Family law SEO: a guide for divorce, finance and children solicitors

What is different about a family law search

Every other consumer practice area has a client and a problem. Family law has two clients, one of whom will instruct somebody else, and a problem that each of them describes differently. The person thinking about leaving searches for what it would mean; the person who suspects it searches for what their rights are; both search for what the children’s position would be, and later both search about the other. A family firm’s pages are read by the spouse of its client as often as by the client, and a page that is written for one side reads badly to the other.

The second difference is the scale of self-representation. The Ministry of Justice’s family court statistics for January to March 2026 show that in 49 per cent of private law children disposals neither party was legally represented, up three points on the year, and that only 13 per cent had both parties represented.¹ Divorce itself is an online application on GOV.UK, and more than a quarter of applications are now made jointly.¹ The person searching “do I need a solicitor for a divorce” is asking a real question, and the honest answer for the application alone is usually no. The honest answer for the finances and the children is usually yes, and the firm that explains that distinction is the one that gets instructed for the part that matters.

The third is time. The sector page on family law firm marketing describes the weeks of private research before anyone rings; the court statistics add the rest of the picture. From application, the mean time to a conditional order is 39 weeks and to a final order 67 weeks, and a private law children case takes a mean of 35 weeks to dispose of.¹ People search throughout. A family site has to serve the person at month nine as well as the one at week one, and a search programme has to be judged over a timescale that matches.

The divorce timeline, and the searches along it

The Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 came into force on 6 April 2022 and replaced the fault-based process with a single statement that the marriage has broken down, a minimum of twenty weeks between application and conditional order, and six weeks between conditional and final order.² Because the process is fixed and public, the questions people ask at each point are predictable, and so is the point at which a solicitor becomes relevant.

Two consequences for a search programme. The first is that the “thinking about it” and “afterwards” stages are where the firm’s expertise is least contested, because GOV.UK and the online divorce services only cover the middle. The second is that the stage a page is written for should be visible in the first line, so that a person at month nine does not land on a page written for week one and leave.

Who is on page one, and what they give away

Type any process question about divorce and the first organic result is GOV.UK’s own divorce service, followed by Citizens Advice and Advicenow, which are accurate, free and endorsed by the courts. Type a cost question and the online divorce services appear, offering the application for a fixed fee, alongside mediation services and the government’s voucher scheme. Type almost anything and an AI Overview assembles the answer from those sources first, because they are the ones Google trusts most on the topic.³ Then come the national family law firms, which have spent a decade building large sites with a page for every town and every question.

A regional family practice cannot outrank GOV.UK on “how to apply for a divorce” and should not want to; the page would bring people who are going to do it themselves. What the free sources cannot do is apply the law to a situation. “Can my husband stop me selling the house” is not answered on GOV.UK, nor “will I have to share my inheritance”, nor “my ex is refusing to let me see the children at Christmas what can I do”. Those are the questions a solicitor answers in an initial meeting, and a page that answers them in the solicitor’s voice, with the caveats a solicitor would give, is what gets cited by the AI Overview and clicked beneath it. The free sources describe the system; the firm’s pages describe what to do.

The national firms are the organic competition that matters. Their advantage is authority built over years; their weakness is that the pages are templated across hundreds of locations and written at a distance from any particular solicitor. Google’s spam policies now treat town pages for places a firm has no presence in as doorway pages, and the sites built on them have been losing ground since 2024.⁴ A firm with three offices and twelve family solicitors who are visible on the pages they are expert in has a structural advantage it did not have five years ago.

Where the fees are: matching searches to matters

The court statistics give an unusually clear map of where family work is. In January to March 2026 there were 28,632 divorce applications, 12,646 financial remedy applications of which 73 per cent were uncontested, 15,534 private law children cases started, and 9,322 applications for domestic violence remedy orders, 82 per cent of them for non-molestation orders.¹ Searches follow a different shape: divorce dominates the volume, finance and children questions are more specific and more numerous than they look in a keyword tool, and injunction searches are small, urgent and often made by someone else on the person’s behalf.

The decision this table forces is which rows the firm wants, because the site cannot be excellent for all of them at once and does not need to be. A firm that wants financial remedy work builds the finance spine first and lets the divorce pages be short and honest. A firm with a children specialist builds the arrangements pages around that person. The sequence matters more than the total.

Writing for someone in a crisis

A non-molestation order page is not a matter page. The person reading it may be reading it with the other person in the next room, on a phone whose history will be checked, with minutes rather than an evening. The page has to work for that reader first: what the order does, how quickly it can be obtained, that it can be applied for without notice, what evidence helps, whether legal aid is available, and a number to ring now. Everything else, the law, the procedure, the firm’s experience, comes after and is shorter than it would be anywhere else.

Urgent children pages are similar: a child not returned after contact, a threat to take a child abroad, a parent who has moved without agreement. The reader wants to know what order exists, how fast it can be obtained and what to do in the next hour, and a page that opens with the Children Act’s welfare checklist has lost them. These pages also carry a measurement lesson: they produce few searches and few enquiries, and the enquiries they produce are among the most valuable and most grateful clients a family firm has.

