April 30, 2026 • 21 mins
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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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https://www.youtube.com/@TylerxDolph
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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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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You really can't be accidental about it.
You have to know what keywords should beused to interlink to certain pages.
You need to be really disciplinedabout that so that you're not accidentally
getting in your own wayby pointing the wrong
internal links at the wrong pages.
And that happens.
We see that aWelcome back to the Sterling Family
(00:20):
Law Show.
Today We have the co-founder of ourvery 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 fiveSEO fixes the law firm
owners can do to their websitesto boost their visibility.
(00:42):
Nick, give us some insightsinto our first one
which is keywordplacements in page titles.
Tyler.
This is probably one of the.
I mean, it's among the very first thingsthat I would check and
and actually confirmthat these are correct on any website.
So the page titleand the H1 in particular,
(01:07):
the heading one, firstheading on the page,
send some of the strongest signalsto search engines
about what your page is actuallyabout the topic being covered.
So if if you can imagine if you'reif your title is incorrect,
you are not going tonecessarily get placed in the right place
(01:28):
in the library, in Google's library.
You're going to confuse the algorithm.
It's not going to know whereto put your child custody lawyer page.
If that child custody lawyerpage starts with maybe the words.
How our firm helps your family.
You know, something like that.
That's not tiedto the actual content of that page.
(01:52):
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 conciseand to the point
your topic clear and defined.
So for a custody lawyer pageit should be
child custody lawyer ideallychild custody lawyer in city state.
(02:16):
That's typically the structurewe 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 pagefor the rest of the document.
No murder mystery titles here.
What is the page about Tony?
How do we use this at Sterling?
(02:38):
I would say when we'rewhen we look at this for clients
that we work with, one of the first thingsthat we look at is,
are there any missing or duplicatesso that we're avoiding confusion.
So obviously with their sterling sitewe have about 3500 ish pages.
So we have a pretty good map of kind ofhow our content was intended to be built.
(03:01):
So we kind of understandkind of the whole layout of
what is each chapter of our bookand what are the sub chapters and topics,
because that's essentially howyou should view a website is what is the
what is the whole book aboutand how is it organized in your page?
Titles are essentiallyyour chapter chapter headings,
and your headers are essentiallyyour main subtitle for that chapter.
(03:24):
And then you have more,you have more markup with H2
and so on and so forththat we'll talk about in a little bit
that are just telling uswhat the outline of individual pages are
and how they fitinto the context of the whole site.
So this is a really important thingthat you want to get right, because it
communicatescommunicates a lot to to the Google
search algorithm, as wellas any generative search algorithms
(03:47):
that are crawling your pages as well.
So it's very important.
right.
Your your website is a bookin 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.
(04:07):
This one.
This one can be easy to get wrong.
The URL structure should be cleanand 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 aa clear, concise keyword and avoid
(04:36):
over stuffing with keywordsand or having a lack of meaning.
Something likepage question mark ID nonsense.
We want to follow a structure that'sclear, easy to follow for the user
and for search engine.
Something like family law slashdivorce lawyer.
(04:59):
Very clear.
It's very concise.
We've got some meaning within that.
We don't have to havea really long page URL.
And it's going to reinforce withthe topic is about.
Tony, you developed the URL structureat Sterling.
And it was if I remember correctly,it was very template based.
Like each page had very similar thingsand you replaced different words.
(05:20):
Is that right?
I wouldn't say that.
I would say each section of the sitehas a very clear intention.
So if you were to look atlike one of the main pages,
that gets a lot of inboundtraffic is our Milwaukee location page.
So the URL structure for that is SterlingWisconsin
(05:41):
locations slash Milwaukee.
So if I were just to give you that,you could very easily figure out
like whatwhat do you think that page is about.
Because it would be probably very obviousthat that is about our
Milwaukee, Wisconsin location pagefor where we do services.
So your URL structure should be simpleand should be able to communicate
(06:05):
something that has inherent meaning.
