Why Getting E-A-T Right Is So Important For Family Law Practice Websites

As a family law practice, you may have had a sizeable dip in your keyword rankings and website traffic back in August of 2018. Back in August Google released an update to their algorithm that greatly affected family law practice sites that didn’t have enough E-A-T.  E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trust. Sites that didn’t measure up, lost a lot of ground in their search visibility and drops in organic search traffic to their websites.

In its Quality Raters’ Guidelines, Google includes what it wants to see in sites that it considers to be Your Money Or Your Life sites. Sites giving legal advice and information about divorce are specifically mentioned in the guidelines.  These sites are held to a higher level of expertise on their subject and for good reason. So when you’re marketing your family law practice you need to take this guidance into account. 

This is great for the general public and the family law industry because it filters out less qualified information out of the search results.  However, it does put a burden on your family law practice to make sure you do a great job of letting Google know about your practice’s E-A-T.

So here’s what you can do to your family law practice’s website to increase your Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

• Make sure all of your contact information is clear and present on the site. You should be doing this with any business site, but since Google mentions it in the Guidelines, we’ll reinforce it here. You should clearly display your email address, phone number, and physical address and have a contact form.
• You should have a visible presence on your own site as an author of the content and an on a detailed profile page with your schooling, years in business, the number of cases handled, degrees you hold, any industry group memberships, awards, mentions in the press with links to them, etc.  Anything that will help you boost your expertise and authority. Don’t be afraid to be a little braggy.
• Have a review strategy.  Get reviews from each happy client right after you have completed their engagement.  You can also email people to ask them to review you. However, do your review asking over time. If you get a lot of reviews in a short period of time the review platforms will not count them.
• Add a testimonials section to the site. Just like reviews you can ask for testimonials from happy customers.  Ask them when you finish your engagement.
• Get visible off your own website. There are tons of ways to get your content published off your website but on other websites. This strategy also helps you get links back to your website and that will help your SEO. You can write full articles for publication on other websites.  You can participate in roundup type posts. You can also get on some podcasts, they often have a website where they can link to your website. You can even do public speaking.  Even small groups promote their events on social media. All of this can help.
• Make sure that you have top quality content on your website and that it is updated regularly.  If you have a blogging strategy in place, you should be displaying the author name and date published on your posts. It’s also fine and recommended to go back and update your older posts with newer additional content if possible.
• Update your LinkedIn with all of your qualifications. While it’s not known if Google looks at LinkedIn, most people probably do. It makes sense and LinkedIn is very active these days so it’s worth the few minutes it will take to update it.

As a YMYL website, family law practices are scrutinized in a whole different way.  These tips should help you get your E-A-T up to snuff. If you have questions or need further help, please do not hesitate to reach out to us here at Peak Inbound Marketing (973) 770-4668.