The Issue
Jaffe’s relationship with a Salt Lake City law firm began solely with legal PR services. Having developed a positive relationship with Jaffe, the firm asked our consultants to conduct an audit of its website to determine if there were other strategies that would improve its visibility in search engines.
Our team found that the firm’s SEO maintenance was provided by a traditional advertising agency that lacked proficiency in the SEO realm. The agency’s outdated link-building efforts used off-topic optimized content that drove subpar traffic to the firm’s website. Not only was the firm getting poor results and poor content for its money, but, even worse, the top search engines were finalizing updates to their search algorithms that would penalize websites using such search engine optimization tactics.
Outdated link-building efforts used off-topic optimized content that drove subpar traffic to the firm’s website.
The Strategy
Following its initial audit, the Jaffe team conducted a thorough analytical assessment of the firm website’s architecture, content and SEO. We discovered that much of the site’s content was in a PDF format that was not crawlable by search engines and, therefore, was not being recognized as fresh content. Our consultants also identified every instance of external SEO content that was likely to result in punitive action from search engines.
Jaffe performed a keyword analysis that included a local optimization assessment, enabling our experts to vastly improve the firm’s ranking with prospects searching for legal services in the Salt Lake City region. From this, we developed a comprehensive organic optimization strategy that took advantage of every appropriate tactic to raise the site’s ranking with the top search engines. This included eliminating all SEO tactics that ran the risk of search engine penalties, converting content to a format that could be indexed and optimizing every page for the most favorable keywords.
Eliminated risky SEO tactics and leveraged select keywords to improve onsite optimization.
The Impact
Upon implementation of Jaffe’s SEO and content strategy, the site experienced a 35-percent increase in traffic. Over the course of the six months that followed, organic search traffic was, on average, 30 percent higher than the same six-month period in the previous year.
Perhaps most important, however, is that the firm avoided being targeted and penalized for the frowned-upon tactics of its former SEO contractor.