Criminal Lawyer SEO Case Study
In this case study, we’re going to peel back the layers of an organic search optimization campaign in order to show you the exact steps that we took to achieve Page One domination for a criminal lawyer, all in just four short months.
This strategy, which allowed us to capture #1 positions for ‘criminal lawyer’ and ‘criminal attorney’ keywords, directly increased organic search traffic by 67% for our client. And it is by no means a small market that we had to work in, with a city size of just under 500,000 for one of the most competitive industries in the local space.
Our over-the-shoulder case study guides you through every process we utilized on this campaign:
Competitive Analysis
Foundational Linking
Anchor Text Analysis
Content Optimization
Technical Issues
Google Quality Guideline Review
Link Building Campaign From A-Z
Let’s get started and find out what we have going on under to hood of a top-performing SEO strategy.
Rankings And Related Reporting
Criminal Law Terms Ranking Page 1
In depth case studies are one of the ways in which we can show our clients the real value of search optimization, even before they’ve decided that it’s the right move for their business. In this write up of a fairly competitive criminal law campaign, we’re going to show you exactly what made our phenomenal page one ranking goals a reality.
In this article, we want to show you the actionable steps that we took when setting up the campaign and laying out the strategy; steps that would later have a huge payoff for our overall ROI.
First, let’s take a look at some of the results that this client enjoyed thanks to our strategizing and implementation. Next, we’ll cover the link building, anchor text, and the other great SEO tactics that we used in order to create a ranking campaign that would not only get us to page one, but would help us maintain that growth and position over time. For this campaign, our client used the Elite Level DFY SEO package.
As you can see from this rank tracker (provided with every Monthly White Label Campaign), our organic keywords are sitting pretty. We definitely have some improvements that we can make to boost some of the keywords sitting at the bottom of page one, but this campaign overall is not a flop by any stretch. Considering the time frame to achieve these results of just over 4 months, this campaign has been a smashing success thus far.
There are a ton of metrics that we could look at for a campaign, and a ton of great SEO tools that can help us compile that data. For our campaigns, we look at Keyword Rankings and Organic Traffic and New Users primarily in order to determine a client’s success. But we’d also like to share some cool SEMRush snaps that give a feel for just how important this data really is to our campaign.
First, we’ll dig into the top two organic keyword estimates in SEMRush. We can see that they estimate the number one rankings with 320 searches per month drive more traffic to the site than other ranking keywords. Traffic estimates here are a bit off, but the value metric is close.
Again, a weird traffic estimate here for this criminal lawyer, but the Cost-Per-Click is high and makes for an excellent talking point when we’re reporting to the client, because we can show that we have increased their investment 10x or more in organic traffic. Now let’s take a look at some of the most important data for a local campaign.
Client anonymity is extremely important to us, so we won’t be able to show too much location specific data in order to make reverse engineering the client as difficult as possible.
What you’re seeing here is a GeoGrid Rank Tracker report from Local Viking, which showcases the local visibility for our client’s given term. We’re seeing some pretty decent results around the city based on this report, and we can see how our presence is holding up as we go further out from our location. We love this supplemental GMB rank tracking tool as it allows us to visualize coverage of an area with arguably more accuracy than a traditional rank tracker. We use these grids with all of our GMB & Local SEO campaigns in order to make client reporting and understanding even easier.
To preface this section, I want to make a declaration that most individuals in SEO will agree with:
In a situation where there are unseen algorithms determining the success or failure of your efforts for search optimization, such as in the case of ranking in Google, it is important to rely on the most thorough reverse engineering possible in order to be in parity with the sites that Google has shown you it wants to rank highly for any given search.
Above are the top three or so sites that Google has already placed highly for our search. When we look to reverse engineer the competition and design our own SEO campaign, these are the primary places that we want to extract our data from since these are the websites ranking most effectively in SERPs for the terms that we are aiming to rank for ourselves.
Anchor Text Analysis
The image above is a snippet from our anchor text classification engine, which we are going to use to analyze how the competitors are linking to their own sites from other sources. This helps us to make sense of the data that we grab through larger link platform APIs.
We will use this to judge the overall power of the link, the topical relevance of the linking page/site, the specific anchor text our competitors are using, and so on. This can turn into a complex process quickly, and we will be utilizing several tools in order to determine content and link gaps between our site and the competitor sites.
The above snapshot is obviously not for the same client that we have been reviewing, which is again to protect the anonymity of our client. But for this specific campaign, we still used this outlined process to build out a six month link building campaign strategy. Building out a link strategy that lasts for 3-6 months is a perfect way to map out what you need to achieve in your link building early, while still remaining flexible enough to move to other keyword targets or increase/decrease the current keyword targeting from month to month of the campaign. In a case like this where the rankings come quicker than the 6 month benchmark, this strategy is going to allow us to jump on other targets that much sooner.
