Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! In this case study, we are discussing a personal injury law firm that came to Zulu Shack Creative in 2019. They asked us to increase search engine ranking, traffic, and leads– and as the lord is our witness, we delivered. No, we exceeded expectations and established a commanding online presence for them.
As this is an SEO case study for a personal injury law firm, we have had to keep some of the details private; however, we have shared as much as we can to prove how important SEO for a personal injury law firm is.
The Who
Not the band, the client. Whom is this SEO case study all about? Well, we must keep all names confidential. We can tell you that this particular client was a multilocation, personal injury law firm with more than 200 employees.
This personal injury law firm was founded in the early 90s. They had previously established themselves through long-standing traditional marketing efforts (i.e. billboards, television commercials, taxi banner ads).
Then they made the choice to get more aggressive online. SEO marketing hadn’t achieved the desired results yet. While a PPC firm created many fantastic ads that were successful, the SEO efforts from their previous SEO company had been lackluster. They requested our SEO and personal injury digital marketing services towards the end of 2019.
This case study covers the initial growth period from 2019 to 2021.
Getting Started
Here at Zulu Shack Creative, we believe in 3 things:
- Alex Ferguson was the greatest football manager of all time (that would be soccer to our American families).
- Discovery is a VITAL part of the process. We want to know everything there is to know about our client so we can make an outstanding marketing strategy.
- Our client’s success is our success; our client’s failure is our failure. We celebrate wins with you and we are up late at night fixing issues when they arise. You can call us old-fashioned, but we guarantee you will never call us uninvolved.
With that in mind, we arrived at the discovery section of our SEO onboarding process. The “meet, greet, give us the deets” part of our marketing strategy. During our discovery meetings, we learned a lot about this client.
The Brief
Previous SEO Agency: The law firm was working with another SEO agency that they believed was not delivering. They received reports from the previous SEO agency, but not much work–few deliverables and no changes made to the website in some time.
Brand Name Change: The company changed brand names in 2018, which caused a major drop in organic traffic. The website had also experienced a notable drop in all calls from organic sources.
Other Marketing Efforts: They relied on PPC and traditional advertising to a large degree. The firm’s marketing department believed that there was a large organic market that they should be tapping into more aggressively.
The firm’s internal marketing department had monitored organic success through Google Analytics, reports from the previous SEO agency, and through their call center, where potential clients would answer “how did you hear about us” questions.
The Goal
If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you get there? That should be the motto of all good SEO strategies and case studies!
There’s something magical about working with a client that has so much SEO potential but has not harnessed it yet. And this law firm had lots of SEO potential. It’s like kinetic energy, just waiting to be realized onto the internet to reach potential clients.
Our goals broke down as follows:
- Transition: The client asked us to smoothly transition away from their current SEO firm, one that was charging far too much and delivering far too little, and to take the lead on all SEO efforts in the future.
- Increase Leads: Additionally, the goal was to increase organic leads as much as possible, by whichever means we thought were necessary.
- Increase Traffic: The brand name change had caused some major traffic downturns; the law firm wanted to correct this and return to previous traffic levels, or ideally, exceed those levels.
- Open More Locations: Expansion was in the air! The firm was planning a robust expansion effort that included opening up another 5 to 10 locations in states across the US.
- Transparency: Finally, the client wanted transparency. What were we doing, exactly, and how was it helping? Those lawyers love details so this was a match made in heaven. Zulu Shack Creative is a BIG believer in full transparency and details. We don’t hide the secret sauce; we tell all our clients exactly what we do.
Now the fun can begin! The Zulu Shack impis got to work gathering resources and scouting the battlefield to begin transforming this personal injury law firm into a massive online success.
The Plan
A well-laid-out SEO strategy is a good SEO strategy. And the same applies to a detailed SEO case study. So here are the deets.
With our discovery out of the way, the brief in our hands, and the goals clearly assessed, we got to work creating a plan that we could implement to reach success.
Phase 1: Transition from the previous SEO agency in a smooth, thorough, and chivalrous fashion.
We spoke with the previous agency for a few weeks and gathered all the information we needed to move into the next phase.
During this phase, it’s important to enter each meeting with a complete list of all the most vial SEO-related information. Once the previous SEO agency departed, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get some of this information again.
We collected everything we needed to take over including benchmarks, past reports, strategies regarding the brand name change, and the strategies they planned to implement. We covered all bases. We wanted to see what had been done and what they thought should be done next. It’s always a good idea to get information from people so close to the project. Even if we decided not to use their strategy, it’s good to see where their heads were at.
Phase 1.5: Immersion & Competitor Analysis
While we gathered all the information we needed from the previous SEO agency, we began to immerse ourselves in the world of personal injury law.
See, the only way to truly create great marketing is to live and breathe the service you are marketing. So we began to read everything we could about personal injury, we watched videos, we read articles and legal documents, and we combed through the website of every one of our new client’s competitors to understand what works, what doesn’t work, and how we needed to tackle this marketing strategy.
We created a comprehensive competitor analysis that outlined the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything that every one of our client’s competitors was doing in terms of marketing. Keeping an eye on competitors allows you to skip ahead. If you look at what they are doing, you can find what works and we save our client’s time and money, starting at the baseline of what works and innovating from there.
Phase 2: Audit the current website and find any and all errors.
In phase 2, we put on our Sherlock Holmes hats, grabbed our magnifying glasses, and began to audit the website, combing through every single pixel and div. This is an important part of the process because we have to fix current issues in the foundation to build upon. This process also allows us to gather more information about the inner workings of the client’s internal processing systems.
