How Riley Summers Helped a Law Firm Generate a 40% Increase in Targeted Leads

Keyword Research and Optimization: Our SEO team performed in-depth keyword research study to identify high-value, location-specific terms like “Chicago car accident lawyer” and “personal injury attorney in Chicago.” These were also used as keywords that we could annotate and report progress on to the client.

The on-page optimization was performed by updating title tags, meta descriptions, headers and content to reflect these target keywords. Variations of these terms were also utilized to increase keyword relevancy without keyword stuffing.

Local SEO: Specific techniques were also employed, beginning with the optimization of the firm’s Google My Business listings and then, incorporating geo-specific keywords across the site – largely in the blog content but also throughout applicable business pages (like attorney bio pages, contact us page and so on).

Content: The next step was to evaluate the content already published on the website and align with the client of the typse of content that we would be publishing on the website during the six month contract.

We developed a content calendar that focused on writing a combination of blog posts, helpful articles and FAQ sections that answered common legal questions that potential clients in Chicago might have. An example may be – “What should I do after a car accident in Chicago?” and “How long does a personal injury claim take?”.

Our content team also created landing pages for specific practice areas like car accidents, slip-and-fall injuries, and workplace accidents, targeting local traffic – all of which were geographically focused.

Link Building Campaign: We then began working on a local backlink outreach campaign, partnering with local businesses and legal directories to help obtain quality, LOCAL backlinks. This is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process however, very rewarding when it comes to local ranking factors.

We also began contributing guest posts to local blogs and news outlets, which helped build the firm’s online authority and lift overall visibility in local search results.

Onsite Technical SEO Enhancements: A technical audit of the website was performed using software that we prefer (Google Search Console) to identify and fix any issues related to site speed, mobile usability, and security. This was also augmented by another useful tool – “Screaming Frog”.

The use of internal linking via anchor-texts were also improved to ensure users and search engines could easily navigate and scan the website. This process effectively has two functions – to satisfy users (via enhanced user experience) and bots, via the method of connecting related/relevant pages together via clickable links to those pages using specifically targeted terms. When the links are added, these terms are known as “anchor text”.

User Experience Improvements: We updated the website design to reduce known friction points (when users wanted to contact the firm by calling or filling out and sending a contact for) and also launched A-B tests to determine what button text on the call-option and contact forms generated the greatest amount of leads using an equal number of website visitors.

Organic Traffic Growth: Our SEO team accomplished a 75% increase in organic traffic, surpassing our initial goal of a 50% increase.

Monthly traffic also grew from 500 new, organic visitors to more than 800, with most coming from high-intent searches related to personal injury cases in Chicago.

Improved Keyword Rankings: We also began to see the site on the first page of Google for several high-value keywords, including “Chicago personal injury lawyer” and “car accident lawyer in Chicago.” This improvement led to a substantial increase in qualified traffic from individuals searching for legal assistance in the local area.

Increased Leads: The firm saw a 40% increase in leads generated from the website, that were attributed to both the improved visibility in search engines and the user experience enhancements – certain terms in the call to action “Call Us” button tests provided useful insights as did the contact form button tests. These outcomes helped us to determine the ideal combination of call-to-action statements throughout the website.

To double click into this topic, the contact form submissions doubled, and the firm began receiving more inquiries for cases related to their specific practice areas.

Higher Engagement: The bounce rate on the website decreased by 20%, and average session duration increased to over 3 mins, up from just 50 seconds previously. This tells is that users were more engaged with the new style of content that was being published on the website.

The firm’s blog posts and FAQ sections became some of the most popular areas of the site, bringing in both local visitors and those seeking general legal information – where that traffic was sourced from long-tail Google organic searches.