Now that we know our link building efforts are going to be on par with the competitors (and we even have some possible link opportunities from the Ahrefs Link Intersect Tool), we want to make sure that our content is optimized for competitor parity as well.
Content Optimization
Again, we’re using a different example above than the client, in this case our own Web 20 page ranked for GMB Optimization. We’ll use this to look through some of the more important content optimization points that will help make our page pop.
A lot of people talk about the ‘most important on page factors’ and go on to talk about things like Page Titles, H tags, and schema markup. All of these are important to your page; but a lot of optimizers don’t take into account that content is an on-page factor too and should be just as optimized as these other elements. Some of the things that we’ll also want to review with competitor parity in mind are the average page length, keyword density, and term frequency of the ranking page(s) against our own.
We use Surfer’s Content editor app to review on page content against competitor pages. We’ll be removing keywords that we’re not interested in optimizing for, making sure that we have included any additional terms specific to our brand or page that we want to rank for as well. Once finalized, we can pass the project directly to our writer who can login to the program and fill in the missing data that we need in a way that makes sense for the page, removing anything that we don’t need in the process.
There are more sophisticated ways of analyzing and optimizing content for a web page. However, when it comes to optimizing local website content based on competitor parity, Surfer is a very effective means of getting all of the data we want in one place and making it actionable for our team of SEO writers.
When it comes to content, we can look at both the page level and the sitewide approach. A page by page review allows us to keep up with competitor parity, refresh our content, and better optimize our core pages for our desired terms. Sitewide, we want to look at thin content pages, pages with keyword cannibalization, and ‘dead pages’ that have nonexistent traffic and are really just taking up our website’s crawl budget. Data from Google Analytics and a Siteliner review are easy ways to find thin content and underperforming pages.
Technical Issues
Nothing will completely negate the work of a great SEO campaign like the unaddressed technical issues of a website. Luckily, we start each of our DFY SEO campaigns with a full technical and quality audit in order to catch major and minor underlying technical and quality issues that could, once addressed, lead to some easy wins in the campaign.
We start with a quick Screaming Frog report so that we can catch things like poor H tag and title optimization or bad url structure at a glance. We’re looking for missing or duplicate meta data, incorrect indexation settings, un-optimized images, and so much more. But the Screaming Frog report is only one portion of our full 30 Point Tech Audit.
Google Quality Guideline Review Emulation
Our SEO team stays up to date with the latest industry guidelines, including the Google Quality Rater Guidelines for website optimization. This is included in our setup audit for all new DFY SEO campaigns, especially our DFY SEO for Lawyers, where meeting these Your Money Your Life guidelines can really make or break our site’s potential.
We use a fine toothed comb to determine if there are trust issues at play with your site. If it doesn’t look like a real brand or there is a lot of spammy content – or even content that could be harmful to the reader – it could negatively affect our campaign. That’s why our audit and quality review is a multi-hour process that works through the Page Quality Rater’s Checklist, an E-A-T Audit (Expertise | Authority | Trust), a Brand Reputation Check, and a YMYL audit of the site overall.
The Google Quality Rater Guidelines is a 166 page document, but we’ve turned the process into a service of checklists and SOPs that break down this info into easily digestible bites that can easily be broken into tasks for our staff. Our full audit was initially implemented well over a year ago and we’ve been improving the process ever since. From adding additional checks for things like site speed and mobile friendly optimization, to streamlining the technical report workbook and including a written summary of all work to be completed, we have continued to pack more value into our technical and quality audit with every fresh iteration of our DFY SEO service.
Link Building Campaign From A-Z
Here is a quick comparison between our client’s site and a few of the top ranking competitors when it comes to our backlink profile. In this case, we’re looking at the top two sites ranked for our keyword compared against our own site, and we’re seeing that we had quite some room to grow when it comes to link acquisition, with more than 300 domains linking to our competitors but not our own site.
There are several ways that we determine if a link is worth building. We want to look at things like the local and niche relevancy of the site. We also want to consider the DA and traffic depending on the type of backlinks we’re looking for and the metrics for backlinks that our competitors are getting. Really there are a lot of ways that we can judge a link and the metrics we use for something like a guest post will not be the same metrics we use to judge something like our tier 2 links. We could do an entire other case study on what makes a good link and how to get a robust link profile based on competitor parity in particular niches. Instead, let’s get back to the steps we took to get this criminal lawyer ranking on page one organically.
Premium Press Release
We did a Premium Press Release. Every campaign, local or organic, that we manage gets a press release in the first month of work. Our press releases include tactics like a map embed, linking to the GMB CID, and contextual backlink building to key citations or brand properties. This way, we turn the press release into hundreds of unstructured citations with the NAP right in the article. Press releases have been a part of our foundational link building for a very, very long time, and nothing has changed that.
