Case Study: National & Local SEO Strategy

Background

This solo practitioner started with us in June 2021. At the time they were not ranking for any injury keywords, and they were getting 0 inbound traffic through non-branded search (for example, keyword searches, not searches for the firm by name).

Prior to working with our team his marketing strategy was primarily focused on paid search ads, or PPC, for his firm’s growth strategy through another marketing company. Initially, he came to us to overhaul his PPC strategy.

In our initial strategy phase, we discovered his priorities were to build a plan that would generate revenue for years to come and, ultimately, build an injury firm he could hand off to his son.

At this point he knew he had to take a fresh approach to his marketing investment and gave us the green light to devise the perfect plan to meet these goals.

In just 10 months this firm was landing over 250 visitors per month and, even more importantly, these visitors were high-intent clients looking for terms like “brooklyn brain injury lawyer”, “traumatic brain injury lawyer near me”, “brooklyn burn injury attorney”, etc.

First, The Digital Audit

Before we ever put a plan in place, we start by assessing the domains entire digital profile. We were able to uncover how his current PPC ads were performing, where the traffic was coming from, and we learned that there was virtually no organic search profile for his firm.

The site had been around for some time, which is always a great thing when starting an SEO strategy. It’s important to note that if you are a new law firm or are considering a rebrand, it’s important to consider the impact on SEO when changing domains or starting a new site altogether.

Search engines prefer domains that have been around for a while. That doesn’t mean SEO for a new domain is impossible, but it does take longer to ramp up.

To start, the firm wasn’t appearing for any “money” keywords. Money keywords are non-branded terms that show organic search visibility for non-branded terms. For example, terms like “accident lawyer near me” or “car accident attorneys in New York”, etc. These keywords drive new business.

At the time this firm’s website was receiving around 1 or 2 organic visitors monthly. From a visibility standpoint they were hovering between 4-12 keywords ranking in search. After reviewing this data, we knew this was virtually a blank slate.

Next, we wanted to start to identify ways to attract the right cases.

The “keyword research” Analysis

If you’re familiar with any of our other case studies, you’ll notice this is usually your “low-hanging fruit” analysis step. But, in the case of this firm, their organic visibility was poor with the firm ranking for 0 competitive keywords.

With that said, we knew we would start out by digging into the market to find keywords that we knew would be valuable for the firm and terms for which we could quickly rank them.

Once we’ve identified the keywords that would bring the firm the most valuable cases we started to evaluate the competition and put a plan in place.

Competition Analysis

Now, we have a whole array of keywords that search engines are telling us have great traffic. Next, we work to dig into the competition. By investigating a competitors profile it’s easy to find areas of opportunity. For example, let’s say your firm is ranking for 1,238 keywords. Your profile is sharing 987 keywords with a competitor. Let’s say that competitor is also ranking for another 1,024 keywords that your firm isn’t ranking form.

Boom! Now we have another list of competitive keywords that are viable, valuable and obtainable.

We put all of this information together to build our strategy and to decide exactly how we’re going to help our client achieve the results they are seeking.

The Strategy

This firm needed a number of things addressed. First, their site was old, low on valuable content, and didn’t reflect the firm’s image in any way. Secondly, we knew from our research that the local market was virtually untapped and a strategy targeting the offices physical vicinity would work well. Lastly, the big push would come from a national SEO strategy. We started building a brand-new site with our BrandBUILDER web package to represent them in the most professional manner. Also, we started building out brand new content that we know search engines would like.

Next, we initiated a push for local SEO optimization through our LocalLITE SEO plan, to start position the firm to capture clients from within a 15–25-mile radius of their office. This utilizes the “map pack” of search results. The big push came from out national SEO plan implementation, for this firm it was our NationalADVANCED SEO plan. This is where we see the long-term growth.

After assembling this plan, generating the content, and building the site we started to track the progress over the coming months.

Results

In around 10 months from the client kicking off their strategy we increased their referring domains from around 25 to over 350. This is significant because the firm is now acquiring the proper link referral sources to show search engines that they are to be considered a valuable resource.

To compliment the referring domains above let’s talk about keywords. Keywords are ultimately the pieces of the puzzle that our law clients feel. This is the portion of the strategy where the contacts and form submissions are generated. Keywords drive the traffic to the site to convert to calls and cases.

In just 3 months’ time of starting the campaign we noticed a major jump to over 120 legal keywords for which the firm is now ranking. By month nine they were ranking for over 300 legal keywords and around 30 of which were in the top 10. We’re talking terms like “brain injury lawyers Brooklyn” and “top brain injury lawyers near me”.

This visibility translates into traffic. Traffic is the be-all end-all of everything we do. The more visibility the more traffic. It’s that simple! Here, you’ll see how all of these keywords translate to traffic. Let’s take a look below.

In just 10 months this firm went from a 0 organic profile to getting over 220 visits per month for legal keywords. This helped the firm completely transition from only receiving cases on a referral basis to now generating dozens of new injury cases monthly. Some cases being motor vehicle accidents, other being slip and falls and even brain injuries.

The firm has now a flourishing model that will pay dividends for years to come.

Conclusion

We took a wholistic approach to this strategy. We considered everything from driving cases in the national search results section of a search page, making sure the firm was visible for competitive keywords locally and ensuring that the user experience on their site was impeccable and ready to convert these visitors.

For this firm no one, singular aspect of this plan was more important than any other. Great off-site SEO was important to driving the links and visibility. On-page content was a huge contributor to showing search engines that someone will learn something about their case, and all of the conversion aspects were in place to make sure we know who was calling and how they were finding the firm.

If you’re looking to understand how you can start acquiring cases online, it’s important to contact our lawyer marketing experts for your strategy evaluation.