A Zulu Shack Creative SEO audit tends to range between 75 and 120 pages in total–let’s just say, it gets rather detailed. We leave no stone unturned!
For this client, we created a 103-page website audit and we discovered a few issues that included:
Unoptimized, nonuniform content and metadata
Over the years, more and more locations and case types were added to the website. But without a clear SEO strategy, each case type for each location began to take on a life of its own.
Some locations did not have pages for certain case types and most case type pages would have layouts and content that did not follow SEO best practices or a boilerplate template. Almost all metadata was also completely random.
Some Title Tags contained the name of the law firm, others had an abbreviated name or the initials of the firm while some were missing the firm name altogether. There were missing meta descriptions, unoptimized pages, and very little interlinking. This was going to take some work to fix. With 15 case types in 5 locations (so far; they were planning to expand), we needed to get things up to SEO standards and uniform, pronto.
Crawlability issues
A website that cannot be effectively crawled is always going to struggle to rank on search engines. This law firm’s website had some pretty standard crawlability issues including an out-of-date sitemap, thousands of 404 errors, broken internal links, and a number of 301 redirect chains. Plus, the schema was hardcoded and out of date. That would have to be optimized pronto.
Thin, duplicate, and irrelevant content
The previous SEO firm had created an FAQ section that was thin at best. Some pages contained 2 sentences, and although that may be efficient, it’s also not going to do you any favors when it comes time to rank and engage with users.
This site had 15 case types and 5 locations so some of the content could be classified as slightly duplicate. There are only so many ways you can talk about personal injury, regardless of location, right?
Wrong. There are plenty of ways to avoid duplicate content. Finally, there was content that was not industry-specific but location-specific, which sends the wrong signals to search engines. Ultimately, all content should be industry-specific first, then location-specific if applicable.
Toxic Links
A backlink audit uncovered several hundred toxic backlinks from a few choice offenders. As we came to find out, the legal niche is a shark tank and competitors may be willing to do things that are potentially a little off-color. Overall, the audit revealed many underlying issues that could be fixed and should be fixed as soon as possible. Once we knew what the client wanted and what issues we needed to address, we began the next phase.
Phase 3: It’s Mighty Morphin' strategy making time.
We focused on a local SEO approach for each location, basically treating each location as its own business if you will. With that in mind, there are 4 strategies we had to make:
Tech SEO Strategy
Our tech SEO strategy primarily focused on website fixes. We wanted to increase the website speed because competitors were all a few seconds faster than us and we wanted to increase crawlability by fixing error codes and internal linking structures.
Keyword Strategy
All keywords were location-specific and case type-specific. This approach was pretty straightforward. We wanted to rank for the highest volume keywords for each specification. We researched topics based on long-tail keywords.
Content Strategy
We had to reoptimize all existing content, ensure it was not duplicate, set up a templated structure, and flesh it out. Additionally, the blog needed a few big pieces to really drive traffic. All irrelevant and thin content had to be deleted, redirected, or combined. In order to determine which content could be saved or removed, we combed through traffic numbers on Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, and aHrefs.
Link Building Strategy
Finally, we set out to create a link-building strategy that focused on quality. We wanted to create an outreach strategy that would ensure we were getting the best quality links at a steady stream.
Each strategy has its own unique challenges and obstacles and each strategy is as important as the next. When you lump all of these strategies together, add a few goals, sprinkle in a timeline, and decorate with benchmarks, well, that all add up to a holistic SEO strategy.
Execute the Plan!
It took about a month to gather all the relevant information, perform the audit, and create the strategies. And the execution began in the second month and lasted 14 months in total.
Results
- Work Began With the Client!
- Discovery
- Transitioned from the previous SEO agency.
- All the strategies were created.
- Link building began.
- Content creation, consolidation, and optimization began.
- Making Fixes!
- All 404 errors were redirected.
- All 301 redirect chains were unraveled and redirected.
- Backlinks were disavowed.
- Schema was updated and added to the website.
- The New Website Was Launched
- All content was optimized.
- Metadata was updated.
- Website speed issues were resolved.
- New locations were added to the website.
- Viral Content
- A few of our published articles hit viral status by February.
- We were continually pumping out new content at a rate of about 10 pieces per month.
- This content has since tripled the website’s traffic and doubled conversions
- Efforts Were Paying Off!
- The link-building strategies had paid off and we were seeing a major increase in rankings to case-type pages.
- All the crawlability fixes had worked! More pages were indexed and more content was ranking well.
Organic Traffic
Organic Metrics According to aHrefs
Keywords According to SEMrush
Leads & Cases
And finally, the only metric that really matters: did our client receive more leads and open more cases?
YES!
We cannot put in data from Call Tracking Metrics or Salesforce for privacy reasons. We would love to display it for all to see how great the Zulu Shack Creative SEO team really is and to make this SEO case study of a law firm complete, but alas, this is one bit of data we have to keep private.
What we can say is:
- Calls from organic sources increased by 110% on average by the 14-month mark.
- Case signups also increased by 87% on average by the 14-month mark.
The increase in traffic directly correlated with an increase in leads and sales. Phones were ringing, traffic was coming to the website, and all was right with the world of personal injury law.
Law Firm SEO Case Study Conclusion
With a bit of elbow grease and a lot of discipline, the Zulu Shack Creative team set out to completely transform this law firm’s website into something incredible while ensuring that the phones kept ringing off the hook with calls from new clients.
We transitioned from another SEO agency, audited the website, created our plan, and worked for months to watch it build and grow into a massive success. This case study is just one of the many examples of the successes and growth that Zulu Shack Creative has delivered to clients for over 10 years.
The only question is, are you ready to take your business up a notch?