So this gets over complicated often.
So they're not thought aboutand everything's at the root level.
Or it's people get way too cuteand they try to keyword
stuff the heck out of everything.
So I'm going to you know, bothboth scenarios aren't
beneficial for you actually in the longAnd really, you won't see
(06:27):
the negative impacts of that until you tryto continue to grow your site.
Because at the beginning,if you have like an 18 page site,
you're not going to feelthe negative impacts of bad URL structure.
But as you start to grow your siteand you have 500, 600, 700 pages,
what's going to end up happening is you'reyou're now going to start
to feel the pain of a poor IRL structureand poorly organized content.
(06:50):
And now you have a larger.
Yeah, now you have a larger firmin all reality, and you want to continue
to grow that thing, and you actuallyare setting yourself up for kind of a,
okay, we're goingto have to go through a lull season here
because I didn't think about this ahead of100. Yeah, that's a great point.
Is as your websiteand firm becomes more complex,
(07:13):
you're going to need more rigidityand and
less less complexity withwithin your website structure.
All right.
Nick number three is your internal linkingstrategy.
So other pageslinking to other pages on your site.
Yeah, I love internal linking.
(07:34):
It's it's one of the best ways to.
Well, it's one of the biggest toolsin our tool belt to actually
to send authority throughout your websitefrom the different pages on your website.
So we can really use it to reinforcethe overall
topical authority of say,okay, family law.
(07:55):
Well, what whatwhat is what makes up family law?
You know what?
Divorce, child custody, alimony, etc.
down the list, all of these differenttopical pages I want to connect together.
They reinforce each otherand they in turn reinforce
the authority of youryour overall brand and domain.
(08:16):
I like to think about it like like the,the the electricity
running through your house.
You need the wiring throughout your housethat needs to go to the light switches
and the lights.
And I want to light up the whole house.
Does it alsoallow you to funnel authority
to your most important pages?
(08:37):
Oh, absolutely. To and from.
So your most important pages,I mean from a link
from a backlink perspectiveI want some pages
are going to attract a lot ofa lot of external links are going
to just have a lot of natural authority.
Your homepage is the prime example of that.
I want to flow from my homepage to the pages.
(08:59):
I need to then in turnhave a lot of authority to rank more.
So I really want to make thosethose pages, the central,
the pages that that drivetraffic, drive revenue.
I want to make them the central pointof any internal linking plans.
I want to support them.
I want lots of internal links,lots of lots of lots of internal links
(09:21):
coming to those specific pages.
When was thelast 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 aboutit is sitting in your CRM right now
without an owner, without a follow update, and no next step?
(09:41):
That lead is not dead.
That's revenue that you will not getthat you forgot about.
At Sterling Lawyers, 75% of our revenuecomes 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.
(10:05):
We're teaching the exact follow up systembehind 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 behindevery lead until they book?
Please see the link belowso that you can sign up today.
Tony,would you say that's how we leverage
(10:26):
internal linking and Sterlingor is there any Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we have we kind oflook at this in two different ways.
So there's kind of a strategicinternal linking.
So basically every page on the Sterlingwebsite is linked
linked to the home page for that state,the attorney page for that state
and the location hub for that state.
(10:46):
And then those pages divert authorityto the remainder of the
site where appropriate.
So there all those are kindof the three central hub locations
for all of my the link equity.
The second portion of itis kind of content clustering.
So all the main important divorce pages,they're interlinked together
so that we have topical authorityfor divorce.
(11:10):
You know divorce is getting linkedto from from several of those pages
that I mentioned, attorney the home pageand some of the location pages.
So then how am I funneling that downinto some of the most important
topics for divorce,like how to file for divorce?
What what are the common groundsfor divorce, and things like that
that allows me to rank for all of thosedifferent things because you can't,
(11:34):
you know,if you just if you don't think
about this, you're essentially goingto 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 rankfor all these different things?
