Summary – Through consistent backlink building, targeted content, and user experience improvements over the course of a full year, June 2020 – June 2021, ranked.legal increased organic search leads by 234.66% compared to the previous period, June 2019 – June 2020. Due to the client’s request, the name of the firm has been excluded from this case study, but we can confirm that the business is a law firm.
The Problem – When ranked.legal first talked to this client as a prospect, their website was in free fall. What was going on? After years of keeping up with SEO best practices, organic traffic was suddenly plunging with no end in sight. In January 2020, this site was averaging 70 new organic users per day, by May 2020, that number dropped to 25.
The site was losing ground quickly to competitors. We had to figure out why and how to fix it. We did a deep dive into the site’s history and found the following items to fix…
The Solution(s)
Link Building – One of the problems most apparent from the beginning was the site’s rapid loss of backlinks over the years. Links were dropping at a fast pace and this trend had to be reversed immediately.
At their zenith in April 2019, the site had over 7,500+ backlinks pointing to the root domain.
By June 2020, there were only around 2,500, a far cry from the top.
This problem would require two solutions… First, reclaim the lost links.
Second, build more links. Over the 12 months when ranked.legal was in the driver’s seat, the client’s backlink profile improved from 2,500 to over 4,300 with a mix of both reclaimed and new backlinks.
Targeted Content – During the site’s downfall, blogs and additional pages (local pages for example) were not being produced. ranked.legal started creating. Month after month, ranked.legal turned around 3-6 pieces of unique content tailored to long tail keywords. These included high quality local pages, and blogs based around industry FAQs.
While these blogs and pages didn’t immediately turn in traffic and leads, they ranked, especially the local pages. Most took the first or second result for “________ lawyer town” sometimes immediately.
Improving User Experience – Many of the core pages needed big improvements in both UX and Calls to action. Ranked.legal addressed this need by adding: push to call mobile buttons, tables of contents, search friendly H1s and H2s, a contact form higher in core landing pages and better interlinking.
Bonus – The inclusion of rich results, especially FAQ schema, was a big boom for even more traffic. Schema code still works wonders.
The Results Top 3 Rankings went from 54 in June 2020 to 121 in June 2021. Here are some of the metrics on those rankings:
These rankings were helped along by the core updates in June.
Organic Users Overall Organic search traffic trends are heading back in the right direction.
User Behavior Due to the additional calls to action, even more searchers converted.
With the improvements in UX and targeted content, user behavior appreciated compared to the previous year.
And finally, Lead Completions from June 2019 – June 2020 compared to June 2020 – June 2021.
Conclusion: When preparing an SEO strategy for a new client site, don’t try to reinvent the wheel.
Build on your basics for long term growth. Links, content and user experience are a great place to start. Build consistently and better than your competition and you’ll get there.
Most importantly, implore your clients to give your agency an entire year to build up their website. With this client in particular, a whole year made all the difference.