Result: 74% year-over-year organic growth in Q4
Investment: $4k / month
Client: High volume, transactional law firm with a commitment to turnkey client service in a niche practice area
Summary:
For established law firms with a well built website and solid technical foundation, there’s a point where easy and obvious opportunities for growth are exhausted and you need an ongoing strategy to drive increases in organic traffic.
In this instance, the firm had been pursuing an aggressive SEO and content strategy for the past several years. They’d done an outstanding job getting reviews and optimizing their business listings, citations were all consistent across the major directories, they had content for every conceivable area of their practice, and a strong backlink profile. Over the past year, the strategy shifted from solving problems and filling gaps to expanding the site’s linkable content, continuously evaluating what content was driving organic inquiries, and finding new publications that might be willing to feature (and link to) some of their articles and resources.
In the absence of opening another office location or expanding the practice to encompass new case types, the process for driving sustained organic growth is actually pretty straightforward. That’s not to say it’s easy, but there is a roadmap that can be followed to ensure the site’s content is performing well, new content is being tested, and backlinks are continuing to grow. At its simplest, the process is:
- Evaluate the Site’s Existing Content
- Identify and Create New Content and Resources
- Reach Out to Relevant News Outlets and Publications
Rinse. Repeat.
By removing or rewriting old content that is not driving organic traffic, you ensure any indexed pages on the site are deserving of being crawled by Google and have a decent chance of pulling in potential clients. In this case, the client’s site has enough traffic that we audit and prune content at least twice a year to remove any pages that haven’t gotten at least ten organic visits (or generated one phone call). As we’ve been saying for a while, too much content can actually be problematic if some of it isn’t performing well in search engines.
We also identified new article and resource topics that aligned with the firm’s goals as well as the needs of their clients. New content was written with either the goal of expanding on an already successful type of content, replicating something a competitor was doing successfully, or creating a resource specifically to generate links from other websites. Following each round, someone would reach out to a targeted list of sites and promote the firm’s new content. Although tedious, this type of outreach can produce a steady flow of relevant links if the content is good enough and the list of publications being targeted is large enough.
Even for an already successful firm with a highly trafficked website, two rounds of content pruning, content development, and link building outreach yielded massive growth year-over-year. The site had 20,000 additional sessions and 17,500 more users in Q4 of this year than in 2018. More importantly, the number of inquiries (phone calls, chats, and form fills) was up 102-percent!
Total year-over-year growth for organic traffic was up 47-percent and the firm had an opportunity to speak to 2,300 more prospective clients in 2019 than they did in the previous year. Not bad for a firm that was already killing it in the search engines.