5 Family Law Firm SEO Systems You Should Build From Day 1

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Family law firm SEO breaks at scale—here are the 5 systems we'd build from Day 1 if we were starting Sterling over.

We hit 400 pages, and the site groaned under its own weight. These 5 systems kept us from rebuilding everything at 3,500 pages.

Websites break on title tags, URLs, internal linking, meta descriptions, and alt text. Hygiene at 18 pages, structural debt at 400. Build for topical authority before you need it.

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - Family Law Firm SEO Systems That Break at Scale 

0:42 - System 1: Title Tags as Chapter Headings 

4:07 - System 2: URL Structure That Holds at 1,000 Pages 

7:25 - System 3: Internal Linking and Topical Authority 

15:03 - System 4: Meta Descriptions That Earn the Click 

17:22 - System 5: Image Alt Text and Why It Compounds

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Transcript

0:00

You really can't be accidental about it. You have to know what keywords should be used to interlink to certain pages. You need to be really disciplined about that so that you're not accidentally getting in your own way by pointing the wrong internal links at the wrong pages. And that happens. We see that a Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show. Today We have the co-founder of our very own law firm, Sterling Lawyers. Tony Karls with us today, as well as our head of all things websites, Nick Perreault. So today we're going to talk about five SEO fixes the law firm owners can do to their websites to boost their visibility. Nick, give us some insights into our first one which is keyword placements in page titles. Tyler. This is probably one of the. I mean, it's among the very first things that I would check and and actually confirm that these are correct on any website. So the page title and the H1 in particular, the heading one, first heading on the page, send some of the strongest signals to search engines about what your page is actually about the topic being covered. So if if you can imagine if you're if your title is incorrect, you are not going to necessarily get placed in the right place in the library, in Google's library. You're going to confuse the algorithm. It's not going to know where to put your child custody lawyer page. If that child custody lawyer page starts with maybe the words. How our firm helps your family. You know, something like that. That's not tied to the actual content of that page. it needs to be as dumbed down as possible. This is my divorce page. My title tag is going to be what? It needs to be concise and to the point your topic clear and defined. So for a custody lawyer page it should be child custody lawyer ideally child custody lawyer in city state. That's typically the structure we want to follow. But it's just not a place to get cute. Be very specific. What is this page about? You're setting the topic of the page for the rest of the document. No murder mystery titles here. What is the page about Tony? How do we use this at Sterling? I would say when we're when we look at this for clients that we work with, one of the first things that we look at is, are there any missing or duplicates so that we're avoiding confusion. So obviously with their sterling site we have about 3500 ish pages. So we have a pretty good map of kind of how our content was intended to be built. So we kind of understand kind of the whole layout of what is each chapter of our book and what are the sub chapters and topics, because that's essentially how you should view a website is what is the what is the whole book about and how is it organized in your page? Titles are essentially your chapter chapter headings, and your headers are essentially your main subtitle for that chapter. And then you have more, you have more markup with H2 and so on and so forth that we'll talk about in a little bit that are just telling us what the outline of individual pages are and how they fit into the context of the whole site. So this is a really important thing that you want to get right, because it communicates communicates a lot to to the Google search algorithm, as well as any generative search algorithms that are crawling your pages as well. So it's very important. right. Your your website is a book in the library. Each of your practice areas are chapters. Make it clear and concise. All right. We're moving right along. Number two is URL structure. This one. This one can be easy to get wrong. The URL structure should be clean and keyword rich and follow a logical structure to set up to, to reinforce the content of those pages the topics, the headings, the titles. What I mean is that your URL should have a a clear, concise keyword and avoid over stuffing with keywords and or having a lack of meaning. Something like page question mark ID nonsense. We want to follow a structure that's clear, easy to follow for the user and for search engine. Something like family law slash divorce lawyer. Very clear. It's very concise. We've got some meaning within that. We don't have to have a really long page URL. And it's going to reinforce with the topic is about. Tony, you developed the URL structure at Sterling. And it was if I remember correctly, it was very template based. Like each page had very similar things and you replaced different words. Is that right? I wouldn't say that. I would say each section of the site has a very clear intention. So if you were to look at like one of the main pages, that gets a lot of inbound traffic is our Milwaukee location page. So the URL structure for that is Sterling Wisconsin locations slash Milwaukee. So if I were just to give you that, you could very easily figure out like what what do you think that page is about. Because it would be probably very obvious that that is about our Milwaukee, Wisconsin location page for where we do services. So your URL structure should be simple and should be able to communicate something that has inherent meaning. So this gets over complicated often. So they're not thought about and everything's at the root level. Or it's people get way too cute and they try to keyword stuff the heck out of everything. So I'm going to you know, both both scenarios aren't beneficial for you actually in the long And really, you won't see the negative impacts of that until you try to continue to grow your site. Because at the beginning, if you have like an 18 page site, you're not going to feel the negative impacts of bad