The Sterling Family Law Show

[EP3] The 5-Step Process to Fix Website Redirect Errors

• Jeff Sterling Hughes

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Website redirect errors are silently killing your family law firm's organic traffic and converting fewer leads into consults.

Learn the 5-step systematic process that eliminated redirect chains at Sterling Lawyers, protecting $17MM in organic revenue growth.

Most family law firms lose 30-50% of their organic traffic after website redesigns because agencies don't properly handle internal redirect chains. This systematic 5-step audit process identifies redirect loops, eliminates crawl budget waste, and preserves link equity from years of backlink building. When Sterling Lawyers went multi-state, we used this exact framework to maintain our organic traffic dominance across practice areas and locations.


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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - Website Redirect Errors: Why Site Redesigns Kill Organic Traffic 

1:41 - Internal Redirect Chains: The Hidden SEO Sabotage 

3:03 - Site Migration Checklist: Preventing Traffic Loss During Redesigns 

4:50 - Technical Audit Process: Using Screaming Frog for Broken Link Authority 

8:40 - Redirect Loop Problems: When URLs Create Infinite Loading Cycles 

11:00 - URL Structure Planning: Sterling Lawyers Multi-State Scaling Strategy 

14:17 - Link Equity Preservation: Protecting Years of Backlink Investment 

17:56 - Crawl Budget Optimization: Making Google Love Your Site Architecture

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Have you recently been through a website redesign and lost a ton of traffic? My guess is the internal redirects were not set up correctly from the design agency, and now you're paying the price. My name is Tyler Dolph. I am the CEO of our agency, Rocket Clicks, which is a full service digital marketing firm focused exclusively on family law firms across the country. With me today, I have Tony Karls and Nick Perow. We're going to continue our deep dive into SEO for family law firms. And today we're going to we're talking about internal redirects, which is the hidden SEO issues that can silently sabotage your site rankings and performance over time. Nick will break down what internal redirects are, why they matter, and how family law firms can eliminate them to unlock more organic traffic and conversions, which turn into leads which turn into consults for your firm. Nick, you're going to have to get us started with a very big overview, because this is a very complicated topic. Redirect is a tool. It's something we use to, make sure that links across your website are always working, regardless of, say, a site redesign or just, you know, websites change over time. So, we need tools to pass, broken to unbroken, make sure that people get where they're going and make sure that the search engines can adequately crawl around a website. So those are our redirects. A reader directs 301 redirects and 3 or 2 redirects. Their tools. Also, sometimes we abuse our tools, and, even though everything can appear to be working under the surface, maybe it's it's, it's kind of a mess. Sure. And is this normally when a redesign happens or. This is happening all the time, and you have to check it every day. Well, I take redirects, redirect chains or these are where we have like one redirect linking to another redirect, sometimes many redirects linking to many other redirects. Those I would say tend to happen most often around a redesign. Like that's, that's like, that's the 80% of redirects that are out there. You're going to have 1 or 2 occasionally pop up. It's something you want to monitor for regularly, but redesign is almost guaranteed. You are going to skyrocket the number of redirects that you haven't played on your Yeah. I can't tell you the number of times we've had a, a potential client come in, right. And say, hey, I just redesigned my site, and I lost all my traffic. Can you guys help us? Yep. And what I find in, a lot of design situations where the developer comes in, they don't really. They proclaim to know SEO, but they don't really know SEO. They'll put hard limits on the number of redirects that they're willing to put on your site. And instead of treating it like a 100% job, which is what they should be doing. Like, we shouldn't tolerate broken links. We should fix them with redirects. So there shouldn't be a limit to the number that your code 100%, I think. Yeah. Tony, we've seen a number of family law firms who will get a website built for free, you know, from their marketing agency. Realized that it's not performing the way it should be. And then, you know, we see when we do an audit, all these different redirect issues, is how does the law firm prevent this? What are the questions they need to be asking in order to, to make sure that this doesn't happen to that? Yeah. I think an hour or so. Two of our previous conversations we had. We talked about site redesigns and the importance of technical audits there, as well as in one, kind of regular maintenance. You'll find 404 and again through 300 ones are kind of your, your tool to fix those. I think as a, as it pertains to firms, kind of being proactive about this and have your SEO to do an audit or something using leveraging something like Screaming Frog to find broken page, broken broken links, orphan pages. So that you can make sure your site is servicing, servicing your, your users and communicating well with search engines and AI tools that are scraping your site. So, I think it's really important that these are all, all working because when they don't, that ends up sometimes it redirections that the little it'll just go forever and ever and ever. So this end up in a loop. It's essentially they actually want resolve. And I don't, I don't there's that I'm not sure technically what happens there. I think sometimes that might be worth five, 500 errors and you got to restart the server. But there's some like bad things that can occur when you do this poorly. Guy. I think that's what we want our listeners to hear. Is that especially during a redesign like this is essential. Has to happen. You have to make sure that your redirects are correct. But the the downfall is if you don't and Nick, expand on this, the the authority loss is dramatic. We are. You're dealing. Potentially. With. With authority. Loss