How to Build a 90-Day Family Law SEO Strategy That Scales

Family law SEO strategy fails when you start in the wrong place. Order of operations is everything.

At Rocket Clicks, we wasted months on blogs before fixing the technical foundation.

Now we have the 90-day system that builds real lead flow, not vanity traffic. Foundation first → GBP → content architecture. Every time.

That sequence is what makes organic lead generation compound—not random content, not bought backlinks, not AI-mass-produced pages.

We scaled Sterling Lawyers from $0 to $17MM using this exact SEO framework.

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - Family Law SEO Strategy: The Prioritization Problem Killing Your Firm 

1:57 - Why Agencies Sell Everything at Once (And Why It Never Works) 

4:48 - The Vanity Metrics Trap: Traffic Up, Leads Nowhere 

7:10 - Days 1–30: Technical Foundation and Google Business Profile Setup 

12:52 - Month 2: Content Gap Analysis and Architecture That Builds Authority 

18:43 - Days 60–90: Measurement Infrastructure That Proves Real Case ROI 

22:40 - The 3 Things to Never Do in Your First 90 Days of SEO

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Transcript

0:00

The family law industry has a prioritization problems. Agencies sell you everything at once. Content, links, blogs, social because it justifies bigger retainers. But when everything is a party, nothing is. Today we are breaking down the exact order of operations that produces compounding results in the first 90 days of any SEO engagement. Welcome to the Sterling Family Law Show. The Sterling Family Law Show is the show for family law firm owners who want to grow their profits, multiply their cases, and get a clear roadmap on what they need to do to build the firm of their dreams. Today, our episode continues. The series we're doing on SEO for Family Law. It breaks down the proven business growth, digital marketing, and revenue first strategies to help you scale smarter, not just busier. I am your host, Tyler Dolph. I'm also the CEO of our law firm only consultancy called Rocket Clicks. we exclusively work with family law firms because we built our own family law firm called Sterling Lawyers that's grown to over 27 attorneys. Today, we are breaking down the exact 90 day roadmap we use at Rocket Clinics and have applied at Sterling Lawyers to build an SEO foundation that everything else compounds on top of. We will cover. Why the everything is urgent audit model sets firms up to fail and how to prioritize instead. We're going to talk about the technical foundation that must be in place before anything else matters. How to optimize a Google by business profile, including the category decision. Most firms get wrong. We're going to talk about keyword research and the content architecture that prevents cannibalization and maps to real search intent. And finally, we will talk about what not to do in the first 90 days to avoid penalties, wasted spend and ethical risk. So when we get a new client and we're thinking about how we can help them grow their organic visibility, this is the process that we use. And, it really stems from a prioritization of doing the right things in the right order. I think a lot of firms come to us and then we're like, just do all the things, just just do everything. And they come from, you know, other agencies who were who were selling them a list of deliverables. Right. Every month we're going to give you five blogs and three, you know, landing pages. And and we we disagree with that approach. We think that you should do the most important things that are going to have the greatest impact and the shortest amount of time, and that that is a specific list. It's a specific order. And so just starting with kind of the first problem, which is that when everything is a priority, nothing is. Why do you think that this is such a stigma in our space, and why do we do things differently? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think I see those. It's I think it starts from a place of SEO is really a combination of probably four things. So, you know, you have to be able to develop a website to do SEO because you're writing. If you're writing some frontend code, you have to understand content to be good content strategist, content writer, you need to be really good technically from an SEO perspective, so the search engines can read what you're putting down on the website, and then you need to understand really good off site, signals so that you can, kind of get your site out on the internet. And that's more that would, you know, that would be back linking the press releases and all, all of those things. So within each of those four disciplines, there is a whole lot of stuff to do. And if you don't start in the right place, you could just, you know, if you're not focused, you really don't get much done. You kind of get like 5% done on each thing and you never really finish anything. Which is why a lot of sites don't move when, they hire the wrong. And SEO agencies, there's nothing really happening. They're not prioritizing the foundation of the site, which has a lot to do with kind of the first one I mentioned, which is your website development and how it's architected from a speed perspective as well. So that it performs really well on the bots that your site as well as the technical perspective, so that when the bots do hit your site, they can read the information correctly. A lot of people just go right into, let's build