Gordons - seo

Background and client brief

Leeds and Bradford law firm Gordons currently employs 250 people, 180 of which are fee earners. According to the annual survey by industry title The Lawyer, Gordons is one of the UK’s Top 100 law firms. Its clients include Wm Morrison Supermarkets plc, construction and high performance materials manufacturer Saint Gobain, international brewers Molson Coors and the world’s largest electrical heating business Glen Dimplex.
The firm had a website which was not achieving the key objectives of developing the Gordons brand online and creating new business opportunities. It was clear that the major issue with the firm’s website was that its architecture was flawed and that it had not been optimised. Against this background, the agency was appointed to remedy the situation.

Objectives

The following objectives were set for the search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign:

• Migrate the Gordons website into an SEO friendly and easy to use CMS
• Increase organic traffic from search engines
• Improve the quality of organic traffic
• Enhance the search engine visibility of the website
• Raise the level of income through the website
• Improve the websites positions in Google for all services one by one

Strategy implementation

• In-depth analysis of the website was carried out in order to assess its strength and weaknesses and gain genuine insight and understanding to allow the agency to develop a strong strategy that would transform the firm’s SEO results. Analysis identified that the SEO effectiveness of the previous Gordons website was not sufficient. It was therefore essential to remedy the situation by making SEO the most powerful online marketing tool at the firm’s disposal.
• Competitor analysis was carried out in order to fully determine Gordons main competitors and the activity being carried out by them. These include local, regional, national and international law firms and government bodies. In relation to recruitment, the firm was competing against high profile websites such as jobs.thelawyer.com, indeed.co.uk and totallylegal.com
• Keyword research was undertaken to identify the most relevant keywords with the highest average volume of searches and the website’s positions were measured against identified keywords in three major search engines. Ranking checks revealed that the website did not appear on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN for any of the keywords identified as relevant.
• It was clear that the old CMS could not handle the on-site improvements required to make the website search engine friendly. Identified issues included: natural barriers stopping search engines from indexing the website, no internal page optimisation, weak content formatting, inadequate use of HTML, low volume of themed content on main service pages, absence of off-site optimisation and duplicated content.
• The decision was made to migrate the website and its existing design into an SEO friendly content management system and perform all necessary on-site improvements.
• Once the website was migrated, internal optimisation was carried out to ensure all pages met the necessary SEO requirements.
• Content optimisation was then started by targeting one particular legal service offered by the firm at a time. Priority for service optimisation was identified by the client and the first service to be optimised was ‘contentious wills & trusts probate’. On topic analysis was carried out to identify and add any missing topical elements of content. Relevant targeted keyword phrases have been added in the visible HTML text.
• Title, Meta description and keyword optimisation was undertaken.
• URLs were rewritten to include relevant keywords and improve snippet visibility in search engine results pages.
• Permanent URL re-directing of old URLs took place to make the transition from the old to the new site smooth without losing any existing traffic.
• An XML site map was submitted to a Google Webmaster Tools account in order to monitor the crawl process.
• Gordons has two offices, one in Leeds and the other in Bradford. Both were added to Google Local Business Centre to maximise the website’s exposure in Google search results for highly relevant and geographically targeted searches.
• The new optimised website was launched and content optimisation continues. The next sections for optimisation have been identified and approved - employment law, personal law and the managing partner, Paul Ayre.

Results

• Organic traffic to the Gordons website increased by 153.80% - from 1,697 visits during in August 2007 to 4,307 visits in June 2009. Google organic traffic has also gone up by 162.25% - from 1,526 visits during in August 2007 to 4,002 visits in June 2009.Yahoo organic traffic has increased by 155.80%.
• Like-for-like organic traffic from search engines went up by 101.86% year-on-year in March 2009.
• Like-for-like organic traffic for non-brand related keywords went up by 318.18% year-on-year in January-March 2009. Law related keyword traffic from search engines increased by 309.30%.
• Prior to the optimisation, the contentious probate service section of the website was receiving an average of around 15 visits per month. It now recieves approximately 389 highly targeted visitors per month – up by 2,553%.
• The quality of organic traffic has also improved dramatically, with traffic from some of the main keywords up by over 640%. For example, during the w/c September 9, 2007, organic search sent only eight visits from search engines via the “law firm” keyword. After the website migration and internal optimisation of templates organic search now sends on average 59 visits per week for the same keyword, indicating a 638% increase in traffic for this targeted keyword.
• Before the SEO campaign, the majority of visitors to the Gordons LLP website were people who were already aware of the brand name and who were actually using phrases containing the word ‘gordons’ to land on the site. For example, during the w/c August 12, 2007, search sent 24 total visits via keywords excluding the word "gordons", demonstrating the number of genuine visitors to the site who were actually searching for legal services. Over a year later, during the w/c April 26, 2009, search sent 379 total visits via keywords excluding the word "gordons", indicating a 1,480% increase in targeted organic visits from search engines.
• Prior to the campaign, Gordons did not feature in the top 200 search results when people searched for legal services. However, following the initial campaign and recently started content optimisation campaign it now nearly always features in the top three results. For example, if someone now searches for terms including ‘law firm Yorkshire’, ‘law firm Leeds’, ‘law firm Bradford’, ‘contentious trusts probate’, ‘contentious wills probate’ or other keywords listed in the attachment Gordons always ranks top. The website ranks number one for “gordons” in Yahoo & Bing and number two in Google, with even the Gordons Gin website together with numerous government websites mentioning Gordon Brown below it.
• On average organic listings in search engines now bring 82.84% of the entire website traffic, making the website the best marketing tool in Gordons’ disposal.
• Gordons LLP’s page rank moved from three to five.
  

Client testimonial

Jane Richardson, Gordons marketing & business development manager, said: “The agency has allowed us to demonstrate the power of the web to the firm and the role that it can play in developing our brand online and creating sales opportunities. In particular, the work on contentious probate directly secured us four new clients all of whom have said they found us by searching online. This has generated a return on investment (ROI) ratio of 1:93 so far.