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 legal staff.

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.

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.

Here at Zulu Shack Creative, we believe in 3 things:

• Organic search is the cheapest way to get highly qualified personal injury cases. 
• Detailed discovery is a VITAL part of any successful SEO campaign. (We want you to feel like we are a part of the firm itself)
• A good strategy takes time, attention to detail, and consistency.

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. 

We can see organic results here, laid out with a timeline of the fixes that were made to the website. This is the part of the SEO case study that you have all been waiting for, let’s dig into the results.

We have delivered real screenshots

All Organic Insights for the first 14 months:

[1] 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.

[2] 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.

In September, a vicious backlink attack began on the website. We began to receive thousands of harmful links pointing to the law firm’s website.We began weekly disavows.

All organic pageviews

[3] The New Website Was Launched

• All content was optimized.
• Metadata was updated.
• Website speed issues were resolved.
• New locations were added to the website.

[4] 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.

[5] 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

There was an 82.76% increase in non-branded, organic traffic 14 months after the contract began, jumping from 7,655 to 34,440 monthly visitors.

We focused on non-branded traffic because the firm had down traditional marketing for decades and had a well-established name. So by all accounts, most branded searches were likely started by billboards, television commercials, and taxi banners.

Organic Traffic According to SEMrush

Organic Metrics According to aHrefs

Keywords According to SEMrush

We focused on more longtail keywords and top-of-funnel queries. The idea was to find potential personal injury clients when they are at the beginning of their journey, looking for answers related to finding a lawyer.

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% per month by the 14-month mark.
• Case signups also increased by 87% on average by the 14-month mark.

The increase in traffic is 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.

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 vital 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 is 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.

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?