How We Increased A Law Firm's Backlinks by 800%

Before we can start helping a new client, we need to conduct an SEO audit of their website to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for growth.

In October 2019 the firm’s organic traffic was around 300 visitors per month and they were ranking for approximately 650 keywords. To put this in perspective, their biggest competitor is currently receiving about 3,000 visitors per month.

We knew it was possible to boost their monthly traffic by building backlinks and helping them to optimize their sites with ranking keywords.

Our first step after the site audit was to identify “easy win” keywords and make them start working for our client.

In any campaign, this step is a quick and effective way to start boosting a client’s SEO. So what are “easy win” keywords exactly?

These are keywords that you’re already ranking for in positions 4-30. They aren’t in the top three positions but they are still ranking which means with a little love, we can get them into the top 3. It’s a quick and easy way to take already successful keywords and boost them up to help drive traffic.

Some examples of these “easy win” keywords included “grapevine conditions,” “101 freeway,” and “car accidents near me.”

Once these keywords are identified they can be used for web copy or blogs. For example, “grapevine conditions” was used in a blog about what to do if you get stuck on this iconic California highway.

Competitive Gap Analysis

The sophisticated digital tools we use for SEO help us to analyze everything about our clients and their competitors. Doing this helps us find out what’s working in the market and to identify new opportunities for our clients.

Our intention of doing a competitive gap analysis isn’t to do the same thing as our client’s competitor. We understand every law firm is different and not all legal keywords would apply to every practice. This analysis helps us find keywords that our clients have in common with a competitor.

For example, the law firm is currently ranking for 11,279 unique keywords. They are sharing 6,577 keywords with their closest competitor. But, the competing law firm is ranking for an additional 11,035 keywords that our client isn’t. We can look through this list and find keywords that would work for our client.

We can also get a look at some of the websites providing competitors with backlinks. There may be an opportunity to get a backlink from the same place or generate new ideas to help our client.

When the law firm started working with us in October 2019 we first helped them distribute content and gain new links through HOTH Syndication. This product helps clients to syndicate their content across 300+ high authority news sites. The law firm syndicated articles on legal topics in which they were featured.

They were pleased with the results of the content syndication and kicked off a large HOTH Foundations campaign for the rest of 2020. Similar to HOTH Syndication, this service gets clients in-content, contextual links back to their website from high authority blogs.

Our Foundations service is completely white label and our account managers work with clients on crafting the most effective anchor texts.

To boost their link building, the law firm also had their Campaign Manager add HOTH Guest Posts to their project:

• DA 50 Guest Post
• DA 40 Guest Post
• DA 30 Guest Post
• DA 20 Guest Post
• Guest Post Pro – 25K

Our guest blog service helps clients to write an original blog with a backlink and get it published on a site with domain authorities (DA) ranging from 10-50. As you can see by what they ordered, the law firm wanted their content to appear on sites with a higher DA.

After putting all of these things in place, we noticed that the law firm’s traffic really started taking off in the summer of 2020. Let’s take a look at the results below.

In one year, the law firm’s number of referring domains jumped from less than 50 to 450 — an increase of 800%.

By identifying and incorporating those “easy win” keywords, as well as a targeted strategy to gain keywords in rankings 1-3, we helped them obtain 20,177 organic keywords. 

As you can see below, their ranking keywords in the top three positions jumped from around 40 to 240.

And our final indicator of campaign success was organic traffic, which is influenced by the number of backlinks and ranking keywords.

Their traffic skyrocketed to 10,000 monthly visitors at the end of 2020 and today they are getting close to 6,000. It would cost the law firm $30,000 of paid advertising to get this amount of traffic, but they’re receiving it organically!