Lawyer Website SEO Case Study: 1.41M Traffic In 6 Months

This is an SEO case study of how I managed to increase the traffic for a lawyer directory website by roughly 65%, bringing it from 861,000 traffic in the previous 6 months to 1,410,000 in the last 6 months through monthly SEO coaching and consulting services.

Like any other of my case studies, I won’t reveal the website and keywords for security and privacy reasons. But in this article, you will find some of my overview process of how I went about achieving the results, along with various screenshots as proof.

Project Background

The client runs a lawyer directory website in Thailand where customers can browse through various lawyers in different areas and sectors and hire them. The platform also offers forum Q&A, useful resources and articles, etc..

The client approached me about 7 months ago, after the site got hit by Google algorithm updates for an audit and consultation.

Challenges

Here are a few challenges faced while working on the project:

Custom platform: The site was built using custom frameworks, which makes debugging, changing, and other technical factors more difficult to deal with, especially that the site is quite a large site with at least 1,000 of pages.
Mid-high competition: Since the site targets multiple keywords on various sub-topics, there were already many competitors in each sectors and topics that are more relevant and high-authority. So it was quite a challenge to be able to breakthrough into each sector.
Lack of proper strategy: The site SEO was built without proper SEO blueprint laid out properly, making it more difficult to implement the change and mindset throughout.

The Campaign

Here are the overviews of how I approached the campaign:

Technical Modifications

The first steps were to clear and fix all the technical present on the site, primarily because it is a custom-built site, so there were many issues that needed to be fixed, some of which are:

Lots of unnecessary and not-so-useful pages that include tags, filters, etc.
Improper handling of URL parameters
Near-duplicate URLs.
Poor site structure and navigations.
Code bloat that slows down the site speed and crawl efficiency.

These issues, along with others, were presented with proper solutions where I collaborated with the client’s developer team to get them fixed.

On-Page Optimization

Next up is to focus on the on-page obsessively. What I mean by “obsessively” here is to optimize each and every detail to the tee.

This includes things like:

Heading (h1,h2 & h3) optimization
Existing content re-optimization and prioritization

Due to improper site structure, many of the important pages were located deep within the site, making it lack enough internal links and user signals. So these pages were brought up higher up within the site structure, and then the content was re-optimized, refreshed, and restructured. Priority was also placed on lawyer listing pages than blogs, since the client mainly focused on blogs initially, making the site lacking the much needed commercial keyword rankings.
Keyword research and page creation:

Since the majority of traffic will go to listing page, the next step was to do proper keyword research to build out as many relevant listing-style/category pages that target various keywords. For example: targeting the lawyer sub categories, more locations, etc. We also created new blog articles as well but as a lesser priority.
Sentence-level optimization using semantically relevant keywords:

By making sure that each sentence is properly optimized using semantically relevant keywords based on reverse engineering the competitors and using a proprietary tool that I created. You can use on-page tools like Surfer-SEO to help with the process. This step is applied to listing-page/category and each listing content to optimized them for maximum on-page relevance.
Keyword count and variation optimization:

Making sure that I have used the right frequency of each keyword on the page. For example, the word “Lawyer”, I made sure to check the competitors’ average and see how many times I should use this word. You can again, use tools like Surfer SEO, but there’s really no hard rule for this. I’d like to keep it a little lower than the average to avoid over-optimization.
Design refinement and connection

One thing I’ve also done after the web design process was to refine the design elements on the page to make sure they are consistent in the flow and all the sections and areas are connected without breaking the semantic connection from one area to another.
Internal linking

Lastly, after all the page creation and optimization steps were carried out, I also made sure to do proper internal linking – connecting from one page to another using relevant anchor texts and keeping in mind the quantity.

Off-Page Optimization

Once the on-page of the site is ready, the next thing is to start looking into off-page factors.

Mainly the effort was focused on backlinks since the client already had good branding and traffic.

Backlink strategy and building

The client already had some good authority news backlinks, but those were all pointing to the homepage. Since the site is quite large, the main focus was focused on building links to the majority of pages to help with a better flow of signal. The main type of links we focused on was high-quality PBNs built strategically to various places, along with a few guest posts. This process was repeated constantly every month to help maintain and improve the overall performance.