Key Points...
- 170.65% increase in New Users from targeted states
- 99.63% increase in Leads from targeted states
- 10% of new leads resulted in new cases
Cases resulted in a 5:1 return on investment
Client Testimonial
“Ranked.Legal’s SEO work helped us close a case record in 2022/2023. They are transparent, hard working, and they delivered for my law firm. I would recommend them to anyone.”
The Challenge
This client is a Lemon Law attorney who is licensed in 14 states, but they wanted Ranked.Legal to grow organic traffic leads in three states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.
The goal of this increased traffic was to drive quality leads which would result in cases. For this particular attorney, a quality lead is a client with an expensive vehicle which has turned out to be a lemon.
Where We Started
Before Ranked.Legal took over SEO duties, this firm brought in an average of 2,000 users and 22 leads from organic traffic per month. The website’s SEO was severely lacking. Some crucial SEO shortcomings of their website included:
- Thin content on Practice Area pages
- Only 167 referring domains
- Inconsistent content releases
- Apps disrupting interlinks
The site was bringing in decent organic traffic, but was not closing many cases from that organic search traffic.
The Strategy
Overall, the site had three primary issues; low quality landing pages, thin blog posts and inconsistent link building.
If Ranked.Legal focused on these factors, the site’s performance would certainly improve.
The Tactics
Optimize Practice Area Pages
When improving this website’s Practice Area pages, there are a few important elements which were missing. Ranked.Legal added took the following actions to improve these pages:
- Cite sources of state laws
- Implement rich content such as infographics and videos
- Add an FAQ section
- Publish client testimonials
- Lead with a table of contents
- Interlink to related pages
These practice area pages have to be optimized with rich content in order to compete with similar pages in the Google results. Optimizing landing pages with rich, informative content is a crucial first step.
Building Consistent Backlinks and Referring Domains
Once the Practice Area pages are optimized, they need to be consistently linked to authoritative and local websites. While most content doesn’t necessarily need consistent link building, highly competitive product or transactional pages do. Backlinks and referring domains can often act as a tie breaker for pages with product or transactional intent.
Publish Consistent Blog Posts
While content is not king (that’s an SEO myth), it is the most effective tactic for building authority and traffic. For this attorney, Ranked.Legal wrote blog posts about high end lemons such as the Ford F-150 and various GMC vehicles. These types of posts target consumers who are looking to get out of their expensive vehicle and are searching on Google for potential solutions.
Another piece to the content strategy was creating content centered around the lemon law itself and its application in various states. Thoroughly demonstrating your knowledge goes a long way on Google.
Technical Cleanup and Speed Improvements
This attorney’s website contained two plugins which were causing huge issues to the site: Link whisper and 404 to home. These two plugins created many confusing interlinks throughout the site. Once these plugins were disabled and the correct redirects restored, the site’s performance noticeably improved.
In Legal SEO there are many types of tie breakers if the companies ranking against each other are similar. If your site is trying to compete against an identical or similar page for the number 1 spot, a surprisingly important differentiator, like in a real race, is speed. Google wants searchers to get quick access to information. This makes speed not a kingmaker, but a tie breaker. Ranked.Legal ensured all landing pages on the site quickly loaded and contained solid core web vitals.
The Results
After the first six months, Ranked.Legal was able to increase organic search leads by 50%. This was the client’s primary KPI and Ranked.Legal executed.
After one full year, the results exploded. Compared to the previous 12 months, New Users from organic traffic increased 170.65%.
(“Tri-State” refers to the Google analytics segment which just examines traffic in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania)
This new traffic nearly doubled the new leads brought in through the site.
Now, on a monthly basis the website brings in an average of 5,815 Users per month and an average of 44 organic search leads per month.
The site continues its growth trajectory and is compounding organic user traffic and leads into the future.
