The numbers behind family law SEO — and what they actually mean for your practice

Most family law firms know SEO is generating some business. The problem is they can't say how much. A prospective client Googles "divorce attorney [city]," finds your site, reads three pages, waits two weeks, then calls your intake coordinator. By the time that call happens, your front desk has no idea the client came from organic search.

This attribution gap causes two problems. First, firms underestimate what SEO is delivering, which leads to premature cancellations. Second, they can't make informed decisions about where to increase investment.

Accurate ROI measurement requires closing three gaps:

• Traffic-to-lead gap: Google Analytics shows visits, but not how many visitors became inquiries. You need goal tracking on your contact form and call tracking numbers tied to organic traffic specifically.
• Lead-to-client gap: Not every inquiry becomes a retained client. Your intake data needs a source field so you can calculate close rates by channel.
• Client-to-revenue gap: Family law matters vary widely in fee structure. Tracking average fee per organic client — even roughly — turns lead counts into revenue projections.

None of this requires enterprise software. A properly configured Google Analytics 4 property, a call tracking tool like CallRail, and a simple intake spreadsheet or CRM field will capture what you need. The firms that skip this setup spend months arguing about whether SEO is working instead of measuring it.

Once your tracking is in place, the calculation is straightforward. Here's the framework managing partners use:

1. Monthly organic leads: Total inquiries (form fills + tracked calls) attributed to organic search in a given month.
2. Close rate: The percentage of organic leads your intake process converts to retained clients. Many family law firms see close rates between 20% and 40% on organic leads, though this varies significantly by intake process quality and the complexity of matters you handle.
3. Average case value: Your average fee per matter, calculated across the organic clients you've actually closed. Uncontested divorces and complex custody disputes have very different values — track them separately if your mix is varied.
4. Monthly organic revenue: Multiply organic leads × close rate × average case value.
5. Monthly SEO cost: Your retainer or in-house cost, including any content production or technical work.
6. ROI: (Monthly organic revenue − Monthly SEO cost) ÷ Monthly SEO cost × 100.

A simple example: if SEO generates 15 organic leads per month, you close 30% of them (4-5 clients), and your average case value is $4,500, that's roughly $18,000–$22,500 in monthly revenue from the channel. Against a $3,000/month SEO investment, the return is significant — and it compounds as rankings strengthen.

The important caveat: this framework only works if your tracking is accurate. Garbage-in, garbage-out. Many firms report higher ROI once they fix attribution than they estimated when guessing.

One of the most common reasons family law firms conclude SEO "doesn't work" is that they evaluated it on the wrong timeline. SEO is not a paid channel where you fund a campaign and see leads the same week. It builds authority over time, and the return curve is back-weighted.

Here's what a typical engagement looks like, understanding that results vary meaningfully by market size, competition, and the authority your site starts with:

• Months 1–2: Technical and on-page foundation work. Rankings may shift, but qualified leads are unlikely. This phase is not where ROI appears.
• Months 3–4: Content targeting mid-funnel queries begins to rank. You may see early-stage traffic increases. The occasional lead starts appearing from long-tail queries.
• Months 5–6: If the foundation is solid, high-intent local queries begin moving into page one. This is where the first measurable organic leads typically arrive for competitive markets.
• Months 6–12: Organic lead volume becomes consistent. For many practices, this is when the monthly ROI calculation first turns positive.
• Month 12+: Compounding effect. Existing rankings generate leads without incremental cost. New content compounds on existing authority. Cost-per-lead from organic typically decreases over this period as output stays steady and costs flatten.

Firms that cancel at month 4 — when they've paid for foundation work but haven't yet received its output — capture none of the return. This is the single most expensive mistake in family law SEO investment decisions.

The following is a representative example drawn from the types of engagements we run for family law practices. It is not a verbatim case study — client confidentiality obligations under Rule 1.6 mean we don't publish identifying details without explicit permission, and even then we're careful about what outcome claims we make publicly.

A mid-size family law firm in a competitive metro market had been running paid search exclusively. Their cost-per-lead from Google Ads had climbed over three years to a level that made client acquisition expensive relative to case fees on lower-complexity matters.

They engaged us to build an organic channel in parallel, not as a replacement for paid search. Over the first twelve months:

• Organic sessions grew from negligible to representing a meaningful share of total site traffic
• High-intent local queries — specifically variations of "divorce attorney [city]" and "custody lawyer [neighborhood]" — moved from outside the top 50 to page one positions
• Tracked organic leads went from near-zero to a consistent monthly volume that, at their close rate and average case value, exceeded their SEO investment cost

The specific numbers aren't the point. The structure is: they had a measurable baseline, they tracked organic leads with call tracking and form attribution, and they calculated ROI against actual case fees — not projected or theoretical revenue.

What made this work wasn't any single tactic. It was a consistent content strategy targeting the queries their clients actually use, technical cleanup that resolved crawl issues their previous agency had left unaddressed, and map pack optimization that pushed their Google Business Profile into the top three for their primary service area.

If you want to see how this framework applies to your firm's specific market and case mix, the family law SEO engagement starts with exactly that analysis.

These are the objections we hear most often from family law managing partners evaluating whether to invest in SEO. Here are direct answers, without spin.

"We've tried SEO before and it didn't work."
This usually means one of three things: the previous agency optimized for traffic instead of qualified leads, the engagement was cancelled before rankings matured, or attribution was never set up so no one knew what was actually converting. Before assuming SEO doesn't work for your firm, it's worth diagnosing which of these happened.

"We already get referrals. Why do we need this?"
Referral networks are valuable and worth protecting. SEO serves a different population: people who don't have a personal connection to a lawyer and are searching independently. These are often contested matters with higher fee potential, since people with simpler situations are more likely to take a referred name without shopping. The two channels don't compete.

"Paid search gives us leads now. SEO takes too long."
Paid search is a valid channel with a real cost-per-lead. The case for SEO isn't that it replaces paid search — it's that organic leads, once earned, cost less to maintain than paid leads, which stop the moment billing stops. Over a 2–3 year horizon, most practices find organic significantly more cost-efficient per retained client.

"I can't tell if our current SEO is working."
That's a measurement problem, not an SEO problem. Set up call tracking tied to organic traffic, add a source field to your intake form, and calculate the formula in the section above. If you have an agency that can't show you these numbers, that's worth addressing directly.