I will be taking you through an ongoing SEO campaign that I am running for a Solicitor who has 20 offices across the North East of England. They provide family law, probate, property and business services to a wide range of clients with family law and probate being their main focus for the campaign.
Challenges
The campaign for this client began in middle September 2021 with the aim of becoming one of the top solicitor firms in each of their office locations. Due to campaign budget, this was going to be difficult due to competitors spending 5x more. However, from current results, this has been achieved in some of the areas.
A slight challenge is being able to manage the partners from the firm as they are present on each monthly call. They expect a lot and can get quite confrontational when something doesn’t go their way which is why I get quite apprehensive before the calls start. Fortunately, I have the data and results to back me up.
Standout SEO Tasks
The campaign consists of many tasks to help deliver a solid product for the client. Below are some of the main tasks that we focused on which have helped the website improve its visibility online.
Content
The first thing that I identified was that their office pages had 0 content on them, except for the office name and Google map embed. This was a great opportunity to get some keywords featured and ranking as there was very little local keywords on the website. As a result, their SERP position for service + location was very poor. However, upon adding optimised content to each office page, their ranking has improved massively. In some cases, they are in position 1.
Another content task that was carried out was fleshing out the service pages with internal links to location pages and relevant blogs. Also added were FAQs, researched content and more information about their services, having gained more knowledge from their partners.
Backlinks
From looking at the number of referring domains that the website has in comparison to their competitors, it was clear that they needed to improve in order to compete. As a result, we set aside some budget in order to get some relevant, high authority backlinks to get them near the competition.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a key tool for a solicitor wanting to focus on local searches which is why a lot of our time and effort was directed towards optimising their 10 office profiles. We ensured that; the NAP information was accurate to the website, the service area was correct, all their services were added (with descriptions of each), the links to the website were correct, the phone number was the correct one, the business description had useful and optimised information and there were plenty of photos. Posts were added each month to show that the business was active.
Results (so far)
The results below show how the campaign has progessed since it started in September 2021 to current day.
Organic Traffic
From the start of the campaign, we can see that organic traffic has doubled with it almost tripling later in the quarter. The client is very happy with this growth as the competition that they are facing is very heavy and strong.
Organic Keywords
From September to November, we can see the initial content that we added to the office pages as the number of organic keywords increased by around 90%. From there, the content that we have added has had a gradual increase in the organic keywords that the website is ranking for.
Impressions & Clicks
Impressions to the website have increased by over 50% thanks to the added keywords and optimised meta tags. This increase in impressions has helped clicks to the website increase by 22%.
Traffic Value
Traffic value is explained as; the value of organic traffic if the organic traffic was acquired via PPC. From looking at the graph, we can see that the value of the traffic acquired via SEO has continued to grow from around $600 in September to up to $3000 in July and down to $2000 in August. Despite this recent drop, the client is experiencing great value for money since they don’t pay close to this figure.
Website Health
When we started the campaign, the website had a decent health level. However, we knew that this had to be improved in order to achieve decent rankings. As a result, we continue to fix any technical issues that we find. Having improved the site health from 75 to 88, we will endeavour to get it up to the solid 90 mark.
Keyword SERP Positions
We knew that the best chance of success and increased traffic was to focus on service and location keywords. For example; ‘Solicitors in Croydon’ or ‘Divorce in Portsmouth’. We have helped them acheive 54 new keywords in the top 3 searches, 62 new keywords in the top 10 and 90 new keywords in the top 20.
The next plan for achieving more ranked keywords is to create effective and cornerstone blog content. Not only will this help with keywords but it will help with their EAT success.
Conversions
Having recently been introduced to the conversion section of Google Analytics, I am now able to provide detailed stats about how many conversions they are getting and which channels they are from. Whilst I can’t show the data (due to access) for the PPC campaign that they also have with us, I can compare the conversions which were provided in the monthly catch-up call.
SEO v PPC
| SEO | PPC | |
| Spend (September) | £1500 | £7500 |
| Conversions (September) | 142 | 100 |
As we can see from the table, the spend for SEO is significantly less than PPC yet is it yielding much better results. This shows the impact that SEO has when it is allowed to continue for over a year as it is spending x5 less yet gaining almost 50% more conversions.
Conclusion
This is a professional legal firm who expect solid results. It has been hard to show them the results due to them not understanding many metrics due to age. However, once they are presented with clear stats, they appreciate the work that has been done so far.
The campaign is performing well at the moment and with a content plan currently being created, I expect to see a continuous growth in online visibility.
If you are impressed by what I have done for this client and are considering optimisation work on your website, consider reviewing my SEO services which are designed to help grow your business organically.
Harry Buckley 