Local search when you're the alternative to a courtroom

Mediators lose search twice: once to a category that files them with litigators, and once to searchers who have never been told mediation exists.

A vegetarian restaurant listed under steakhouse has two problems at the same time. The people who arrive are expecting something it does not serve and leave unhappy, and the people who were looking for exactly what it does serve never scrolled through a list of steakhouses to find it. Both problems come from one line in a form.

That is the position most divorce mediators and collaborative practices are in on Google, and it is not because anybody was careless. The setup screen offers the categories it offers, "Lawyer" is right there, plenty of mediators are lawyers, and so the box gets ticked. Then the profile spends three years competing for searches from people who want a fight, against firms built to give them one.

The primary category is a positioning decision

Google decides which searches a profile is even eligible for partly by category, and the primary one carries most of that weight. So the choice is not administrative. It is the same decision as what goes on the sign.

For a practice whose work is genuinely mediation, the mediation category is the one that makes you eligible for the searches you want, and it does something else worth having: it puts you in a shorter list. Family law is a crowded, expensive category in every county in North America. Mediation is a fraction of the competition for a search where the person already knows what they are asking for.

Attorney-mediators have a real decision to make here rather than a right answer. If most of your revenue is representation and mediation is a service you also offer, the litigation-side category is honest and the mediation category goes in as a secondary. If you have deliberately built a non-adversarial practice and you are turning down contested files, filing yourself as a divorce lawyer is working against you every day. Pick the one that names the work you want more of, add the others as secondaries, and check the choices against the live category list rather than an article, because the list changes.

The words people actually type

Here is the part that costs mediators more than the category does. A large share of the people who would be best served by mediation have never heard the word used about their own situation. They are not searching for a mediator. They are searching for "uncontested divorce," "divorce without going to court," "how much does a divorce cost," "cheapest way to get divorced," and, at eleven at night, "do I need a lawyer to get divorced."

"Collaborative divorce" is a precise term of art and almost nobody outside the profession types it. Naming your practice around it is fine. Betting your search visibility on it is not.

The practical move is to make the profile answer those plain questions where Google will show the answer. Services listed in the language a frightened person would use rather than the language a professional would. The Q&A section on the profile seeded with the five questions your intake call already answers every week, answered plainly. Descriptions that use the phrase people search alongside the phrase you would prefer they used. All of that amounts to meeting somebody at the words they already have.

Reviews, and what they signal before anyone reads them

Reviews do two jobs for a mediation practice, and the second one is the reason to care.

The obvious job is trust. The quieter job is pre-qualification. Somebody deciding between mediation and hiring a litigator is reading review text to work out which kind of experience they are walking into, and they decide that from the vocabulary long before they finish a sentence. A page of reviews describing calm rooms, timelines and agreements reads differently from a page describing wins. Neither is better in the abstract. One of them brings you the clients you can actually help.

The mechanics of asking, in the plainest terms. Ask at the moment the work concludes well, out loud, by a human, rather than by an automated sequence three months later. Give people the direct link so the request costs them twenty seconds. Ask an open question, "what was it like to work through this here," so people write in their own words. Reply to every review you get.

Two hard lines that are platform rules rather than opinions. Never offer anything in exchange for a review, and never filter who gets asked based on how happy they seem. Both violate Google's policies and both can take a profile down.

And one line I will not cross. Whether you may solicit a testimonial, what a satisfied-client review is permitted to say, whether a disclaimer is required, and how any of it interacts with the confidentiality that mediation runs on: those are questions for your own bar counsel or your certifying body, not for me and not for this page. I will build the plumbing and tell you honestly where the plumbing stops. The guide on review requests draws that same line and explains what is on each side of it.

Expect low volume, incidentally, and do not read it as failure. Family law and mediation clients decline to review in public at a far higher rate than any other local business category, for reasons that are entirely reasonable. Comparing your eleven reviews to the dentist's four hundred tells you nothing.

The people finding you privately

Mediation-curious searchers overlap almost exactly with the people who search carefully: private windows, phones rather than shared computers, late at night, sometimes with a browser history they intend to clear. That behavior breaks the numbers you would normally use to tell whether any of this is working, and it breaks them in a specific and predictable direction. It is worth understanding before you judge a quarter's results. How private and incognito search changes who finds you covers what to measure instead.

What I do about it

Category and positioning work sits inside the Good size at $1,200, one payment. Most mediation practices want the Better size at $2,200, which adds the directory corrections, the review setup that is yours to keep, and the wording work against what people in your county actually type. The homepage has the full breakdown of all three sizes, and if you are an attorney-mediator inside a larger firm, the small firm page covers the listing structure question that comes with that. If the site itself needs to read as non-litigation and does not yet, DivorceWebDesigner's mediator page covers that build.

Pricing shown in USD. See Canadian-dollar pricing →

Email hello@divorceseo.com with the practice name, your county, and one line on whether you want more mediation work or more representation work. Inside one business day you will get a written answer on what your profile is currently eligible for, and what it is not.