We all know that conversions are the ultimate goal for any business. But what happens when your website doesn’t even appear on the first page of Google search results? In such cases, rankings become crucial for increasing the number of leads. This was the problem faced by an attorney from a city in California with a population ranging between 70k-80k. They were not ranking for any keywords on the first, second, or third page of search results, and all the keywords they wanted to rank for were on the fourth page or beyond.
Our Approach
To address this issue, we started with a detailed audit of the attorney’s website. We went through all the pages, noted down what we could do to optimize them, and prioritized the actions. We focused on three main areas:
- Home page copy: We added the services the attorney provided, as well as the locations they served. We also added geotags to the images.
- Blog post URLs: The attorney’s blog posts had year/months/days in their URLs, making them look outdated. We changed the permalink structure and redirected all the old URLs to new ones using regex.
- Page merging: The attorney had two or three service/video pages targeting the same keywords, leading to keyword cannibalization. We merged those pages.
- We also noticed that the website had a lack of internal linking. Many pages were orphaned, meaning they had no links pointing to them. To address this issue, we used a plugin called Link Whisper, which helped us in finding internal linking opportunities.
The Results
After implementing these changes, we saw a significant improvement in the attorney’s website’s rankings in only two months. We targeted 18 keywords, some of which were not even ranking in the top 100. However, after our work, 11 out of those 18 keywords are now in the top 30, and one keyword is even in the top 10. This improvement was achieved without a single backlink. Our focus for the next few months will be to increase the website’s authority by adding more backlinks and content.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we were able to help our California attorney increase their online visibility and improve their rankings on Google search results. Our approach was focused on optimizing the website, merging pages, and increasing internal linking. We were able to achieve significant results in a competitive niche like law, demonstrating that it’s possible to improve rankings without backlinking.