And you're going to end uplikely just spinning up
a whole bunch of bad pages,which is we see that often
where you have all differentpermutations of exact match keyword
stuffed in the Earl and in the title,and there's not
(11:56):
a whole lot of differentiationin the content.
And then you get hitwith a, you know, a content spam
algorithm hit because youaren't really doing things the right way
strategically with how you're thinkingabout your content structurally
and then internally, internallylinking it together so that you're
flowing the authority around theEverything we're talking about today
(12:17):
is it's like hygiene, right?
It's doing things the right wayover the long term so that you don't
all of a sudden countersome major issues on your Again,
you're not going to feel the painsof poor internal linking.
And until you continue to grow your site.
So like this is something that like firmsas they grow they get like surprised by
(12:40):
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 easybecause you had five pages on your site.
It's very easy to rank a five page websitefor like six terms,
but you now have a 400 page sitethat you're trying to rank for 1600 terms.
So that's a very different setof requirements if you want to do that.
(13:00):
Well.
And thinking about thiswell up front is really important.
You really can't be accidental about it.
You have to know what keywords should beused to interlink to certain pages.
You need to be really disciplinedabout that so that you're not accidentally
getting in your own way by pointing thewrong internal links at the wrong pages.
(13:22):
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 blogon your website to be sort
of a central point of interconnectednesswith internal linking.
If you are disciplinedabout the keyword choice,
(13:42):
you know which pages are areyou need to flow authority to and from.
That becomes sort of the point of yourIf 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 frontand you won't experience the pain
(14:04):
as you grow, or you can decide to not heedthis advice and you will experience
this pain as you grow.
And you'llthen have months where you're kind of
you're you're much bigger,your cash flow needs are higher.
And you'reyou 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.
(14:25):
Now this isthis 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 sooneryou can get your hands around this,
the better, because you will experienceless pain at some point.
You have to.
(14:46):
You have to figure outto 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 hackwhich is meta descriptions.
(15:09):
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 partnerto your title tag on your page.
You have a clear title tagthat sets the topic of the page,
and a meta descriptionthat speaks to the user,
and I view them as beingnot there, a way to entice the click.
(15:33):
They are not directly relatedto your rank and position.
We're not optimizing them directly forrank and position, we're optimizing them
in order to get a click, entice a click toI mean really we want to
we want to do better here by by by havinga non boring meta description.
(15:55):
Your title tag says what it issets up
authority and confidence in the user.
But your meta description is a hook.
So we might want to say something likelooking for a compassionate divorce
lawyer?
Schedule your consultation today. Click.
Several of the first three thingswe talked about are, I would say are more
(16:18):
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 thingsthat will get you a seat at the table,
which means like you're on theon the first page of
of Google or search resultswhere you can actually be visibly seen.
Then there's other portionsof the algorithm
that are more user metrics based.
So that is,once you have a seat at the table,
(16:38):
does anyone willing to listen to you?
And your first opportunity to have someonelisten to you is do you have
a compelling meta descriptionso that they click on your link?
And then do you have an engaging pagewhen they land on it,
or do they land on your pageand they're like, this thing doesn't
load, bounce or this thing loadedand it doesn't make sense.
(16:58):
Bounce or so on and so forth.
There'sa whole bunch of different user metrics
that aren't really part of the algorithmper se in terms of ranking factors,
but they highly influence ranking factorsbecause if they don't, you don't
have a good user experience.
You're not terminating the search.
So our goaland this is to terminate the search.
One of our first opportunitiesto communicate
well is through our meta descriptions.
(17:20):
That's the first user metric opportunity.
Okay. Made it to the end.
Numberfive is image optimization with alt text.
So we could we could assume thatGoogle can see our images or search
engines can see our imagesand understand them,
and they look nice and they have noor they have no bearing on on search.
(17:41):
But that's wrong.
Search engines understand imagesby what's called alt text.
And againthis is text that we don't usually see.
Sometimesif an image doesn't load on a page,
you might actually see this alt text.
