SEO case study

Legal SEO: Generating Consistent $1.9k Traffic Value

Is your law firm’s website optimized for the right keywords?

If the answer is no, you’re letting a ton of business go to your competitors. 

As proof, research by Ahrefs found that 12,000 people search for the keyword ‘lawyer near me’ on Google each month. 

If you did your local SEO right, your law firm would be amongst the lucky firms appearing in the coveted local 3-pack, which looks like this:

As you might imagine, these law firms generate a ton of new clients from appearing in the 3-pack, as users trust it the most (68%). 

That’s why SEO is an extremely important marketing channel for law firms

Such was the case for the subject of today’s case study. 

While they found modest success advertising on TV, their online presence wasn’t bringing in any new clients. 

That was until we entered the picture. 

After we took the wheel for a few months, we completely turned around their SEO. 

The client now consistently generates $1.9 worth of traffic, and they rank for over 2,000 relevant legal keywords

Stay tuned to learn how we achieved these results (and how we can do the same for your firm)! 

The Client: A Personal Injury Firm from Houston, Texas 

This time, our clients hailed from Houston, Texas. They’re two expert attorneys who specialize in personal injury cases, and they’ve been in the game since 2006. 

During their years of practice, they built an extremely positive reputation, as evidenced by their long list of testimonials on their website. 

Despite this, they were generating next-to-no clients through their website, which left a lot to be desired. 

They were still bringing in new clients through other advertising methods (and word of mouth), but all the online traffic related to their firm was going to their competitors. 

This issue only got worse in the years after the pandemic, as online advertising, telehealth, and mobile searches skyrocketed during the lockdowns. 

As a result, they were eager to invest in SEO to start capitalizing on legal searches made on engines like Google. 

In particular, they needed to rank for keywords related to personal injury lawsuits in Houston, Texas

After researching a few SEO providers online, they came across a few of our legal case studies on our case studies page. Seeing this convinced them to reach out to us for a free SEO consultation, as they were looking for an SEO provider that had legal expertise. 

During the call, we discussed their goals, our process, and what they could expect from working with us. 

Since they needed some extensive work done, we decided to set them up on a HOTH X campaign. 

Developing a HOTH X campaign 

HOTH X is our fully managed SEO service where we take the entire process of our client’s hands. 

This typically comes as a huge relief to clients since they no longer have to focus any time or energy doing their own SEO. 

We also connect each client with a dedicated campaign manager who:

  1. Develops an in-depth SEO strategy based on the client’s unique needs 
  2. Provides updates, answers questions, and stays in contact with the client 

HOTH X also makes use of all our SEO products, including content creation, link-building, and technical SEO. 

The campaign manager decides which products to use based on each client’s unique situation. 

In the case of the personal injury law firm, they were in dire need of link-building services alongside a technical SEO audit (which every client receives at the beginning of a campaign). 

Speaking of audits, that was our next step. 

The SEO Audit: Tightening Things Up and Targeting Easy Wins 

In the SEO game, there are lots of factors that can impact your rankings, and it’s crucial to know what they are. 

Specifically, things like crawling and indexing errors can cause your content to disappear entirely from the search results. 

This is why we kick off every HOTH X campaign with a thorough audit of the client’s website. 

We look for things like:

  • Slow loading speed (so they can pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test) 
  • Duplicate content (two pages trying to rank for the same keyword confuses Google’s search bots) 
  • Thin content (Google doesn’t like content with less than 700 – 1,000 words) 
  • Indexing errors (noindex tags, improper robots.txt file, 4xx errors) 

We discovered that our client only had a few issues to fix this time around, as they had a few thin pages and some slow loading times. 

Once that was done, we looked for keywords that the site already ranked for, just not in a desirable spot (i.e., not on page one). 

We call these easy-win opportunities because:

  1. The content is already in Google’s index (meaning it won’t take very long to see results from changes) 
  2. It’s easier to boost a keyword’s existing ranking than to start ranking from nothing 
  3. Usually, some simple optimizations are all it takes to get easy-win opportunities on page one

The client had numerous personal injury keywords that they were ranking for in positions 20 – 30, so we got to work on those first! 

The Strategy: Link-Building to Key Legal Service Pages 

A major reason why the site wasn’t ranking for keywords was a lack of authority

This meant they needed lots of valuable backlinks to boost their website’s reputation to Google’s algorithm. 

Link-building is one of our specialties, so we got to work leveraging our massive link network

We pursued link insertions the most, which is where we reach out to site owners requesting that they insert one of our client’s backlinks into an existing piece of their content. 

To ensure that we landed these placements (instead of never hearing back), we pursued content where it made perfect sense to link to one of our client’s service pages

For example, this article on Flux magazine’s website is all about how to deal with a serious injury after a car accident (which is right up our client’s alley):

So, we reached out and requested that they hyperlink the text ‘personal injury’ with one of our client’s links, which is what they did:

Not only did this backlink drive targeted traffic to our client’s site, but it also brought lots of authority to their link profile, as evidenced here:

 

As you can see, the backlink has an impressive DR (Domain Rating) of 60 (on a scale of 1 – 100), meaning it’s very authoritative. 

This was just one of the hundreds of links we built for our client! 

The Results: A Huge Boost in Traffic, Ranking for 2.1k Keywords, 21 in the Top 10

We were able to generate speedy results for our client, as we saw a 283% increase in traffic in just 6 months

legal seo traffic boost

Traffic has consistently risen since then, and will continue to rise into the future due to our efforts. 

We also got them ranking for over 2,000 personal injury keywords, 21 of which are in the top 10. 

As you can see, they now bring in $1.9k worth of traffic to their site each month, which is a far cry from where they started before getting in touch with our team. 

Do you want to achieve impressive results like these for your law firm?

HOTH X is the way to do it, as our gurus will take the entire SEO process off your hands, so don’t wait to get in touch for a free consultation today!