Image by Tim Reckmann - CC License.
Discover how we took a law firm’s traffic from 515 monthly organic visitors to 7769 monthly organic visitors in a few short months. That’s a staggering 1408.54% traffic increase!
In addition their monthly traffic is now valued at $11.714.
Background - Before We Started The SEO Campaign
This relatively small law firm came to us in october 2019, asking us to take care of link building (we didn’t even have an official link building service, but they had been recommended by another client of ours).
We could of course just have started building out links, and it probably would have worked pretty well, but we wouldn’t have seen nearly the same results. It became obvious when we started the mandatory audit that this site needed more than just backlinks. They needed more content and less thin content.We decided to build an authority hub around their sales pages.
Law firms heavily depend on organic or paid traffic for leads, but as more law firms enter the scene, competition is getting harder. If you want to rank on Google and have your law firm stand out from the crowd in 2024 you need to take SEO seriously.
While it’s not uncommon for law firms to pay $5000-$15.000 monthly on ongoing SEO services, it doesn’t always have to require a huge investment. It doesn’t have to be very hard or complicated either.
Here at Martin Sand’s MWTS we believe in lean processes and fast results. We don’t over complicate things just for the sake of it.
When this Delaware Law Firm reached out to us, they wanted to increase their online search engine rankings, and eventually get more leads and clients.
Ready to find out how we did it? Read on…
SEO Audit - The Heart & Soul Of an SEO Campaign
Like mentioned above, we started with an SEO audit. We always do, even if you come for the links only. It’s how we know what we are up against, and how to plan and what strategy to apply.
The legal industry is highly competitive. With potential revenue of several hundred thousands, or even millions, of dollars from just one client, law firms can spend a good chunk of cash on leads.
Let’s have a glance at the number of visitors the law firm were getting from organic searches when they contacted us (and the following couple of months):
The company converted around 15% of website visitors into leads. Needless to say, their phone line wasn’t actually breaking down from traffic overload.
The audit discovered that we would need around 290 links to get top ten rankings locally for the term “Law Firm.” Luckily, the company had got some organic links already, and they had some strong links from both national and local publishers. They also had some articles on major media outlets like Forbes with a link to their website. This did help us get a head start.
We also noticed that we needed more content and we needed to find some quick wins.
Keyword Research With Focus On Finding Quick Wins
We always try to find quick win opportunities when we start a new SEO campaign. It’s of course nice to show results fast to prove to a new client that you can deliver, but it’s also important to strengthen the website as quickly as possible and get some initial return on investment (ROI).
Clients always love quick wins.
Quick wins in SEO terms are typically keywords the website is already ranking for in position 4-30. Content we can give a little push to move quickly up towards the top of the search results.
It’s nice to have a few pages ranking for multiple keywords on the first page of Google, but did you know that the #1 position gets a 10x higher click-thru rate (CTR) than the page in position 10?
The average CTR for #1 position in Google is 31.7%. Even moving up one place from spot #6 will increase CTR with 30%. So, small improvements in ranking can boost your number of visitors and leads significantly.
We found that this website had 676 “quick win” keywords already ranking. Some of these keywords or search terms had an almost unbelievable high number of monthly searches. We knew we had to push them up the search engine rankings. Luckily, that’s our specialty.
The good thing was that it didn’t take much to push some of these keywords to the Top 10. Even if we weren’t running an Adwords campaign for this client, we found some really incredible keywords for them. Like this one for instance: “domestic violence charge lawyer NY” which was perfect as they had just opened up a branch in NYC. Companies bid in excess of $89 per click to show their ad on Google for this term. $89 per click. PER CLICK!
If we could help them rank for this term, that would be highly valuable.
Competition Gap Analysis
Just as important as the audit, is the competitive gap analysis, as well as a content gap analysis.
We found that some of their competitors were ranking for thousands of keywords. Actually, we found 2894 keywords that competitors were ranking for which our client was not.
Many of these keywords included marijuana laws, which is a niche our client is trying to break in to. In addition, we found many keyphrases specific for certain New York boroughs such as, and long tail variations of, Law Firm Brooklyn, Law Firm Bronx, Law Firm Queens, Best Divorce Attorney Staten Island and more. This is gold when you are looking for easy to rank for keywords and is perfect due to their new NY branch.
A nice side effect of discovering all these new keywords was that it gave us a lot of ideas for blog posts to write.
We got to work, wrote killer content and turned their blog into a topically relevant, authority hub.
Law Firm SEO Strategy
We started by building out a solid content foundation. Then we started gradually building links to that content.
Links are like votes for a website from other websites, and play an important role in ranking a website. However, not all links are equal and some types of links can even get your website penalized by the search engines.
Our SEO strategy was, and is often, to build topically relevant content on a blog. Links inside these blog posts will point to highly relevant sales pages on your website (money pages).
We reached out to relevant websites and bloggers and secured guest posts with do-follow links pointing back to our client’s blog posts. Then we created another layer of quality links to those guest posts to further improve relevance and power of the links. Basically, we created a link funnel.
We also took a bit more aggressive approach on behalf of this client, as they didn’t have much to lose. The 500 monthly visitors could easily be achieved from paid advertising and they had a lot to gain by applying some more greyzone (yet legal - just not approved by google) approaches to link building. We therefore pulled some strings and managed to secure a solid number of high authority links from well established websites.
Was it worth it?
I think the stats speak for themselves.
The Results
Remember, many of these keywords are worth $50-150 per click and they had a visitor to lead conversion rate of 15%.
7769 visitors x 15% conversion rate equals 1165 leads. They had to unhook their telephone lines at one point and hire a new assistant to answer the calls!
The number of organic keywords they ranked for:
The traffic value - See how it correlates to the increased ranking:
:
Looking at the traffic value you see that the average value per visitor is far less than the $90 per click in the example above. This is because the site is ranking for a lot of lesser expensive long tail keywords. If we take $11714/7769 we get a value per visitor of $1.51.
Yet, a traffic value of $11714 is quite different from the original traffic value of $755 (500 visitors * $1.51). In addition, because the legal business has such a high number of keywords with astronomical prices per click, there are a lot of opportunities for growth.
The traffic value is how much the law firm would have to pay to get these visitors from Adwords (Google paid marketing).
The Conclusion
The law firm contacted us asking if we could do link building for them, but we eventually agreed on doing a full-stack SEO campaign. The work started by the end of October 2019, and per April 2024 we are still working with them to continuously improve their traffic and leads.
We knew our full-stack SEO campaign would be a perfect fit for their company, because it’s literally 100% autopilot SEO for the company. Most companies don’t want to do the work themself, and to be honest most companies will see better results when leaving the work to professional strategists.
Get an SEO Agency that moves the needle!
Their business has seen incredible growth and we are now starting to run PPC campaigns to get even more leads and business.
Ready to start? Book a free consultation here.