It is literally thereto describe what this image is.
(18:02):
And it's a great opportunityfor for keyword placement
to reinforce the overall topicof that page, to say, you know,
Milwaukee divorce, divorce attorneythat that's a foundational
all tag that we would use on aon a divorce optimized page.
(18:27):
It's easy to missbecause you can't see it.
So our tools really help us identifyand optimize
along these lines to say, okay, there arethere are opportunities here.
And would that be likethis is a picture of a family
That's that's what that's what.
That's what Google would prefer you do.
(18:48):
Actually, that's exactly how Googleoptimizes its own images.
Describe the picture.
But there really if you do itthat way, you're missing a chance
to to add some,some keyword leverage to those
You can.
So you could do thatif you have like
if you on your let's say you had a pictureon your Milwaukee divorce alert page
(19:08):
so you could saypicture of a Milwaukee divorce lawyer
sitting in our Milwaukee office.
Like that would be completely appropriateto leverage.
So I think this is typicallya largely missed opportunity.
Typicallywhen we do our first technical crawls,
(19:29):
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 iswhat's the image file name?
It's another opportunity for you to getkeyword keyword opportunities in there.
So there are there's a whole bunch ofthings related to images that if you want
(19:50):
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 nerdyabout images
and leave to stuff data into Google'salgorithm, because there's ways
to edit, edit, and augment thatso you can optimize images even
(20:10):
there are 68,000family law firms across the country.
So the competition is high.
And so every little thing you can doto help your website outperform
your competitors,especially in your same geographic region.
The better.
There's compelling data to suggest thatthat image optimization
has some bearing on,and the sort of growing
(20:32):
trend of optimizing for AI.
So and there are additional opportunitiesin image search that help lend authority
to your overall website.
So don't don't sleep on on the alt imagesor the alt text on images.
It's a big opportunity.
There it is.
(20:53):
Listeners, I hope you enjoyed thisand got something from it.
Gentlemen, I appreciate your time andwe'll look forward to seeing you again.
You really can't be accidental about it.
You have to know what keywords should beused to interlink to certain pages.
You need to be really disciplinedabout that so that you're not accidentally
getting in your own wayby pointing the wrong
internal links at the wrong pages.
And that happens.
We see that aWelcome back to the Sterling Family
(00:20):
Law Show.
Today We have the co-founder of ourvery 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 fiveSEO fixes the law firm
owners can do to their websitesto boost their visibility.
(00:42):
Nick, give us some insightsinto our first one
which is keywordplacements in page titles.
Tyler.
This is probably one of the.
I mean, it's among the very first thingsthat I would check and
and actually confirmthat these are correct on any website.
So the page titleand the H1 in particular,
(01:07):
the heading one, firstheading on the page,
send some of the strongest signalsto search engines
about what your page is actuallyabout the topic being covered.
So if if you can imagine if you'reif your title is incorrect,
you are not going tonecessarily get placed in the right place
(01:28):
in the library, in Google's library.
You're going to confuse the algorithm.
It's not going to know whereto put your child custody lawyer page.
If that child custody lawyerpage starts with maybe the words.
How our firm helps your family.
You know, something like that.
That's not tiedto the actual content of that page.
(01:52):
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 conciseand to the point
your topic clear and defined.
So for a custody lawyer pageit should be
child custody lawyer ideallychild custody lawyer in city state.
(02:16):
That's typically the structurewe 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 pagefor the rest of the document.
No murder mystery titles here.
What is the page about Tony?
How do we use this at Sterling?
(02:38):
I would say when we'rewhen we look at this for clients
that we work with, one of the first thingsthat we look at is,
are there any missing or duplicatesso that we're avoiding confusion.
So obviously with their sterling sitewe have about 3500 ish pages.
So we have a pretty good map of kind ofhow our content was intended to be built.