URL structure. But as you start to grow your site and you have 500, 600, 700 pages, what's going to end up happening is you're you're now going to start to feel the pain of a poor IRL structure and poorly organized content. And now you have a larger. Yeah, now you have a larger firm in all reality, and you want to continue to grow that thing, and you actually are setting yourself up for kind of a, okay, we're going to have to go through a lull season here because I didn't think about this ahead of 100. Yeah, that's a great point. Is as your website and firm becomes more complex, you're going to need more rigidity and and less less complexity with within your website structure. All right. Nick number three is your internal linking strategy. So other pages linking to other pages on your site. Yeah, I love internal linking. It's it's one of the best ways to. Well, it's one of the biggest tools in our tool belt to actually to send authority throughout your website from the different pages on your website. So we can really use it to reinforce the overall topical authority of say, okay, family law. Well, what what what is what makes up family law? You know what? Divorce, child custody, alimony, etc. down the list, all of these different topical pages I want to connect together. They reinforce each other and they in turn reinforce the authority of your your overall brand and domain. I like to think about it like like the, the the electricity running through your house. You need the wiring throughout your house that needs to go to the light switches and the lights. And I want to light up the whole house. Does it also allow you to funnel authority to your most important pages? Oh, absolutely. To and from. So your most important pages, I mean from a link from a backlink perspective I want some pages are going to attract a lot of a lot of external links are going to just have a lot of natural authority. Your home page is the prime example of that. I want to flow from my home page to the pages. I need to then in turn have a lot of authority to rank more. So I really want to make those those pages, the central, the pages that that drive traffic, drive revenue. I want to make them the central point of any internal linking plans. I want to support them. I want lots of internal links, lots of lots of lots of internal links coming to those specific pages. When was the last time your team called to book a lead who didn't book? If you can't answer that, neither can your intake team. And that means every lead. Who said I need to think about it is sitting in your CRM right now without an owner, without a follow up date, and no next step? That lead is not dead. That's revenue that you will not get that you forgot about. At Sterling Lawyers, 75% of our revenue comes after that first conversation, 75% meaning even if you just do this poorly, you will change your firm over night. We track this across thousands of cases, and we found the money in the follow up. We're teaching the exact follow up system behind that number in a free training. How do we prepare for every call? What do our agents actually say? And what is the cadence that runs behind every lead until they book? Please see the link below so that you can sign up today. Tony, would you say that's how we leverage internal linking and Sterling or is there any Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have we kind of look at this in two different ways. So there's kind of a strategic internal linking. So basically every page on the Sterling website is linked linked to the home page for that state, the attorney page for that state and the location hub for that state. And then those pages divert authority to the remainder of the site where appropriate. So there all those are kind of the three central hub locations for all of my the link equity. The second portion of it is kind of content clustering. So all the main important divorce pages, they're interlinked together so that we have topical authority for divorce. You know divorce is getting linked to from from several of those pages that I mentioned, attorney the home page and some of the location pages. So then how am I funneling that down into some of the most important topics for divorce, like how to file for divorce? What what are the common grounds for divorce, and things like that that allows me to rank for all of those different things because you can't, you know, if you just if you don't think about this, you're essentially going to have probably 1 or 2 pages with all the link authority, and then you're going to try to be like, why don't, why don't my pages rank for all these different things? And you're going to end up likely just spinning up a whole bunch of bad pages, which is we see that often where you have all different permutations of exact match keyword stuffed in the Earl and in the title, and there's not a whole lot of differentiation in the content. And then you get hit with a, you know, a content spam algorithm hit because you aren't really doing things the right way strategically with how you're thinking about your content structurally and then internally, internally linking it together so that you're flowing the authority around the Everything we're talking about today is it's like hygiene, right? It's doing things the right way over the long term so that you don't all of a sudden counter some major issues on your Again, you're not going to feel the pains of poor internal linking. And until you continue to grow your site. So like this is something that like firms as they grow they get like surprised by they're like, what do what do you mean I can't do this? Like, it used to be easy. Yeah, it used to be easy because you had five pages on your site. It's very easy to rank a five page website for like six terms, but you now have a 400 page site that you're trying to rank for 1600 terms. So that's a very different set of requirements if you want to do that. Well. And thinking about this well up front is really important. You really can't be accidental about it. You have to know what keywords should be used to interlink to certain pages. You need to be really disciplined about that so that you're not accidentally getting in your own way by pointing the wrong internal links at the wrong pages. And that happens. We see that a lot. And really we get kind of into the, the, the really strategic or strategic opportunity of the blog on your website to be sort of a central point of interconnectedness with internal linking. If you are disciplined