from external links. So, making sure that those external links are still resolving to a 200, which is. Okay. Everything's good. 200 is not an error, but a positive signal. You want all of that external link value to be coming into your website? Still, and then, when this is the way that I think about this, internal, internal redirects shouldn't be tolerated. You should not redirect to yourself. You should. It is lazy if you have internal redirect. So if Screaming Frog Crawl is run on your website and you're returning redirects on their crawl, if you're returning 400 for errors you order, I'm going to fix those. I'm going to fix for force first by updating the link reference on the site and adding a redirect. Then I'm going to crawl again, and I'm going to fix the redirects and make sure that those links point to the right page. The redirect still is there. It's still important, but you are no longer wasting the search engine crawlers time by making it pass through these redirects on your own site. You've you're you're sending confusing signals by having these internal links here. Your your, diluting your own authority of authority to these pages by, by, passing them through other links. So we we want it we want a clean slate. We want to work with no errors on the site, and we don't want to own any of those three or ones on the site. We want to clean them up. And just. Just in case. Our listeners are a little confused as I may be. Talk to me about what a what an actual redirect is. Right. Okay. I'm searching for a divorce attorney near me. I click on a link. That is their divorce attorney page. But then something happens. What is this redirect? Actually? the the redirect is, is a tiny bit of code that just says permanently moved or temporarily moved to the browser. It just says, hey, we moved it over here. So used to be this URL. Now it's this URL. And we're just saying, hey Google to say no, this is this, this is now this. Yeah. What? Like order of operations. Nick. I believe when the site's loading it, the access files, first thing referenced. And if it if there. That's essentially before your page loads. It's going to hit that first. And if that URLs in there, it's then going to change where the destination is to whatever you've coded it to be to open the right the right page. If it's not in there, it'll just potentially error out. Or if you have WordPress, just to make things more complicated, you're actually going to get pointed to that page. And then that page is going to redirect you to, the next page, which is a lot slower and less definite for, for the search engines to understand. So, that would be kind of what happens really from, from the user end. It's going to slow things down a little bit. If it's a single redirect, it's it's kind of a minor UX concern to have that redirect in place from a search engine standpoint. It's going to look across your site cumulatively. And the more of these redirects you have, the less less quality your site is going to look, Because it's just confusing. Yeah. It's confusing. It's well, it's a waste of crawl time. So if you look at this from like Google standpoint, their money is all tied up in crawling the internet. It and organic doesn't make them money. So they're just spending energy and they're looking for ways to reduce energy. And the easiest thing to do is go, well, I'm not going to waste my time with you. Your site is low quality. It takes me too long to crawl your site and, you know, the the easier you could make it for the search engines to crawl your website, the more time they will spend on your website, the more pages they will index. The hierarchy will rank, the happier you will be. Everybody wants. in piles of money Who love it. Okay. Let's dive back into the weeds here. Talk to us about redirect loops. What the heck are those? Well, redirect loop is is is something Tony kind of spoke to a little bit earlier, but if you point a redirect to redirect a page URL to another page, you URL that then points back to the original URL, you are in an infinity loop. You're just pinwheel of death. You are spinning and spinning and spinning until Because there's no destination. There's no destiny. The destination is the destination that is the redirect, and you're just, you know, start your computer's existential crisis or your own. sometimes it can crash the server. It's, bad news. It's a waste of resources. And the worst possible case for URLs. Second to that would be a redirect chain. I'll just jump ahead on you this time. So this is where you have single redirect pointing to a new URL that then redirects to a new URL at least once. So you have this extra step, and that may resolve in the right page. And it's not going to loop or anything like that, but you just, added additional steps where you could point that URL at the destination page and not have that loop. That loop is just a time waste. Who claims to be able to jump through many steps of redirect like these chains? But just because Google can doesn't mean they want to or will. So we make it easy. Link directly to the page. Well. Simple and concise as what I'm hearing. And this is. I mean, I would I would expect this to happen, especially if you. If you started a started a firm, you may not have had a very clear vision on the type of practice areas you want to practice. Maybe it's like when we started Sterling, we did family, criminal and personal injury. So we had lots of pages built out. We were going to be single state, not multi-state. So the URL structure was very different than we did our first revamp, two years and into the firm going solely family, still single state. So that changed URL structure. And then when we went multi-state, we had to then accommodate for that. So that we could separate out the content by state, because the user users coming from, you know, Naperville, Illinois, reading about parentage rights versus people coming from Madison, Wisconsin, trying to understand custody rights, which is that, nomenclature in the two states like that needs to be useful for the user because they they have different laws, different terms. So the users have different expectations. And if it's not easy to find an easy to navigate, you're going to you're going to have issues. So we we went through this process of, you know, working through this. All right. I think our access file is massive because we've done this three times. So, it's it's something you're going to likely encounter as you continue to evolve your, your brand. Ideally, you know, you want to do this as little as possible, but it's going to happen. So doing it right is important. Hundred percent. It's going to hurt your brand. Otherwise. So, we're talking about redirects, right? And there are different forms of redirects. Nick, tell us of the difference between a 302 and sort of a 301. Sure. Well, 301 is the most common, and that is that the. The 301 is most common. And it literally means permanently moved. So, it sends it very clear signal to any of the search crawlers. Never come back here. We're done with this page so you can be done with it to very clear. 