(03:01):
So we kind of understandkind of the whole layout of
what is each chapter of our bookand what are the sub chapters and topics,
because that's essentially howyou should view a website is what is the
what is the whole book aboutand how is it organized in your page?
Titles are essentiallyyour chapter chapter headings,
and your headers are essentiallyyour main subtitle for that chapter.
(03:24):
And then you have more,you have more markup with H2
and so on and so forththat we'll talk about in a little bit
that are just telling uswhat the outline of individual pages are
and how they fitinto the context of the whole site.
So this is a really important thingthat you want to get right, because it
communicatescommunicates a lot to to the Google
search algorithm, as wellas any generative search algorithms
(03:47):
that are crawling your pages as well.
So it's very important.
right.
Your your website is a bookin 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.
(04:07):
This one.
This one can be easy to get wrong.
The URL structure should be cleanand 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 aa clear, concise keyword and avoid
(04:36):
over stuffing with keywordsand or having a lack of meaning.
Something likepage question mark ID nonsense.
We want to follow a structure that'sclear, easy to follow for the user
and for search engine.
Something like family law slashdivorce lawyer.
(04:59):
Very clear.
It's very concise.
We've got some meaning within that.
We don't have to havea really long page URL.
And it's going to reinforce withthe topic is about.
Tony, you developed the URL structureat Sterling.
And it was if I remember correctly,it was very template based.
Like each page had very similar thingsand you replaced different words.
(05:20):
Is that right?
I wouldn't say that.
I would say each section of the sitehas a very clear intention.
So if you were to look atlike one of the main pages,
that gets a lot of inboundtraffic is our Milwaukee location page.
So the URL structure for that is SterlingWisconsin
(05:41):
locations slash Milwaukee.
So if I were just to give you that,you could very easily figure out
like whatwhat do you think that page is about.
Because it would be probably very obviousthat that is about our
Milwaukee, Wisconsin location pagefor where we do services.
So your URL structure should be simpleand should be able to communicate
(06:05):
something that has inherent meaning.
So this gets over complicated often.
So they're not thought aboutand everything's at the root level.
Or it's people get way too cuteand they try to keyword
stuff the heck out of everything.
So I'm going to you know, bothboth scenarios aren't
beneficial for you actually in the longAnd really, you won't see
(06:27):
the negative impacts of that until you tryto continue to grow your site.
Because at the beginning,if you have like an 18 page site,
you're not going to feelthe negative impacts of bad URL structure.
But as you start to grow your siteand you have 500, 600, 700 pages,
what's going to end up happening is you'reyou're now going to start
to feel the pain of a poor IRL structureand poorly organized content.
(06:50):
And now you have a larger.
Yeah, now you have a larger firmin all reality, and you want to continue
to grow that thing, and you actuallyare setting yourself up for kind of a,
okay, we're goingto have to go through a lull season here
because I didn't think about this ahead of100. Yeah, that's a great point.
Is as your websiteand firm becomes more complex,
(07:13):
you're going to need more rigidityand and
less less complexity withwithin your website structure.
All right.
Nick number three is your internal linkingstrategy.
So other pageslinking to other pages on your site.
Yeah, I love internal linking.
(07:34):
It's it's one of the best ways to.
Well, it's one of the biggest toolsin our tool belt to actually
to send authority throughout your websitefrom the different pages on your website.
So we can really use it to reinforcethe overall
topical authority of say,okay, family law.
(07:55):
Well, what whatwhat is what makes up family law?
You know what?
Divorce, child custody, alimony, etc.
down the list, all of these differenttopical pages I want to connect together.
They reinforce each otherand they in turn reinforce
the authority of youryour overall brand and domain.
(08:16):
I like to think about it like like the,the the electricity
running through your house.
You need the wiring throughout your housethat needs to go to the light switches
and the lights.
And I want to light up the whole house.
Does it alsoallow you to funnel authority
to your most important pages?
(08:37):
Oh, absolutely. To and from.
