Digital Marketing for Law Firm: How We Doubled the Organic Traffic [Case Study]

The Challenge

An immigration law firm from San Diego turned to Hop Online for help with their website. They already had an excellent reputation and a steady business flow due to their long-term presence on the market. However, they felt that their website could work harder for them and contribute more to generating new business.

The attorneys were looking for growth in non-branded organic traffic for both English and Spanish terms related to immigration to the US, as well as an increase in the organic local search positions for keywords targeted at their exact location and practice.

The homepage of the website, which was the main landing page, was missing a prominent call to action, and the contact number wasn’t immediately visible to visitors, which was an additional obstacle to great conversion rates.

We decided to approach the project with a combination of on- and off-page tactics to help our client quickly and confidently overcome these challenges.

What We Did

We started with an SEO audit of the website, which revealed multiple issues. In order to ensure that we’ve tackled all the on-site problems and eliminated the main factors impeding the site from ranking well, we implemented the following: added breadcrumbs navigation and a sitemap, and at a later stage, we also added an image map.

Next, we updated the site’s metadata, since this is the information that search engines use to render a short description of the website in search results. Specifically, we did this for the news and blog posts, using long-tail, less-competitive keywords. Internal links are also an important factor for the ‘health’ of a website, so we created internal links using various keywords in the anchor text aiming at types of immigration advice on visas and green cards offered by the firm.

To improve conversions (contact form completions and phone calls) we moved the phone number to the top of the homepage and made the call-to-action button more prominent. Along with that, we set up Google Analytics to track these events.

Mobile search is on the rise, so we also made sure to introduce a mobile version of the site to bring in extra traffic to the attorney’s website.

Then, our Local SEO audit showed NAP (name, address, phone) discrepancies in the existing citations. Plus, the firm’s Google Places page returned three listings for the same business, one of which had user reviews. We managed to claim the page with the user reviews and eliminate the other two. Shortly after we did this, the page started ranking organically and going up for keywords related to immigration attorneys in San Diego. Additionally, we’ve updated the Google Places page by adding relevant information (such as photos and videos of the attorneys and a short description) and correcting existing information (such as the coordinate on the map, address, contact information and the website URL). We then merged this page with the firm’s Google+ local page to boost it even more.

Once we had all that set up, we also added rich snippets. This fancy term means that we added a markup code to the lawyer’s website, which helps them stand out from the competition and helps the search engines better understand what their site is about. In the case of our client we showed reviews, address and contact information and the author tag, which was later removed after Google’s last update.

In order to ensure accuracy and consistency of the information about our client’s law firm on the web, we employed a combination of manual checks and tools to verify and manage their listings.

Our work wouldn’t be complete without setting up their social media accounts, so we created the accounts that were missing: Facebook, Google+ and YouTube, all of which we branded consistently. We then promoted the firm’s blog posts via their social media accounts and relevant websites in the law industry.

Results

Our holistic SEO and Content marketing approach resulted in the following:

Within one year, organic traffic doubled.

Organic growth in contact form completions also almost doubled.

In other words, the law firm’s now receiving two times the number of organic site visits, and those visits are made by the right kind of people — those looking for their services, ready to get started. Our efforts not only helped this company establish a solid online presence, but helped them gain new business by making them easier to find online exactly by the type of people who needed them.

If your local business is seeking growth in organic traffic and revenue, get in touch with us today.