more content, let's build a bunch of backlinks. But you've a broken foundation. Your site's slow. It's not architected correctly. You don't have title tags. Your your meta is your meta descriptions and schema are set up so nothing's being read appropriately. So it doesn't matter how much, you know, link equity you get for backlinks or content you produce on your website. Nothing's happening because you are doing it wrong. You're doing it in the wrong. We're so prioritize matter, get a lot more relaxed, refocus. I think this stems from a hey, SEO is not an overnight thing, right? It's not push button get leads. And so agencies have had to show value so they can keep getting paid. Right. Like, well, I'm just going to do a bunch of writing and send it to you so that you can say, hey, you know, that justifies the payment that I sent. The problem with that is it creates a lot of churn, right? Because eventually that business owner or law promoter is going to say, wait, I've paid you, you know, $35,000 over X number of months. And the only thing I have to show for it is a bunch of blog posts or whatever. And so we The really gross part about it is they can actually show you that you might be having traffic that's growing, but it is completely unqualified. So that is oftentimes what we see. Like for instance, there's a Sterling site we had, written, written an article about kind of long marriage and it got massive traction. It significantly increased our traffic. But it, it actually it did absolutely nothing for us from a lead perspective. So oftentimes what ends up happening in this, like blog article, let me get or build links scenario is you're going to see your traffic increase, but you're not going to see any leads come through so that you're just literally wasting your money to pay a vendor to get you inflated vanity metrics on your SEO, which doesn't really help your business because you can't pay your employees with vanity SEO metrics, you can only pay them when you get a new lead. You convert that lead into a consultation, and that client funds with you and pays you, pays you to earn your retainer. Like then you can pay your team. That's none of that's vanity metrics. So oftentimes what ends up happening in these engagements where they're just writing blogs and building backlinks is you you get the false signal of like, oh, it looks like it's working. They're telling me it's working. I'm getting more traffic. My impressions are growing up, but I'm not getting any more leads because we're not working on the right thing. 100% agree. Yeah. It's, it happens all the time and, and we'll touch on this. But data being able to validate that the work you're doing is actually transitioning into new cases is such an important part that I think a lot of SEOs miss, because they're just thinking about impressions and clicks. Okay, so starting with the first month, right? Days one through 30, we focus first on the technical foundation as well as the Google My business profile, because we've talked, a bunch on this podcast, the importance of showing up, locally in Google Maps, right. So tell us a little bit about our process for those first 30 days as it relates to setting up the foundation as well as the importance of Google My business. Yeah. So we're really working on two things in parallel. One is the technical foundation of your website. And we're really looking for a couple couple things where we're looking at what are the things that are slowing your site down, because if your site doesn't load quickly, users bounce and you're going to and as your as the robots crawl your site, they're also going to score the speed of your site. And if it's slow, they're going to give you bad scores on that portion of the algorithm, which will give you less visibility. So we're going to look at factors pertaining to that. We're also going to be looking at a lot of the technical foundation of of your pages. Do you have title tags on all of your pages? Do you have one H1 on all of your pages, or are there any missing or duplicates? Do you have, appropriate, at least appropriate schema on your location pages and you're turning pages? We're going to go through a list of technical foundations to make sure that when the bots do crawl your site, they're getting good quality information that they can actually read, because they can they can grab all the text. But what they really are looking for is a couple different key, key points that are marked up with, particular HTML language so that they know exactly what your page is about, and then they're not refined and guessing. You're going to get better results as a result. So we're doing all of that on your site. That's one of the first things. And in parallel while we're doing that, we're also looking at your Google business profile page, and we're looking for very similar things. They're looking at the categories that are set up or looking at, ensuring you have pictures. We're making sure that you have descriptions. We're making sure that you're the completeness of your business on Google Business Profile is fully complete, and that what it says on Google Business matches your website. And there's a really strong pairing there, because when that happens now you start showing in the maps, more visibly just by fixing some of the foundational things on your site, as well as making sure what you have in maps matches what you have on your website. And it is completely, the profile is completely built out versus it's just there and it's not built out, which we see a lot. and lots of confusion as it relates to name, address and phone number. Within that profile, the thing I want our audience to remember is the importance of just that. Right? Over 40% of all family law leads come from the maps that come from, you know, divorce attorney near me or divorce attorney plus city name. And if you think about it, you know, this is the spouse that comes home and realizes they're getting a divorce. They immediately go to their phone and they realize, Holy cow, I need a lawyer. And so if you're not prioritizing this kind of low hanging fruit where we're now, a huge majority of the leads are coming from, you're not doing that. First, the time table to showing value, real value that turns into cases is just extended. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's becoming more and more important too, because what's showing up in the, the, the AI chat. So the LMS, like OpenAI and Gemini and all of the, different platforms, they're they are doing an active web crawl for those different localized results. And they're looking for who is showing up on the first page and then and then on top of it, they're doing a, they're doing a customer review assessment. And if you don't, if you're not visible and you don't have good reviews, you're not going to show up in an AI. So like it's what we're talking about is what's going to help you when people are just using traditional Google search, as well as people that are kind of navigate migrating to, different type of search method methods, we're still using the same databases. We're still using the same data infrastructure. So if we don't have the stuff set up right, you're not going to show up. But customer satisfaction is becoming more and more important as well. So just keep that in mind. Because that's, that's a metric that we can't really help you with. That's how well you serve your clients. But it is starting to more significantly impact who's visible and who isn't. Hey, family law firm leaders. My partner, Tony Karl's just released his book where he lays bare our precise blueprint for growing sterling lawyers from 0 to 17 million. This is the blueprint that we still use daily. And Tony explains it in very simple terms. The truth is, this is not simple to do. Success requires and demands hard work. But if you have the patience and the work ethic to do it, your family, law firm will succeed. All right. So we've gotten through first month. We're going to really focus on getting the foundation. We're going to get Google my business rolling in the right direction. Now we're going to continue to optimize those things over the course of the relationship. You can always be adding additional locations or optimizing the profile and stuff like that. But as we move into month two, we talk more about keyword research and then the architecture, the content architecture of the site. Tell us a little bit about that. So in the second month we are going to do what we call a gap analysis, for the family law industry. So they're typically firms that join us. They're about seven categories. Seven different practice types that are going to, specifically fall in the family law. And if you want to rank really well in the family law space for, you know, those primary keywords, a Tyler was just mentioning that drive map search, you're going to you are going to your site is going to have to index as an authority on that topic. So what we do is for all of those seven different practice areas and some practice areas. So divorce, property division, child support, child custody, alimony, you know, so on and so forth. We are going to build out, we're going to do a gap analysis of the content on your site versus what should be there for you to be deemed an authority on the space. So that's what we're going to do, and we're going to build out a content plan to then start addressing those gaps and addressing and working towards, making you the authority in your local area so that you can then show up more for those local searches, because what's what, what you want to do is you want to, have a corpus of information that validates that your service, which is divorce lawyer, that would be your service. You are lawyering for divorce. Cases. It's backed up by information that supports that. You know what you're talking about. So you know what happens to the house during a divorce. What's the process for divorce? The grounds for divorce, like all, there's a whole bunch of different topics that if you aren't covered on your site, algorithms are not going to see you as an authority. And like what we want to do is we want to shore up those gaps so that when they're searching for the service, you show up because it's backed by what you're saying on your website about what what your knowledge of information is regarding that kind of service area. Hundred percent. I think we see, oftentimes, law firms will come to us and have one service page, you know, and then they'll list all the things on a single page. Why is that a problem? It's it's not comprehensive enough. I mean, oftentimes what we'll see is something like that where they'll have like one page about divorce. That's actually like talking about the process of divorce in a particular state. But then they'll have like 200 pages that are all just different variants of each other that are all like divorce lawyer with a city, spousal support lawyer, alimony lawyer, child custody lawyer, all of that, all