So your most important pages,I mean from a link
from a backlink perspectiveI want some pages
are going to attract a lot ofa lot of external links are going
to just have a lot of natural authority.
Your homepage is the prime example of that.
I want to flow from my homepage to the pages.
(08:59):
I need to then in turnhave a lot of authority to rank more.
So I really want to make thosethose pages, the central,
the pages that that drivetraffic, drive revenue.
I want to make them the central pointof any internal linking plans.
I want to support them.
I want lots of internal links,lots of lots of lots of internal links
(09:21):
coming to those specific pages.
When was thelast 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 aboutit is sitting in your CRM right now
without an owner, without a follow update, and no next step?
(09:41):
That lead is not dead.
That's revenue that you will not getthat you forgot about.
At Sterling Lawyers, 75% of our revenuecomes 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.
(10:05):
We're teaching the exact follow up systembehind 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 behindevery lead until they book?
Please see the link belowso that you can sign up today.
Tony,would you say that's how we leverage
(10:26):
internal linking and Sterlingor is there any Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we have we kind oflook at this in two different ways.
So there's kind of a strategicinternal linking.
So basically every page on the Sterlingwebsite is linked
linked to the home page for that state,the attorney page for that state
and the location hub for that state.
(10:46):
And then those pages divert authorityto the remainder of the
site where appropriate.
So there all those are kindof the three central hub locations
for all of my the link equity.
The second portion of itis kind of content clustering.
So all the main important divorce pages,they're interlinked together
so that we have topical authorityfor divorce.
(11:10):
You know divorce is getting linkedto from from several of those pages
that I mentioned, attorney the home pageand some of the location pages.
So then how am I funneling that downinto some of the most important
topics for divorce,like how to file for divorce?
What what are the common groundsfor divorce, and things like that
that allows me to rank for all of thosedifferent things because you can't,
(11:34):
you know,if you just if you don't think
about this, you're essentially goingto 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 rankfor all these different things?
And you're going to end uplikely just spinning up
a whole bunch of bad pages,which is we see that often
where you have all differentpermutations of exact match keyword
stuffed in the Earl and in the title,and there's not
(11:56):
a whole lot of differentiationin the content.
And then you get hitwith a, you know, a content spam
algorithm hit because youaren't really doing things the right way
strategically with how you're thinkingabout your content structurally
and then internally, internallylinking it together so that you're
flowing the authority around theEverything we're talking about today
(12:17):
is it's like hygiene, right?
It's doing things the right wayover the long term so that you don't
all of a sudden countersome major issues on your Again,
you're not going to feel the painsof poor internal linking.
And until you continue to grow your site.
So like this is something that like firmsas they grow they get like surprised by
(12:40):
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 easybecause you had five pages on your site.
It's very easy to rank a five page websitefor like six terms,
but you now have a 400 page sitethat you're trying to rank for 1600 terms.
So that's a very different setof requirements if you want to do that.
(13:00):
Well.
And thinking about thiswell up front is really important.
You really can't be accidental about it.
You have to know what keywords should beused to interlink to certain pages.
You need to be really disciplinedabout that so that you're not accidentally
getting in your own way by pointing thewrong internal links at the wrong pages.
(13:22):
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 blogon your website to be sort
of a central point of interconnectednesswith internal linking.
If you are disciplinedabout the keyword choice,
(13:42):
you know which pages are areyou need to flow authority to and from.
That becomes sort of the point of yourIf 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 frontand you won't experience the pain
(14:04):
as you grow, or you can decide to not heedthis advice and you will experience
this pain as you grow.
And you'llthen have months where you're kind of
you're you're much bigger,your cash flow needs are higher.
And you'reyou 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.
(14:25):
Now this isthis 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 sooneryou can get your hands around this,
the better, because you will experienceless pain at some point.
You have to.
(14:46):
You have to figure outto 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 hackwhich is meta descriptions.
(15:09):
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 partnerto your title tag on your page.
