agree. Like if for that page for Milwaukee for instance, the way we have it structured is, you know Wisconsin locations, Milwaukee. We also have subpages under Milwaukee that talk about the different types of things we do in that office. And that's kind of like military divorce, divorce mediation, things like that that are underneath at that, at that. Like I think it would be a a fifth level. They're not super important because they're just giving contextual relevance to, to the main location page. So our primary, you know, traffic page is Milwaukee. So like we have we have a folder structured appropriately. So you know what we have under our divorce pages like how to file for divorce. And then underneath that that might be the general one for Wisconsin. I think we have several pages under there that are how to file for divorce. So it would be divorce how to file. And then we have them. Then we have a county. And that page is about how to file. If you just infer the domain it's how to file divorce in in Milwaukee County. Just look at the oral structure. It's very clean and you can infer what it's about. And then you get to that page. And that's exactly what it's about. So it's just a very organized, organized outline of a What what that allows you to do is to create a lot more keyword opportunities, kind of across the different services and practice areas. You're not sort of limiting your location page, which is extremely useful and relevant where you're going to get a ton of qualified traffic. You're opening up other keyword opportunities by not trying to like, put it all into one place. That's great. We talk about duplication a lot. Tell us how this has affected in the URL structure. Well, if if we keep a nice tidy URL structure and we're kind of following best practice where there is hierarchy and everything kind of relates back to where are you? What do you do? Really logical structure. You can kind of easily read it. There are some elements of a URL that can be a little trickier to to kind of parse out. And, and these are things like they're called parameters and query strings. And what you tend to see is a question mark followed by a bunch of questions. Now sometimes those are good for tracking ads, bad clicks. That's sort of a thing. They have a purpose. We need to make sure that those are correctly canonical, so that that search engines don't view that as a separate page. So these query strings can look like a separate distinct page. It's one of the functions of just. Your or else basically all your characters matter that you are. And if you are not careful about it, can be accidentally duplicating a page just because you have one page that has maybe different query strings that aren't properly canonical. a good example at some of our more advanced clients are using an implemented. And usually we see the canonical setup well on the site. But sometimes it's it's not correct is people will put in parameters behind links from their GBP, for example, so that they can see what traffic is coming from the GBP. So they'll say like, you know, sterling lawyers slash Wisconsin slash slash Milwaukee, but then they'll also put a parameter string behind it to tell me that this is this is directly from the GBP. So if I don't have a canonical setup on that, what Google is going to think is that's a separate page and it's going to load just like it always does. But now, now there's two pages because I didn't I didn't set the canonical up. And like it's great from a tracking perspective. But if I didn't do the second step, which is make sure all query strings were included in the canonical of the URL. Now Google thinks there's two different URLs and it's going to it's going to split the authority between those two. And now I'm going to rank worse. So it's like a good example, a good practical example that we see often. Well okay final point. And it's a big one is plan URL changes carefully. We deal with a lot of clients who have gone through a rebrand. Or they've consolidated two domains into one, or they have two separate law firm domains and they want to bring it into one. And we find that the redirect strategy is often amiss. Is this all based on your nick or give us a little more context Well, you probably have heard of a 301 if you've been if you've had a website for a long enough time, there are 301 redirects and they allow us to say, hey, this page is boot. We've moved this page. In that case, the your Ewell's. That's that's how the search engines know your website, your whole website, that page, the content of that page, all the metrics associated with the page, the history of authority of that page has a key in a database. And that key is that you RL. we don't want to make changes around that important of a field lately whenever you inevitably when you change a URL, inevitably, almost invariably there is some loss of information, some loss of data. Some like you're not starting over necessarily, but you're not you're not starting from where you were. So that happens at the URL level. Now if you move your whole site, if you move many pages at once on your site, you are you are going to experience a period of time where things are not quite what they were, even if it's 1 to 1, and we look to minimize that as much as possible, keeping the content 1 to 1, not mixing, not mixing up the maybe a URL structure move with the chance to do a whole lot of rebranding. Let's change the title, let's change the content, let's change things. We want to limit those moves as much as possible to be structural first, and to be as 1 to 1 as possible. Yes, if you are thinking about migrating your website or moving a bunch of pages, please call someone in the know. I can't tell you how many tough calls we've had with prospects who have lost tons of traffic overnight because of the stuff incorrectly. A good a good way to humanize it for everybody that doesn't kind of work on websites is I think everybody generally knows what a planet gram is a at a store planning Graham is like literally how a store is laid out. Where are the aisles and where do the products go if if you change the way the store is structured and you don't complete it and like some of the aisles that you create, you end up with, like, you know, blocks on both ends of the aisle, you can't get to any of those products. And all of that is essentially equity that you are now missing because you you haven't done the 300 ones correctly. You haven't thought through the restructuring. Well, so like just imagine a store where all of the aisles have stuff in front of the aisles and you can't walk and you can't walk through the store like all the products are there, but you can't walk through it. So like there's really no value. And that's essentially what you're doing. You're like removing the value from the store because you can't buy anything. All the products are there, all the equity is still there in the database from Google's perspective, but it isn't going anywhere. It's not accessible to anything. And you've restructured your site and you haven't completed the work. So it's really important to do that because if you don't, you're you're going to miss out on what you used to have. So just like when a store gets redesigned and we're all kind of annoyed, we're like, oh, this was over here. That's kind of what Nick is talking about. Like for for a period of time, you're going to be like, you're the search engines are going to be figuring out where stuff went. And once they figure it out, you'll you'll rebound. And if it's restructured, well, it's going to improve your sales just like it would with a good store planning. So that would be my rule. Inference on this specific topic. topic. Very good. Put the lines where the lines go. Gents, I appreciate it. Love this. Appreciate the time and insights. We look forward to seeing you again very soon.