about the keyword choice, you know which pages are are you need to flow authority to and from. That becomes sort of the point of your If you're going to be successful in this digital game, you have to pick a point at which you're going to pay for the pain. So you can either decide to do it up front and you won't experience the pain as you grow, or you can decide to not heed this advice and you will experience this pain as you grow. And you'll then have months where you're kind of you're you're much bigger, your cash flow needs are higher. And you're you also have growth goals so that this something like this is then required. And now you kind of have a catch 22. It's like, oh man. Now this is this is going to be really expensive because we're going to be slower for, you know, 30 to 60 days because I need to do this thing for me to grow. I should have done this, but ahead of time. Yep. We should have done this ahead of time. So my opinion would be the sooner you can get your hands around this, the better, because you will experience less pain at some point. You have to. You have to figure out to how to endure it. The sooner you endure it, the better it is in the long term. It's like going to the gym Like. so good. All right. Well we talked about title tags. Nick, let's move on to our fourth hack which is meta descriptions. Meta descriptions, which you do not see on the page. So this is hidden text on the page. It is about your page. So it's kind of it's the partner to your title tag on your page. You have a clear title tag that sets the topic of the page, and a meta description that speaks to the user, and I view them as being not there, a way to entice the click. They are not directly related to your rank and position. We're not optimizing them directly for rank and position, we're optimizing them in order to get a click, entice a click to I mean really we want to we want to do better here by by by having a non boring meta description. Your title tag says what it is sets up authority and confidence in the user. But your meta description is a hook. So we might want to say something like looking for a compassionate divorce lawyer? Schedule your consultation today. Click. Several of the first three things we talked about are, I would say are more more akin to actual ranking factors like, how can you get a seat at the table? It's usually what I like to say. It's like you have technical things that will get you a seat at the table, which means like you're on the on the first page of of Google or search results where you can actually be visibly seen. Then there's other portions of the algorithm that are more user metrics based. So that is, once you have a seat at the table, does anyone willing to listen to you? And your first opportunity to have someone listen to you is do you have a compelling meta description so that they click on your link? And then do you have an engaging page when they land on it, or do they land on your page and they're like, this thing doesn't load, bounce or this thing loaded and it doesn't make sense. Bounce or so on and so forth. There's a whole bunch of different user metrics that aren't really part of the algorithm per se in terms of ranking factors, but they highly influence ranking factors because if they don't, you don't have a good user experience. You're not terminating the search. So our goal and this is to terminate the search. One of our first opportunities to communicate well is through our meta descriptions. That's the first user metric opportunity. Okay. Made it to the end. Number five is image optimization with alt text. So we could we could assume that Google can see our images or search engines can see our images and understand them, and they look nice and they have no or they have no bearing on on search. But that's wrong. Search engines understand images by what's called alt text. And again this is text that we don't usually see. Sometimes if an image doesn't load on a page, you might actually see this alt text. It is literally there to describe what this image is. And it's a great opportunity for for keyword placement to reinforce the overall topic of that page, to say, you know, Milwaukee divorce, divorce attorney that that's a foundational all tag that we would use on a on a divorce optimized page. It's easy to miss because you can't see it. So our tools really help us identify and optimize along these lines to say, okay, there are there are opportunities here. And would that be like this is a picture of a family That's that's what that's what. That's what Google would prefer you do. Actually, that's exactly how Google optimizes its own images. Describe the picture. But there really if you do it that way, you're missing a chance to to add some, some keyword leverage to those You can. So you could do that if you have like if you on your let's say you had a picture on your Milwaukee divorce alert page so you could say picture of a Milwaukee divorce lawyer sitting in our Milwaukee office. Like that would be completely appropriate to leverage. So I think this is typically a largely missed opportunity. Typically when we do our first technical crawls, there are very few images without text, and it's one of the first opportunities we have to optimize these things. Another thing related to image is what's the image file name? It's another opportunity for you to get keyword keyword opportunities in there. So there are there's a whole bunch of things related to images that if you want to kind of get nerdy on SEO, you can do if you want further research. We won't talk about it here, but dig into Exif data. If you really want to get nerdy about images and leave to stuff data into Google's algorithm, because there's ways to edit, edit, and augment that so you can optimize images even there are 68,000 family law firms across the country. So the competition is high. And so every little thing you can do to help your website outperform your competitors, especially in your same geographic region. The better. There's compelling data to suggest that that image optimization has some bearing on, and the sort of growing trend of optimizing for AI. So and there are additional opportunities in image search that help lend authority to your overall website. So don't don't sleep on on the alt images or the alt text on images. It's a big opportunity. There it is. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed this and got something from it. Gentlemen, I appreciate your time and we'll look forward to seeing you again.