You have a clear title tagthat sets the topic of the page,
and a meta descriptionthat speaks to the user,
and I view them as beingnot there, a way to entice the click.
(15:33):
They are not directly relatedto your rank and position.
We're not optimizing them directly forrank and position, we're optimizing them
in order to get a click, entice a click toI mean really we want to
we want to do better here by by by havinga non boring meta description.
(15:55):
Your title tag says what it issets up
authority and confidence in the user.
But your meta description is a hook.
So we might want to say something likelooking for a compassionate divorce
lawyer?
Schedule your consultation today. Click.
Several of the first three thingswe talked about are, I would say are more
(16:18):
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 thingsthat will get you a seat at the table,
which means like you're on theon the first page of
of Google or search resultswhere you can actually be visibly seen.
Then there's other portionsof the algorithm
that are more user metrics based.
So that is,once you have a seat at the table,
(16:38):
does anyone willing to listen to you?
And your first opportunity to have someonelisten to you is do you have
a compelling meta descriptionso that they click on your link?
And then do you have an engaging pagewhen they land on it,
or do they land on your pageand they're like, this thing doesn't
load, bounce or this thing loadedand it doesn't make sense.
(16:58):
Bounce or so on and so forth.
There'sa whole bunch of different user metrics
that aren't really part of the algorithmper se in terms of ranking factors,
but they highly influence ranking factorsbecause if they don't, you don't
have a good user experience.
You're not terminating the search.
So our goaland this is to terminate the search.
One of our first opportunitiesto communicate
well is through our meta descriptions.
(17:20):
That's the first user metric opportunity.
Okay. Made it to the end.
Numberfive is image optimization with alt text.
So we could we could assume thatGoogle can see our images or search
engines can see our imagesand understand them,
and they look nice and they have noor they have no bearing on on search.
(17:41):
But that's wrong.
Search engines understand imagesby what's called alt text.
And againthis is text that we don't usually see.
Sometimesif an image doesn't load on a page,
you might actually see this alt text.
It is literally thereto describe what this image is.
(18:02):
And it's a great opportunityfor for keyword placement
to reinforce the overall topicof that page, to say, you know,
Milwaukee divorce, divorce attorneythat that's a foundational
all tag that we would use on aon a divorce optimized page.
(18:27):
It's easy to missbecause you can't see it.
So our tools really help us identifyand optimize
along these lines to say, okay, there arethere are opportunities here.
And would that be likethis is a picture of a family
That's that's what that's what.
That's what Google would prefer you do.
(18:48):
Actually, that's exactly how Googleoptimizes its own images.
Describe the picture.
But there really if you do itthat way, you're missing a chance
to to add some,some keyword leverage to those
You can.
So you could do thatif you have like
if you on your let's say you had a pictureon your Milwaukee divorce alert page
(19:08):
so you could saypicture of a Milwaukee divorce lawyer
sitting in our Milwaukee office.
Like that would be completely appropriateto leverage.
So I think this is typicallya largely missed opportunity.
Typicallywhen we do our first technical crawls,
(19:29):
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 iswhat's the image file name?
It's another opportunity for you to getkeyword keyword opportunities in there.
So there are there's a whole bunch ofthings related to images that if you want
(19:50):
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 nerdyabout images
and leave to stuff data into Google'salgorithm, because there's ways
to edit, edit, and augment thatso you can optimize images even
(20:10):
there are 68,000family law firms across the country.
So the competition is high.
And so every little thing you can doto help your website outperform
your competitors,especially in your same geographic region.
The better.
There's compelling data to suggest thatthat image optimization
has some bearing on,and the sort of growing
(20:32):
trend of optimizing for AI.
So and there are additional opportunitiesin image search that help lend authority
to your overall website.
So don't don't sleep on on the alt imagesor the alt text on images.
It's a big opportunity.
There it is.
(20:53):
Listeners, I hope you enjoyed thisand got something from it.
Gentlemen, I appreciate your time andwe'll look forward to seeing you again.
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