A Year of Bad Law Firm SEO

Gyi Tsakalakis
August 13, 2013

Had a rough year with your SEO? Hopefully it hasn't been as bad as it's been for these law firms.

A little context.

As is not uncommon for search agencies to do, we track a variety of search engine rankings.

While we don't put an emphasis on rank tracking, it can be useful to see more general trends. Which can provide insight into which strategies and tactics are working and which are largely useless, or even damaging.

One area we have been tracking for some time is the keyword universe for personal injury terms related to Chicago.

Number of #1 Rankings for 2 Chicago Personal Injury Law Firms

In the post image above (which I have also provided below) shows a little over a year of rank tracking for two law firms and their rankings for some competitive chicago personal injury terms.

Chicago-personal-injury-attorney-rankings

The "Current value" is the number of these terms that these two law firms currently have number one positions for in organic search. "Maximum value" shows the maximum number of number one rankings these firms had at their height.

The chart represents the trend of the number of 1st positions the firms had over the last two months or so. As you can see, both firms have lost almost all of their number one rankings over the last year. Ouch.

If you plug these sites into Open Site Explorer, it's pretty to easy to see what's going on here. Heavy use of paid online press releases, directory submissions (some paid) and some seriously over-optimized anchor text links from some seriously spammy sites.

In fairness, some of the links that have been built may have been, at worse, gray years ago, but with Google's more recent updates, have moved into the clearly violate quality guidelines column.

And perhaps, these firms paid for their SEO work many times over. After all, it only takes a few major injury cases to pay for a marketing campaign many times over.

Of course, many of you think this is exactly what SEO is all about.

And if you talked to the attorneys and marketing people at these firms, they would probably argue that this stuff worked, until it didn't.

And had they taken this aggressive approach on a microsite or "throw-away" domain, they might have been able to rationalize it.

But these are the firms' primary websites.

And unfortunately, these examples are not exceptions. Looking at the dozen or so websites in this space for which we have data, the overwhelming majority have suffered massive rankings losses.

Admittedly, some of these weren't pushing the SEO envelope.

Search engine results are highly dynamic and levels of flux have been relatively high this past year. And of course, there are some firms that aren't investing in organic search marketing at all. So, it should come as no surprise that many of these sites fall away.

If you're participating in aggressive SEO tactics, and it's "working" for you, let this serve as a cautionary tale. Google is catching on to many of these techniques.

Gyi Tsakalakis
Co-Founder of AttorneySync
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Let's Discuss Your Growth

Helping law firms grow profitably with digital marketing and can prove it.

Barry Conybeare

We are so impressed with AttorneySync and their digital marketing services. We started with an audit of our digital presence and hired them thereafter. Fixes to the website and other platforms quickly followed and we have seen a substantial increase in online traffic, new client calls, and new client contracts. Strongly recommend AttorneySync!

Let's Talk

How can we help?

More From Our Blog

June 8, 2023
On Local Law Firm SEO Rank Tracking and Reporting

Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]

Read More
June 7, 2023
On Attribution

John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]

Read More
March 22, 2023
I asked ChatGPT to Recommend a Personal Injury Law Firm

I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]

Read More
February 17, 2023
My Take on Google Search's Guidance on AI-Generated Content & Law Firm SEO

If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]

Read More
February 16, 2023
Google Adds New SEO Best Practices for Links

If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]

Read More
February 1, 2023
Authenticity & Engagement

The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]

Read More
January 19, 2023
ChatGPT for Legal Marketing

The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]

Read More
May 26, 2022
SEO Expectations for Law Firms

How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]

Read More
May 6, 2022
Who Should Do Marketing?

And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]

Read More

Let's Discuss

Questions or comments? Let's discuss on social!
Testimonials on this site are from examples of real client results. The results you see are not typical. They do not guarantee similar results. Individual results may vary based on a variety of factors. Your results may vary.
envelope
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram