In this case study, we'll uncover how we increased organic traffic to a law firm's website by 800% in only six months and how their organic traffic is now worth $11,714 per month.
Law firms and the legal industry rely on web traffic for leads, but the current amount of practicing lawyers has grown by 15% over the last ten years. These days, the SEO in the legal vertical needs to be on point to rank highly on Google and have a law firm's site stand out from their competitors.
This client had a budget of $7,500 per month, and that was a big enough budget to attain the results we wanted.
We'll break down how we did it.
Background
This law firm is based in Texas, and they contacted us at the end of 2019 to help optimize their existing website. The site went live in June 2015, but they weren't getting much organic traffic growth in four years.
In October 2019, when we started working together, the firm's organic traffic was just about 500 visitors a month.
Their main goal was to improve their online rankings to drive more qualified traffic to their website, which ultimately would translate to getting more leads and clients.
The SEO Audit
Our initial step with any client we work with is to complete a thorough SEO audit of their website. We need to know the current status of their website is before strategizing and planning any SEO campaigns.
From experience, we knew that the legal vertical is always a very competitive space. Our SEO audit discovered that ranking locally in their city for the keyword "law firm" would take an estimated 310 backlinks to rank on page one.
The law firm had some luck with acquiring backlinks on their own, but it was evident that there was much work to be done.
"Quick Wins" Keyword Research
Our team works smarter by identifying "easy wins" keywords.
Their website was already ranking for keywords in positions 4-30. Because these keywords were already ranking near the top of page one, we can focus on them at the beginning for quick traffic increases.
Once we determine these keywords, we can use them strategically to improve a client's overall SERP ranking.
We found a total of 667 "quick win" keywords. Some keywords had very high search volumes with low competition scores, so they wouldn't take much to rank within the top 10 positions.
Our client wasn't running any Google Ads for this campaign, but we determined some valuable keywords during our research period. The keyword "domestic violence charge in Texas" had a CPC of $90, implying that it would be extremely valuable if we could rank them for the term and get on to page one.
While that dollar amount might sound crazy high, you have to remember that the legal industry is very competitive. When law firms make thousands of dollars from their clients, $90 (and sometimes much more) is an investment they can easily generate a return from.
Competitive Gap Analysis
Understanding what your competition is doing provides us with valuable insights. A competitive gap analysis will help uncover areas your competitors are doing better than you.
We discovered there were 2,852 unique keywords not being utilized by our client. Most of these were keywords associated with marijuana laws, one of their legal specialties. We crafted and published content on their website based on the keywords we found to start pushing new targeted traffic.
What made us even more excited about discovering these keywords was how they could help us identify blog topics for the client's website.
The SEO Strategy
We decided to use link-building strategies to acquire contextual links from authority sites.
Our guest posting outreach service fit their campaign well because it allowed us to acquire high-quality links from other websites and differentiate between DA, publisher traffic, and word count.
We made it very clear to our client that results wouldn't come overnight, explaining that SEO results often take months to take effect. But once they did, they were thrilled with how results began to compound.
Our Results
What we saw in this case study was textbook SEO.
The client's organic traffic count was in the 500's when we began working on their SEO campaign in October of 2019. In May of 2020, it was over 7,700 visitors per month and continues trending upwards.
That's an organic traffic increase of over 800%!
Using a mix of our foundational link building and guest posts, we could drive extremely valuable keywords onto page one. We were able to get some of their marijuana and domestic abuse keywords onto page one of Google, adding to the massive traffic spike.
The client's referring domains increased by more than 1,000%!
This campaign was solely for organic traffic (no paid advertising). But it's worth noting that the client's organic traffic value increased from approximately $550 when we began working together to $11,714 per month.
That means it would cost them nearly $12K in paid Google advertising per month to get the same amount of traffic they are getting now with the organic search! Check out the value growth below.
Conclusion
This law firm initially approached us for help with boosting their Google rankings and organic traffic. We knew they'd be an excellent fit for us as a client because they understood that SEO takes time, and they had a big enough budget to allocate towards SEO so that we could compete with their competitors.
At the end of our engagement, we increased their organic traffic by over 800% and positioned them at the top of the SERPs to help them get more leads and cases.
Ready to learn more or get started with SEO marketing? Book your free SEO discovery call with us now.