Case Study: National SEO Strategy

Background

This California injury firm decided to kick off their SEO strategy near the end of 2019. They had some good online ranking and digital presence, but they knew they were seeing nowhere near their full potential for acquiring cases online.

It’s often difficult for law firms to accel at SEO as it’s a notoriously competitive space due to the sheer number of law firms in a given area. And guess what: They’re all shooting for the same keywords. Many times, professional help is needed to be successful.

The goal for their SEO strategy was to increase backlinks while also promoting the great, quality content currently found on their site.

First, The Digital Audit

Before we can get started building, we need to take a look at the entire profile of a law firms’ domain. This will help us identify the profiles positives, negatives, areas for immediate attention and areas for long term attention.

At the time this firm was receiving around 300 monthly visitors to their site, and they were visible for approximately 600+ keywords. One of their most relevant competitors was receiving nearly 3,000 visitors per month.

The very first step after the audit is to take a look at any low-hanging fruit for the law firm.

The “Low-Hanging Fruit” Keyword Research

At the onset of any strategy, we want to capitalize on keywords that the firm already has tee’d up. These are the keywords that your firm is already visible for on page 1-3 of search engine search results. The site won’t be showing up in the top spots, but it is still visible and with some attention we can quickly push the site into the top 3 positions. This is the quickest way to start feeling the benefits of an SEO strategy.

Once the keywords have been identified they can then be used to create practice area page content or blog posts. Once these keywords are identified they can be used for web copy or blogs.

Competition Analysis

Our digital marketing tools help us analyze not only everything about our clients’ digital portfolio, but also to get a sneak peek into what our client’s competitors are up to. As we start to peel this away, we can find an endless amount of information to help us make informed decisions about the direction of the firm’s SEO strategy.

By no means does this imply that we want to follow their lead. What it does show us is that the market may be showing signs of emerging keywords or areas that we can overtake them.
To help illustrate this, a law firm client is ranking for 11K keywords. They are sharing nearly 6.5K keywords with their closest competitor. But, the competing law firm is visible for an additional 11K keywords that our client’s firm isn’t. This list is rich with information on keywords that would work well to boost our client’s profile.

The Strategy

A quick start with our content syndication package, called firmSYNDICATE. This helped distribute content through syndication across the web. We syndicated articles on prime topics relevant to the firm’s expertise across the web in a fashion to show the firm as an ultimate legal resource.

Next, we kicked off our NationalPLATINUM SEO strategy. This strategy combines an aggressive strategy to acquire in-content, contextual backlinks from high authority sites as well as substantial ongoing content creation.

After putting all of the pieces together, it was time to start to evaluate the results and re-evaluate for ongoing strategy modification. Let’s take a look at the results.

Results

In one year’s time, the firm’s number of referring domains jumped from less than 50 to over 440 — an increase of nearly 9x their current standing.

By identifying and targeting the “low-hanging fruit” keywords, plus building a strategy to capture keywords in positions 1-3, our team of professionals ended up ranking the firm for over 20,000 organic keywords.

In the chart below you’ll see that their top-ranking keywords, specifically in positions 1-3, jumped from around 40 to over 250 total keywords. That is a considerable increase in a very short period of time.

Now, let’s talk about the spot where the rubber hits the road: organic traffic. Organic traffic is influenced directly by the number of backlinks and the total ranking keywords. The more backlinks, the more keywords.

With this increase in traffic we see their website traffic soar to over 10K monthly visitors and at this strategy level their efforts leveled off around 6K monthly visitors. This is equivalent to running a paid search ads campaign (PPC campaign) of nearly $30,000 per month to come close to capturing this amount of site visits. Based on our costs they were no where near that amount! That’s major return on investment.

Conclusion

There are a number of aspects that go into showing up for legal search terms. Many small law firms believe it’s “blogging occasionally” or “adding some content to my site with the words I want” and, BOOM! Hopefully this case study has shown that there are a lot of other off-page SEO factors that determine if your firm shows up for competitive search terms. Backlinks are important to your success.

Great on-page SEO along with strategic off-page SEO equals a successful strategy that rewards your firm with loads of phone calls and form fills.

Don’t forget, getting the legal consumer to your site is the first step of the process. When they get to your site you need them to convert to making contact. Interested in covering your online marketing strategy from start to finish? Ask us about our web development services for law firms as well!

Want to learn more about our SEO and PPC law firm marketing strategies? Feel free to contact us at any point. We’re here to help.