Case Study: National SEO Strategy

Background

This firm was onboarded in the last quarter of 2019 with the original intention to simply have our team re-optimize their website. The site had been around for a few years at that point and hadn’t really seen much traffic.

In discussions, we learned what their goals really were. They wanted to capture as many cases online as possible where the web traffic alone was enough to sustain their associate attorneys.

In late 2019 they chose to kick off a true national SEO strategy. At this time, it’s important to know that their current web traffic was sitting around 550 visitors per month.

They knew if they were going to hit this growth goal, they would need help from search engines. They needed a way to get the firm represented for “money keywords”, or keywords that have growth potential. They were very aware that the more high-intent keywords linked to their site the more leads, and more cases.

First, The Full Audit

Our initial step during the onboard phase is to execute a complete site and SEO audit of their online profile. Once we know exactly what the situation is we are then able to build a plan and prepare our framework.

It’s no mystery that the legal industry is extremely competitive with many firms who have been competing for cases online for a very long time. And furthermore, Texas is a law firm-dense state, so we discovered that to have visibility for the words “Texas injury lawyers” we’d need to work on building at least 300+ backlinks to even see the top 10 positions of search engine results.

In the past they did have some success building links on their own, but they were not going to be able to do this themselves.

Next, we built a plan to start getting them traffic as quickly as possible.

The “Low Hanging Fruit” Keyword Research

We want you to have success as quickly as possible. Part of this is identifying those “money” keywords that we can quickly rise to the top.

Usually, these are top keywords that the firm’s websites is already showing up for in the top 1 to 3 pages. If we focus on these keywords to start we can work on some quick traffic spikes to get rolling.

Once we identify these keywords we can use them strategically to improve a client’s overall ranking.

Initially, we identified nearly 650 “low hanging fruit” keywords, many of which had extremely high search volumes and didn’t need much energy to push them onto page one of search results.

This firm was really interested in dedicating their resources to organic search, so at this time there was no initiative to run paid search ads (they did eventually get there, in case you were wondering). We discovered in our research that the keyword “domestic violence charge in texas” had a cost-per-click for search engine text ads of around $85, which indicated that it has a lot of value if we can capture that traffic.

Competition Analysis

It’s important to always keep tabs on what your competitors are doing, which provides valuable insights into the marketing landscape for each firm. This will show not only what they are doing well, but also where we may be able to overtake them with just a little work.

During this stage of research, we discovered nearly 2,800 keywords not being utlitized in our client’s strategy. We discussed this with the firm, and they discovered an handful of keywords that were actually priority practice areas, such as cannabis laws. We then started to build out the appropriate content to mirror the keywords we were planning on targeting.

The Strategy

We now got to work. We put them on our NationalPlatinum SEO plan which hit every bucket of the SEO strategy. We started link-building so they would receive ongoing, contextually correct links from other sites with major authority, plus we started creating guest posts where we were placing full articles within major authority sites. These guest posts are essential to boosting the site in search results.

Although we follow a defined strategy roadmap all our campaigns are completely custom from start to finish. It’s important to remember that with SEO results aren’t built overnight. Often it takes weeks to months to start to “feel the love”, but once things get rolling these strategies offer the lowest cost-per-case-acquisition.

Strategy Results

We know as interesting as the backstory is you’re really here for the results. Of course, you are! We would be too. Let’s discuss the results from all this hard work. The observed results were textbook.

To reiterate, when they were onboarded, they sat around 550 website visitors per month. Fast forward around 7 months and they were sitting at over 7,500 visitors per month and climbing.

That’s big! If we do the math, that nearly a 13x increase. Pretty impressive.

Through our NationalPlatinum SEO strategy we we’re able to push some exceptionally valuable keywords into the top 10 positions of search results.

Not to mention, look at this chart below. The “referring domains” jumped up to nearly 400. This shows that authoritative sites around the world were showing the firm as a brilliant resource.

Remember, when we talk about these results this is strictly taking into account organic traffic. We haven’t even begun to discuss the other 40% of traffic. Initially their traffic was worth around $500 per month. Meaning that if you were to pay for that same traffic, they were receiving it would cost around $500/month.

Here we can see their value had spiked to nearly $12,000. If a competitor wanted that traffic, it would cost them at lease $12,000 per month to compete! Our NationalPlatinum SEO plan doesn’t cost nearly that much! They made the right call.

Conclusion

As you can see, they started out thinking they just needed a website cleanup to help fix their search engine worries. After not only building a plan, we also helped educate them as to what SEO for lawyers really means. They came away with a major boost in their traffic and have been building a successful firm ever since.

Contact us today to learn how we can help your law firm be all that you ever imagined!