How We Tripled Leads for a PI Firm in 12 Months
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May 13, 2024
Let me not bury the lead: We cut 77% of the content on a law firm’s website and improved lead conversion rate by almost 3x.
I still hear law firm SEO agencies talking about content content content as the key to the SEO game. And the reason we hear this, isn’t because it works at driving business… it’s because content is a very tangible deliverable agencies produce. And clients like tangible products, even when they don’t do anything. What law firms like more, is increased business.
SEO Details
The law firm website’s pagecount ballooned to over 2K pages over a period of about 2 years. Now, this was a solid site, well built technical platform and a robust, localized backlink profile. But while this content was legally and even locally relevant, it was of extremely low quality and the backlinks to those pages were clearly of extremely low value (read: SPAM). Further an in-depth audit showed little if any traffic to these pages. So following the data – Google thought the content was useless. Using that data, we removed about 1,600 pages of content from the site, leaving just over 450 remaining and cutting their absolute backlink count by about 25%.
The Result
The results provide a counterpoint to simplistic SEO expectations about content. Despite killing more than 3 out of every 4 pages, overall traffic to the site stayed within a +/- 10% of the benchmark starting quarter. But the real insightful takeaway here is in their overall organic conversion rate – which tripled over a period of twelve months, from 2.4% to just under 7%.
The change in their conversion rate wasn’t driven by changes in UI (like adding form fills for example) and therefore the only explanation is a fundamental shift in the quality of traffic (i.e. the site is now attracting traffic that is dramatically more likely to contact the firm. Note this adjustment took almost 9 months to fully take effect and settle into a predictable pattern.
For more reading and examples on this, check out: When SEO Wins Create Fewer Clients.