of these things. That's all. Basically one page. And like, you have extraordinarily thin content on that site, and you're not telling the search engines anything about who you are and what you do when you have a page about your service on your location page, it's it should identify that you do all of those different things, and it's going to categorize you as such. But having 9000 different pages like that aren't isn't actually going to help. And it's going to thin your content out because you can't say the same thing that many different times differently. So Google is going to see that as thin content versus describing the service that you provide and giving information about how it actually works. That's going to be more supportive of your service pages, and it's going to help you rank a lot better. So it's it becomes a huge problem because it's actually a massive inversion of what you should see. What you should see is like most of the content on the site is informational about what we do and how we do it and where it's done, what the laws are, and all those things. And a small subset where all of those pages are pointed to that are actually about your service, like about your very specific service in that setting, your location page. So you're directing all of that value towards those, and it's all supporting information. Think about it like citations, like you were in school. You got to cite your work. So cite that you know what you're talking about. Because if you don't know what you're talking about, that's how Google thinks about it. It Google is basically a library science algorithm. So if it's if it doesn't think you have a good corpus of information, it's not going to rank you. Same thing with the A's. And so the idea behind splitting out the content is really focused on specific searches like, hey, I'm only interested in learning more about alimony. Well, my expectation is that I'm going to go to a page all about alimony. Not here's your perspective on divorce and why you're the bee's knees for divorce. Like, I don't care. I just want to know about this very specific Yeah. How does alimony work in Wisconsin? Exactly. How is it calculated in Wisconsin. how do you modify alimony orders or if you can't, how can you terminate alimony orders if you can't like all of those different things are different topics that people search for and that those are very specific searches. So like that's all building your corpus of authority on the topic. And then you're you're directing them on those pages to your location page, which is via internal links. In the body copy. But that's, this is where we solve that problem. This is the problem you have. You want to think about terminating alimony? Okay. Here is the here's the page that we're going to point to that actually helps you with that solution. Here's how you call us blah blah blah. So it's it's just a misunderstanding of how to build this information because you need to build supporting information. So you can cite that, you know what you're talking about. Yeah. Well said. All right. We've talked about setting the foundation. We've talked about the importance of local search. We've now built out some category pages. We're very specific about the services and service areas that, a law firm owner should work in our practice. And we now go into days 60 through 90, which is all about measurement infrastructure. Right? You can't improve what you don't measure. I think this is a step that, so many firms skip right back to the whole deliverable based service. If you're just saying, well, great. That agency sent me the blogs that they promised. It's not enough. It's gonna turn into dollars. And so this is the one thing that makes all of that, provable. Tell us about how we think about tracking and measurement and kind of what we use to help our clients out. once we get get to this step where we're we've what what I would call we've plugged the holes in the boat and we're going to stop sinking, and start moving in the right direction. So now we want to, because it takes time for SEO to prove results. If, if not earlier, by at least month three, we are starting to establish baselines and we can look back on data. About 60 months in Google Search Console, longer in ga4. But we're going to start establishing some very clear benchmarks so that we can we can view how our performance is performing year over year, so that we can see same time last year versus same time this year. How are we doing overall from a traffic and acquisition perspective, as well as now we want to we want to map lead attribution to it. We can see calls that are coming from calls and web leads that are coming from our organic searches or our, Google local places, interactions. That's going to allow us to very clearly see, okay, yeah, we're increasing traffic, but we're also increasing leads. We're actually increasing the value to the firm. And what we're doing is productive versus just, active. So there's a very big difference between active and productive. I think that's, there's a saying from Vince Lombardi in there somewhere. I don't remember exactly what it is. But that's really what we're looking for here, is establishing measurements, starting to look at year over year results. Kind of the, the core metrics for SEO performance, but also, attribution to our leads and consultations that are getting set so that we can actually see that we're we are moving the firm forward in a positive direction, not just creating