SEO
SEO Web Design
SEM
PPC
Does SEO Work?
How SEO Works
What's SEO Cost?
Case Studies
Why Hire Us?
Many clients come to us because they need help improving their search profile and their visibility on the web. Clifford Law Offices came to us in the early months of 2005 with the sense that their whole approach to the web was somehow flawed, but without the vocabulary or skills to analyze and improve the situation. It turned out they were right, and a large part of the solution was to develop a new site using the old site's content.
Clifford Law Offices (CLO) is a personal injury law firm in Chicago with 25 lawyers. In an extremely competitive market, CLO was spending just $15.00 per day on their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising—on advice from their site management company—and going through a $56,000 upgrade to that vendor's proprietary content management system (to be .NET enabled). The fact that CLO had no use for a .NET-enabled CMS had not stopped the vendor from selling this upgrade.
Bob Clifford, frustrated by not being #1 on key search terms and concerned about the escalating expense of his web site, researched solutions via the web, got some recommendations and references, and retained RefreshWeb.
To their credit, CLO realized they needed to get aggressive in order to have immediate top-of-page presence, and they approved a $10,000-per-month PPC budget. (Personal injury-related terms in Chicago are the most expensive PPC terms on the Web, according to an article in Forbes.) RefreshWeb managed the campaign and we began a process of mutual education of what works in PPC and what would work best in organic, search-term-based optimization for these Illinois-based personal injury lawyers who also had a national focus on aviation litigation..
Our emphasis was on sales flow optimization
A major contribution to the client's success was our emphasis on sales flow optimization, figuring out how to increase online registrations of visitors that might have a case that CLO could represent, and to monitor the PPC performance based on this metric. Over time, CLO's organic web traffic grew strongly enough that the PPC budget could be adjusted down.
Initially, RefreshWeb worked within the limitations of the proprietary CMS solution. We carefully selected terms that were more likely to result in a case for this Chicago law firm—not "lawyer," or even "personal injury lawyer," but "Illinois personal injury lawyer," for example. These types of terms are more likely to result in new cases; broader terms could be for states where CLO doesn't practice. Besides personal injury-related terms, CLO also has a well-developed practice in aviation law (i.e., suits from airplane crashes), which often do not have the strict jurisdictional limitations of other cases. We increased their visibility from less than two percent of the Total Available Search Market™ (TASM™) to over 40 percent of TASM.
Effective SEO is a process of constant adjustment
But as time went on it was apparent there was a significant drawback to the proprietary CMS, particularly in the fact it greatly limited the ability to gather information about web traffic. Effective SEO is a process of constant adjustment, and that adjustment is based upon analysis of what the market is telling you. The proprietary CMS gave us a very limited window on the market, and it also had significant monthly costs. After about a year, CLO took RefreshWeb's advice and decided to change their CMS to a Plone-based solution that was relatively inexpensive to implement and much easier and cheaper to maintain (among other things, CLO could change their web pages themselves, without remunerative intercession by their web administrator). Best of all was the fact that we could now use web analytics software based on a page tagging system, which allows for very rich reporting of web traffic trends. The Plone site went live in April 2006, with basically the same content as the previous site and promptly doubled traffic.
Now that we have solved the structural problems that were impeding search traffic to the site and have amassed a year's worth of data on which search terms are the most likely to result in cases, we are expanding the range of SEO activities. Secondary optimization, much more extensive keyword research and a more comprehensive approach to the development of landing pages promises a rich reward, from top rankings and improved levels of registration.
| Summary Table, Change in Visibility of Keywords from Optimization by RefreshWeb | ||
|---|---|---|
| Number of Keywords Ranking in: | March 2005 | December 2005 |
| Google Top 3 | 1 | 3 |
| Google Top 10 | 0 | 9 |
| Yahoo Top 3 | 0 | 2 |
| Yahoo Top 10 | 0 | 3 |
| MSN Top 3 | 1 | 1 |
| MSN Top 10 | 0 | 0 |
| Number of people reached in total available search market™: | 1,015 | 23,241 |
| Percentage increase in visibility: | 2190% | |
