Is your law firm’s website optimised for the right keywords?
If the answer is no, you’re missing out on a significant amount of business that could be going to your competitors.
Research by Ahrefs shows that 12,000 people search for the keyword ‘lawyer near me’ on Google every month. If your local SEO is done correctly, your law firm could be one of the fortunate firms appearing in the highly sought-after local 3-pack. Firms that appear in this 3-pack generate a substantial number of new clients, as users tend to trust these results the most—68% of users do, according to research.
That’s why SEO is an incredibly important marketing channel for law firms.
Today, we’ll explore a case study that illustrates this point perfectly.
The Client: A Personal Injury Firm from Houston, Texas
Our clients were a personal injury firm based in Houston, Texas. They are two experienced attorneys who have been specialising in personal injury cases since 2006. Over the years, they have built a strong reputation, as shown by the numerous testimonials on their website.
Despite their stellar reputation, they were struggling to attract clients through their website, which left much to be desired. Although they were still gaining new clients through other advertising methods and word-of-mouth referrals, nearly all online traffic related to personal injury law was being diverted to their competitors.
This issue worsened in the years following the pandemic, as online advertising, telehealth services, and mobile searches surged during lockdowns. Consequently, the firm was eager to invest in SEO to start capitalising on legal searches conducted on platforms like Google.
They specifically needed to rank for keywords related to personal injury lawsuits in Houston, Texas.
After researching various SEO providers, they stumbled upon several of our legal case studies. This convinced them to reach out for a free SEO consultation, as they were looking for a provider with legal expertise.
During our initial call, we discussed their objectives, our process, and what they could expect from working with us. Given the extensive work required, we decided to set them up on a Clout campaign.
Developing a Clout Campaign
Clout is our fully managed SEO service, designed to take the entire SEO process off our clients’ hands. This typically comes as a huge relief to clients, as they no longer need to invest time or energy into managing their own SEO.
Each client is paired with a dedicated campaign manager who:
- Develops a comprehensive SEO strategy tailored to the client’s unique needs.
- Provides updates, answers questions, and maintains regular contact with the client.
Clout employs all our SEO products, including content creation, link-building, and technical SEO. The campaign manager selects the appropriate products based on each client’s specific situation.
In the case of the personal injury firm, they urgently required link-building services as well as a technical SEO audit, which is standard practice for all clients at the beginning of a campaign.
The SEO Audit: Identifying Issues and Targeting Quick Wins
In the world of SEO, many factors can influence your rankings, and it’s essential to identify these factors. For instance, crawling and indexing errors can cause your content to vanish from search results entirely.
That’s why we kick off every Clout campaign with a thorough audit of the client’s website. We look for issues such as:
- Slow loading speeds (to ensure they pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test)
- Duplicate content (having two pages competing for the same keyword confuses Google’s search algorithms)
- Thin content (Google prefers content that is at least 700 to 1,000 words)
- Indexing errors (issues like noindex tags, improper robots.txt files, and 4xx errors)
In this case, we found that our client had only a few issues to address, including some thin pages and slow loading times.
Once these problems were resolved, we looked for keywords where the site already ranked but not in a desirable position (for example, not on page one). We refer to these as easy-win opportunities because:
- The content is already indexed by Google, meaning changes can yield quick results.
- It’s generally easier to improve an existing ranking than to start from scratch.
- Simple optimisations can often propel easy-win opportunities onto page one.
Our client had numerous personal injury keywords ranking between positions 20 and 30, so we prioritised these first.
The Strategy: Link-Building to Key Legal Service Pages
A significant reason the site wasn’t ranking well was a lack of authority. This meant they needed a substantial number of valuable backlinks to enhance their website’s reputation in Google’s eyes.
Link-building is one of our specialities, so we got to work leveraging our extensive link network.
We focused primarily on link insertions, where we reach out to site owners to request the insertion of one of our client’s backlinks into an existing piece of content.
To ensure we secured these placements, we targeted content where it made perfect sense to link to one of our client’s service pages.
For instance, we found an article discussing how to handle serious injuries after a car accident—perfectly aligned with our client’s services. We reached out and requested that they hyperlink the text ‘personal injury’ to one of our client’s links, which they agreed to do.
Not only did this backlink drive targeted traffic to our client’s site, but it also significantly boosted their link profile’s authority.
The backlink had an impressive Domain Rating (DR) of 60 (on a scale of 1 to 100), indicating its high authority.
This was just one of the hundreds of links we built for our client!
The Results: A Dramatic Increase in Traffic and Keyword Rankings
We achieved rapid results for our client, witnessing a 283% increase in traffic within just six months.
Traffic has consistently risen since then and will continue to grow due to our ongoing efforts.
We successfully got them ranking for over 2,000 personal injury keywords, with 21 of those now in the top 10.
As a result, they now generate £1.9k worth of traffic to their site each month—a remarkable transformation from their previous situation.
Do you want to achieve impressive results like these for your law firm?
Clout is the way to go, as our experts will manage the entire SEO process for you. Don’t hesitate to get in touch for a free consultation today!