302 less clear. Still useful. It means temporarily moved. That can be super useful if you're maybe not committed to a move, yet or you're you're working some things out. We use three or two's pretty sparingly. Three. The ones we want to make, a definite move that has been planned in advance. That said, it's nice to have a couple of tools in the kit. Insist that all of this is about creating clarity. Right? And there's a lot of different tools in the toolbox in order to do this. But what I'm hearing you say is the overarching message is that it easier we can make it for Google to clearly understand what your firm is about, what every single page on your website is and should be targeting. The better you rank. Yeah. And like, a lot of this is. You know, Nick, you mentioned crawl. Crawl. Time for the bots. You know, the equivalent is, you know, speed of your site for a user. So similarly, like, if a user comes to your site and you have, you have redirect change set up and it's just continuing to load and continue to load and continue to load, they're not they're not staying on your site. They're going to leave. Same thing as the bot. Like this is all this is a UX experience for for both. And the better. You can kind of accommodate both types of users that are coming to your site, to the crawlers, as well as the users. The more users you're going to get because are improving the quality of the crawl, the efficiency of the crawl of your site for all the crawlers. So, they they work hand in glove, to help you improve your improve your ranking, grow your business, get you more search, search, visibility and traffic. Like. okay? Final point. Ignoring redirects from broken URLs. Should you. Shouldn't you? You should not, You should. Strive to have no four of force on your website. So no errors. You should strive to have no. Three and one redirects internally on your website. But you should have three. And one redirects for the external links. Coming into your website. Your three and ones are super important for directing that that incoming authority. Back to your website. Making sure it resolves somewhere, relevant to that original link. But it's it's incredibly important to maintain that, that sort of strict policy of no broken links. Coming in to your website or on your website and three or ones are key way we do that. Yeah. And an example of this. That that might, like, Register for our for listeners, here is when we started our firm, the first. I think in the first six months, we, we sponsored I think it was a baseball team in Menomonee Falls and they had a website. So the website was and they posted on their, on their page on a blog. That's their it's still a backlink, that links to our, it linked to our Menomonee Falls location page. But when we when we redesigned our site, we restructured our URL that then external link from that baseball bat like youth baseball team website. No longer worked because it was going to an old URL structure. Right. So these these three that we have three and one for it. So it's going to the right place. And now we still get the link equity from that link. That was way back in 2017. So like that's why these these are important like you. Because otherwise you just lose that Is just gone. And you can control whether or not they update their website. Yeah. Most of the time you're going to if you if you change a page and you reach out to a webmaster that's monitoring another website, they're not going to they're likely not going to fix, an external link going to you. What's more likely to happen is you're going to tell them it's broken and they're just going to remove it. They're not going to update it. So like it behooves you to manage those well on your side so that they're not broken. And when they're when they're used, when they run a screaming crawl report and they're looking at what are what are broken links that are external links from my website to other websites. You're not showing up on that report. Losing your link equity. And obviously on your side, you're retaining all the link equity that you've built over time. So, it's important tool. It's super practical because I know a lot of law firms will do sponsorships, especially locally. You know, when you do that, ask for a backlink on their, on their site. They might they might be willing to do it, especially on a blog. And then that'll, that'll be there basically forever. We'll get a ton of traffic, but Google's going to crawl that site local. It's local signal. It's going to help you rank better for for those particular keywords in your location. And you'll you'll get more business as a result, but only if you manage it well. Yeah, 100%. I mean, if you're listening to this, the reason why we care so deeply about this is our own firm, Sterling Lawyers. You know, like, over 80% of the revenue that we bring in for that law firm is comes from the website comes from marketing. And being able to have a very authoritative website. So if you are listening this and you're a family law, you know, attorney, the more you can enhance and benefit your website, the the better you're going to show up, the more often you're going to show up, and the more leads you're going to be able to to turn into consults. Gentlemen, I appreciate the time. I love our deep dives into these very complicated topics. And, we'll look forward to seeing you again as we continue this journey. We're going to continue our SEO Deep Dive. On this next episode here, which is the trailing slashes and mixed case URLs talking about going into the weeds. So you're going to love this one. Check it out here. And we will see you over there.

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