Case Study Highlights
- In the first six months of working with a Personal Injury accident attorney in a major Florida metro, Ranked.Legal implemented an SEO strategy which led to increased organic rankings and traffic
- These rankings include hyper competitive keywords such as “abogados de accidentes” and “car accident attorney” in the major metro the client is based in
- This traffic increase led to a 800%+ increase in organic search leads
- Of these leads at least 1 per month was a qualified lead which resulted in a new case
- The cases resulted in a 20:1 return on investment
Client Testimonial
“We are thrilled with Justin and the team’s work. They brought in more leads and gave us the results we were looking for. Their knowledge, constant communication, and result-driven mindset are nothing short of a formula for success. We cannot recommend them enough.” – Mark C., Owner
The Challenge
In late August 2021, Ranked.Legal was hired by a Personal Injury Firm in a major Florida metro. They gave us one goal, “We want more accident cases and we want you to bring in more accident leads.”
Because this attorney operated in a major Spanish speaking market, we needed to not only build out English pages, but Spanish pages as well. The “north star keyword”, according to the client, was “abogados de accidentes.”
The website was facing stiff competition, but we were ready for the challenge.
Where We Started
The client did not have any non-branded keywords ranking on the first three pages of Google. Many keywords such as “car accident attorney”, “accident attorney”, and our north star keyword phrase, “abogados de accidentes”, were not even ranking in the top 100 results.
Before beginning, we assessed the competition by observing their practice area page content and their referring domain profile.
The Strategy
The strategy would consist of first, optimizing the website from a technical perspective, then ranking the site using our ranked.legal playbook.
Our “playbook” as we like to call it, is 10+ years of successful SEO strategies for law firms which we constantly refine based on the changes to Google. While we keep specifics close to our chest, we work within five pillars of SEO: On-site experience, Off-site (backlinks, referring domains etc), Google My Business, Content, and Technical SEO. These pillars all work in conjunction to rank pages, and ultimately, get quality leads.
The Tactics
Prune Repetitive Pages
Upon completing our audit of the website, it was clear that many URLs were too similar. When pages and URLs are too similar, Google doesn’t understand which page you want to rank for a particular keyword. Instead of choosing one page to rank, Google may not rank any of them.
One of our first tasks was picking the pages we would use for our primary keyword targets. Once we selected those pages, we implemented 301 redirects for the other extraneous URLs, consolidating them to one page.
Expanded Content
With the first step in the process complete, we had our pages selected, but these pages had very thin content. In order to rank keywords related to law, your copy needs to be thorough, demonstrate expertise, and pass BAR guidelines. We only work with writers who have their JD or are enrolled in law school to ensure that we are producing quality content which will rank and not mislead the searcher.
Accurate Translation
When it came time to translate our English copy into Spanish, we chose a Spanish advertising agency instead of using Google translate or a WordPress plugin. This detail might appear overkill, but the impact was obvious. In less than three months, our Spanish pages were ranking in the top five.
Built Local and Niche Relevant Links
Building locally relevant links is crucial to ranking. This client did not have a strong backlink profile. We knew, in order to rank, we had to build quality links.
After three months of consistent link building, we started to see the practice area pages rank on the first page of Google.
Internal Link Building Strategy
Internal linking is when you link important pages, in our case “practice area” pages, from the home page or another important related page.
Using an internal link building strategy is a great way to educate bots like Googlebot. For example, if you are a Personal Injury lawyer, it’s important to link your primary practice area pages from your home page, and not just the navigation menu.
The Results
Within six months, the client’s pages ranked on page 1 of Google in the organic listings and map pack.
Below are the rankings for “Abogado de accidentes” and accident related English keywords from the client’s major metro:
Compared to the six months before ranked.legal was involved, these ranking improvements resulted in a 39.02% increase in Users, a 45.79% increase in New Users and a 54.81% increase in sessions, all from Organic search.
One page in particular, the page ranking #1 for our north star keyword “abogado de accidentes” received a 390% increase in pageviews and a 882% increase in Unique Pageviews. Average time on page also increased by 581%.
These increases in rankings and traffic led to a 842.86% increase in goal completions from Organic search. In the case of this client, a goal completion counts as a form completion or click to call.
On the English side, the Car Accident pages received 7 leads from organic traffic, as opposed to the 0 leads from the previous six months.
Of these leads, 10% were qualified leads which became new accident cases. Over the course of our first six months with this client, this totaled at least 1 new Accident case per month.
These cases brought in by these keywords led to a 20:1 return on investment for SEO.
As you can see, we had a great start with this client. Now we’re expanding into other locations and practice areas, while maintaining the rankings we created already.