The cost question

The court fee for a divorce application is £628, help with fees exists for those on low incomes, and an uncontested application can be made for a few hundred pounds through an online service or for nothing by the person themselves.⁶ Every page one result for the cost question says so, and so does the AI Overview. A firm’s page that answers with its own hourly rate has answered a question nobody asked. The question underneath is “what will it cost to sort out the money and the children”, and that is a question a firm can answer better than anyone on page one, because the free sources do not and the online services do not do that work.

The SRA Transparency Rules require published prices for certain services and family law is not among them, which is why most family sites say nothing about fees at all.⁷ That silence is the opportunity. A page that explains what is usually a fixed fee and what is usually hourly, what a consent order typically costs, what drives a contested financial case up, what an initial meeting costs and what it includes, and what legal aid still covers, is the page people are looking for when they type the cost question, and it is a page the national firms are reluctant to publish because their fees vary by office. Publish the structure, with the ranges the firm is comfortable with and a solicitor’s note on what moves them. It converts because it is rare.

Structuring a family law site: issue by stage

Most family sites are a list of services in the order the firm thinks of them. The searches do not arrive that way. They arrive as an issue at a stage, and a site that is organised as a grid of issue by stage has a page for each combination that is actually searched, cross-linked along both axes, so that the person who arrives at “consent order” can move to “what happens to the pension” without going back to a menu.

The grid also disciplines the firm against the two failure modes of family sites: the single enormous “divorce” page that tries to cover every cell and ranks for none, and the hundred thin pages that cover every cell in two paragraphs each. A cell earns a page when the firm’s solicitors get asked the question often and have something to say about it that GOV.UK does not; otherwise it is a section of the neighbouring page or nothing.

Writing for both sides, and for parents

The person who searches “how do I stop my ex seeing the kids” is angry, and the page that tells them they cannot, and why, and what they can do instead, is the page that gets the instruction, because it sounds like a solicitor who will tell them the truth. The page that promises to fight for them sounds like every other page and attracts the clients who will later complain. Family content works when it is written as a good family solicitor speaks: direct, calm, on the child’s side, and clear about what the court will and will not do.

Three practical rules. Write gender-neutrally unless the search is not; “my husband” and “my wife” searches both exist and the page should use the reader’s term where it can. Use the words people use before the words the court uses: “contact” and “custody” are still what people type, and a page can say so and then explain “child arrangements order” rather than refusing to use the old term. And answer in the first paragraph, because that is what an AI Overview extracts and what a reader on a phone at midnight sees before deciding whether to scroll.³

Resolution’s Code of Practice commits its members to a constructive, non-confrontational approach that puts children first.⁸ Most family firms are members and most of their websites say so in the footer while the pages above talk about fighting. Writing the site to the Code is a differentiator precisely because it is rare, and it is the tone that both parties, and the judge, and Google’s quality raters, respond to.

Local search for a family practice

Divorce is national in law and local in practice. People search “family solicitors near me” and “divorce solicitors [town]” because they expect to meet the person, and because the court they will go to is local. Google’s map pack appears for most of those searches and takes a large share of the clicks, which makes the Business Profile for each office, with family law among its categories and reviews that mention family matters, worth more than most of the site. The office pages behind the profile need the family solicitors who actually sit in that office, not a generic team page.

Beyond the office, the local family court is a subject. Which court a case will go to, how long it is listing for first hearings, whether it has a dedicated financial remedy centre, what the local Cafcass arrangements are: these are questions people ask and nobody publishes, because the national firms cannot write about every court and the free sources do not. From 2026 the government is extending Child Focused Courts, the model piloted as Pathfinder in Dorset and North Wales, to Northumbria and North Durham, Cleveland and South Durham, Lancashire, Cumbria, York and North Yorkshire, Cheshire and Merseyside, Northamptonshire and Coventry and Warwickshire, with the rest of England and Wales to follow.⁹ A firm in one of those areas that explains, in its own solicitors’ words, what the new model means for a parent making an application there has a page that is local, timely, searched and unoccupied.

Proof, within the confidentiality rules

Section 12 of the Administration of Justice Act 1960 makes it a contempt to publish information relating to proceedings about children, and the family courts’ open reporting provisions, extended to all family courts in England and Wales from 27 January 2025, allow journalists to report but preserve the anonymity of children and families through transparency orders.¹⁰ A firm cannot publish “we acted for Mrs X in her £2m financial remedy case”. It can publish, with the client’s informed consent, an anonymised description of the issue and the outcome, and it can publish the solicitor who did it, with everything that makes that person credible.

So the proof on a family site is the people. The Law Society’s Family Law Accreditation, the Advanced accreditation and the Children Law Accreditation each have public standards and registers; Resolution membership and its Accredited Specialist status likewise.¹¹ Each solicitor’s profile should carry theirs, with the kinds of matter they run, the courts they appear in, and a photograph. Those profiles are what Google’s quality guidelines look for on a legal page and what a person deciding whether to trust someone with their children looks for too. Every issue page links to the people who handle that issue, and every profile links back.