vanity metrics. And what you'll see sometimes if you work with an SEO agency, in the past that was just getting you that many metrics, you're going to probably see your traffic go down, but you're going to see your leads continue to stabilize and go up. We see that often because there's they're oftentimes you're going to, we had a client, that was that did something internationally, that got picked up. It was, a super highly trafficked part of their website. Drew. It drove like 100,000 different visits and, 30 days and and then continuous continued throughout the year. But obviously that was that was where the peak was. When you pull that traffic out, you see that we are we are moving in the right direction with what we would call qualified traffic. But it looks like we're we're losing ground on the overall site. The reality is it's all inflated nonsense. It's not it's not real value. And when we also map leads and consultations and hires, we are we are continuing to add value to the firm and actually grow the revenue versus just drive a vanity metric. Because vanity metrics don't pay your bills, they don't pay your team, they don't allow you to retire and make decisions with your family. So we don't necessarily care about those. We want to see the business move forward. Kind of if you're a current agency is sending you a report every month, and it doesn't include revenue or case hires or consults that, they're missing a huge picture. And that might be on you as as a business owner not giving them that information. But I would encourage you to give your agency or your marketing person as much data as possible as it relates to what happens when a lead comes in the door. Is it quality? It? Does it create a console? Does that console result in a hire? Without that information, you're flying pretty blind on the optimizations that you can make. Yeah. And you're just hoping that those vanity metrics that you're getting from your Google Search Console are valuable because they may not be. Okay. To summarize, though, we're going to go a little backwards. We're going to talk about the things you should not do in the first 90 days. First one is don't start blogging without keyword mapping, which is to me pretty obvious, right? What are you going to write about if you don't know where the opportunity and the gaps are? The second is don't buy links. Don't let your agency buy links. It's very spammy. I don't know, Tony. If there's any any context you wanted to add there. Now, if you're if you're generally if you're buying, if you're buying backlinks, you're you're probably going to get trapped in some sort of Google Google spam, algorithm and the where they should be. If you are working with an agency where you should be seeing them spend money to acquire citations would be something like BrightLocal. where you're getting a bunch of data aggregators and map aggregators, as well as, a service that might be building citations for you, to help support your map listings. But most other things are not going to be something that we would recommend because they're going to just they're going to be likely very, very, very likely spam links that aren't going to actually help you in the long run. Yes, I totally agree. And then final point. Don't use AI to mass produce content. I know you and I have had a lot of discussions about this tactic, especially when kind of ChatGPT launch, we're like, oh my gosh, we're never gonna have to write again. You know, what we didn't realize was the impact that that had on, the algorithm and how it's evolved even today, as AI gets better and better and better, the idea of just just, well, throw it in AI, it'll be fine. Why shouldn't firms do that? Well, first it’s irresponsible because I hallucinate all the time. So if you're if you're using AI to help, help outline and create content that still needs to be manually reviewed, it still should be reviewed by an attorney, so that you're making sure it's accurate. And follows the, any guidelines on advertising. So, like, that's super important. But generally the other the other part is if you're if you're just mass producing content with the AI, you're likely, it's likely not being done in a way where you're not creating duplicate content on your site. You're going to end up actually hurting yourself because you're going to say the same thing over and over and over again, and you're not actually creating a like, a good content architecture that's explaining the whole story. You're just restating the same thing over and over. Because there is a there is an art to leveraging AI to produce good content. And it's it's longer prompts, it's very specific. And it gets, is super helpful. But it is it is also like not, just give it a short prompt and hope it figures it out. It sounds like, another podcast episode we should do on how to leverage AI. love it, Tony, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate this. You know, today we gave you the 90 day foundation. But building the base is only step one right now. You need to know if it's actually working. And so in the next episode, we're going to break down the metrics that separate real SEO growth from those vanity metrics we've talked about today, including how to track ROI, when to expect results, and what the leading indicators actually look like. And as a reminder, if you missed our first episode, we covered why Family Law SEO delivers the best ROI and legal. Go watch that first. So you have all the context necessary.