In fact, we use press releases now more than ever to syndicate brand news, improve company awareness and visibility, and boost certain keywords through tiered link building strategies. Because Google and other top news sources are always going to be looking for the freshest content in order to stay relevant to their users, press release links are purged every 60-90 days. Our monthly campaigns include a quarterly press release to keep your brand relevant and maintain a high level of these unstructured citations.
Business Citations
Citations have always and most likely will always be a cornerstone of local marketing. We have tested and retested the way we build citations for years and have come to several conclusions that should be surprising to no one with experience in local SEO.
First, let’s talk about the targeting tactics we use for our citations. And yes, you SHOULD BE creating a targeting and optimization plan for your citation building efforts. Start with making your listings unique. Include unique descriptions and articles for each listing, which will help your rate of indexation. We’ll normally link to the website in our NAP section, but like to include social links where relevant as well. We have also tested linking to the CID from our citations in the past, but came back with mixed results.
We’ve found that building citations is easily done in tiered stages. First, we start with the most important citations; the more prominent Essential Citations. We follow these up with our secondary citations, which are more B level listings, but still important to boosting our brand visibility and even our authority. While we don’t have them available for all industries, niche citations would be the next step for most businesses so that we can get listed in relevant directories where our clients would be searching for us, such as Justia or Avvo for attorneys. The final tier for any citations campaign, whether you’re just grabbing the essentials or going for the full suite, is to grab some tiered links. Tier 2 links are a great way to boost our citations. They will help us to pass more link juice to our primary url(s) and they can help our citations index faster, along with our use of unique descriptions.
Deep Links
Another strategy that we employ for our campaigns is the use of what we call ‘deep linking’. This just means that we’re going deeper into the site silos and building links to those pages in order to create an upward flow of link juice that hits your target pages, without having to build an exorbitant number of links to your high level pages. Got a great blog on your site that is ranking for some longtail terms and links back to your main location page? We’ll use tiered link building to target this blog post, effectively pushing the link juice back to the main location page linked in the article.
We add a unique and relevant article to the site blog every month as a part of the DFY SEO campaign, so there will be no shortage of topical posts that we can use for deep linking. Deep linking is most important to a campaign because it not just allows us to target more pages for additional longtail terms, but allows us to use a higher link velocity without pointing all the links to our target page and potentially raising some red flags with Google.
In the case of this criminal attorney campaign, our combination of powerful authority niche placements and tactical deep link building moved mountains and pushed this client site over the top. Check out a quick snapshot of the DR from some of the links we built for this client.
We prefer to look at referring domains and some other metrics, so here is a glimpse of that view as well:
In short, these links rock. Our link team built 10-15 authority niche placements per month, which are included in any of our DFY SEO monthly campaigns. But we also built 10 guest posts, sprinkled throughout the first few months of the campaign. Guest posting isn’t a part of our regular monthly campaigns, but we did include it in our DFY SEO for Lawyers after seeing the way that a few extra guest post links propelled our rankings for this campaign. You can also get guest posts a la carte if you just want to boost traffic for a particular keyword or to a certain page.
Another tactic that we’ve been using for years with an almost unheard of amount of success is placing tiered links behind our best placements and outreach links. We’ve seen huge national terms pinned to the top of Google for years using these tactics for safe link building. It seems like a basic strategy, nothing too inventive, but it’s a perfect ‘ninja hack’ that really works out when utilized correctly!
Summary
We wanted to keep this case study a bit more high level and concise in order to really showcase the simplicity of real SEO, once you have the process down. Here we took a newer campaign that was seeing some solid results, then we tore the case open and showed you exactly what we did to get those results. The most intense piece of this puzzle may have been the initial audit that we needed to determine where we were starting against our competitors, but that doesn’t discount the enormous impact that we received from our use of the right link building strategy and optimization tactics.
The biggest takeaway here should be how much time you spend in the infancy of your campaigns. Making sure that your link building efforts don’t go to waste all starts with making sure that your progress won’t be impeded by common, easily remedied technical and quality issues within your site. From there, it’s all about reverse engineering the competition and creating a workable link and anchor strategy that you can run with.
If you want to dig deeper into some of the granular details of our processes that we didn’t touch on in this posts, here are a few links that you may find of use:
FREE Google My Business Training ~100 videos and being updated regularly
List of Processes For GMB Campaigns
List of Processes for DFY White Label Campaigns
A Case Study Focusing on GMB Optimization
Between this in depth review of how our processes all came together to kick butt and get this tough cookie of a client ranked, to the above plethora of resources, you should have nearly everything you need to go out and and rank clients. Hungry for more complex case studies and core SEO knowledge guides? Subscribe to The Vault for weekly video updates or join us at https://www.facebook.com/groups/localseocommunity/
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