Reviews work in family law but not through an automated email the day after the final order. The firms with strong family reviews ask at the right moment, usually when the client says thank you, explain where the review will appear and that it need not say anything about the matter, and make it easy. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 prohibits fake reviews and the suppression of genuine ones, and a family firm’s reviews should look like what they are: a smaller number of specific, sometimes raw, accounts of being well looked after.¹²

Links a family firm can earn

Family law sits inside a network of other services that a separating person uses, and most of those services have websites with partner or resource pages. A firm that provides a solicitor for a mediation service’s information sessions, speaks at a parenting charity’s event, writes a plain-English resource for a local domestic abuse service, or works with a financial adviser on pension-sharing explanations earns links that are relevant, local and unbuyable. The same applies to the local family court’s user group, the collaborative law pod the firm belongs to, and the local Resolution region.

Data is the other route and family law has a better source than most. The Ministry of Justice publishes family court statistics every quarter with regional breakdowns, and freedom of information requests to HM Courts and Tribunals Service will produce listing times by court.¹ “Parents in [county] now wait X weeks for a first hearing” is a story the regional press runs, with a quote from the firm’s solicitor and a link to the analysis. One such piece a quarter, done properly, is worth more than any number of articles about what to do on Divorce Day.

Measuring family law SEO

Two features of family work make attribution harder than in other practice areas. The first is the gap: a person reads the pension page in February, the consent order page in April and rings in June after searching the firm’s name, and a last-click report credits the brand search. The firm’s intake question, “how did you hear about us”, answered honestly and recorded, is the correction; so is watching brand searches rise in Search Console as the issue pages gain traffic. The second is the conflict check, which removes enquiries the firm could never have taken; the conflict rate by source tells you whether a page is attracting the second party to an existing client’s matter, which happens more than firms expect.

The report that a family partner can use is quarterly, by issue: enquiries, meetings, retainers, and the fee value of those retainers, against the pages and searches that produced them. Monthly figures in family are too noisy to act on; the research gap and the school holidays see to that. Our page on knowing whether marketing is working covers the tracking that makes this possible.

Mistakes we see on family law sites

• A “divorce solicitors” page for every town in the county. Google treats them as doorway pages; take them down before building anything.
• One long divorce page for everything. Finances, children and the process in one page that ranks for none of them. Split it along the grid in Part 7.
• Combative language. “Fight for your rights” copy that repels the other party, the judge and the Resolution Code, and attracts the wrong clients.
• Process content that is out of date. Pages still describing the five facts, decree nisi and absolute, four years after they went. A solicitor’s name on an out-of-date page is worse than no name.
• Nothing on fees. Silence where a structure would win the enquiry, and a “from £X” where a solicitor’s explanation would have kept it.
• Abuse pages built like matter pages. No exit, no legal aid explanation, no phone number until the fourth screen.
• Divorce Day posts. Every January, a post about the January spike, read by nobody who is getting divorced.
• Celebrity divorces as content. Commentary on cases the firm had nothing to do with, that bring readers who will never instruct.
• AI-written children pages. Welfare checklist recited, forms named wrongly, timings invented. A family solicitor has to check every line, as both Google’s guidance and the SRA’s rules expect.¹³
• Profiles without substance. “A member of the family team” with no accreditation, no matters, no photograph, on a site asking people to trust the firm with their children.

The first ninety days for a family team

Questions family lawyers ask

• Is it worth trying to rank for “divorce solicitors” at all?

  For the firm’s own towns, through the map pack and the office pages, yes. Nationally, no. The organic results for the generic term are national firms with years of authority, and the people searching it are at the stage where the application is the question and the application is on GOV.UK.

• Should we publish fees when the Transparency Rules do not require it?

  Yes, as a structure with ranges and a solicitor’s explanation of what moves them. It answers the question people actually type, it is rare, and it filters out the enquiries that were only ever going to use an online service.

• How do we show expertise when we cannot talk about cases?

  Through the people. Accreditations, the kinds of matter each solicitor runs, the courts they appear in, and anonymised outcomes with consent. A site where every issue page leads to a named, accredited solicitor is doing what a case study would do.

• Does mediation content compete with our own work?

  No. Courts expect non-court dispute resolution to have been considered, the voucher scheme has made mediation cheap, and a firm that explains it honestly is trusted for the consent order that follows and the cases where mediation fails.¹⁴

• How long before family SEO produces retainers?

  Allow six months to see the first retainers that can be traced to new pages, and a year to judge it, because of the research gap. Judge quarterly, by issue. Paid search can produce meetings sooner if the firm needs them.

• Can we use AI to write family content?

  For structure and drafts, with a family solicitor checking every statement of law and procedure before it is published. The process changed completely in 2022 and AI tools still produce the old one.

• Should we write for the other party?

  You already are, whether or not you intend to. Write as a Resolution member would speak to either of them, and the pages will serve your client, read acceptably to the other side, and bring the kind of client the firm wants.

• Do we need separate pages for civil partnership dissolution?

  Usually a section, not a page. The process is the same since 2022 and the searches are a fraction of those for divorce. Say clearly on the divorce pages that everything applies to dissolution, and build a separate page only if the firm has a specialism to show.