Paralegals (traffic tickets) company asked for help to increase visibility for their 16 locations across Canada and gain more traffic to their website.
The company was founded in 1984 in Canada. Over time (36 years) company had a few different website variations. We analyzed the website history with the help of web.archive.org. It was first launched in 2003 and had simple static HTML pages. In approx 2013 it was migrated to ASP.net (Active Server Pages is Microsoft’s first server-side scripting language). And finally, in 2020, it was migrated to WordPress (and still using it).
Till 2020 site had almost zero organic traffic (according to Ahrefs). After the site was rebuilt to WordPress, the client contacted us, asking to increase organic traffic.
Due to legal issues, we can’t advertise (or use on-page) keywords with the “lawyer” keyword, which is used by users more often than “paralegals.”
The site has a competitor with the same domain name in a different domain zone (TLD – Top Level Domain). Between 2010 and 2020, those sites acted as a single one; then businesses were split. So, this second website has most pages similar to our client, using similar content and structure.
The site uses Google Ads (Pay-per-click), which sets limitations on editing some landing pages (On-Page SEO).
Google Business Profile (aka Google My Business) managerial access was lost to most locations.
Due to legal issues, some Canadian provinces (like Winnipeg) require different licensing for paralegals, therefore, require another website to advertise in Winnipeg (Google Ads) while keeping the main page for Winnipeg on the main domain.
To start faster, the client decided to buy double time and finish the proposed SEO strategy (which usually lasts for 12 months) in half a year.
We have made a technical audit (using our 400+ checkpoints list) and fixed most of the issues (excluding page speed/Core Web Vitals, as the site uses Elementor, which is relatively slow).
Basic SEO optimization for content (removing trash HTML code from content, usually added when copy-pasted from Microsoft Word to WordPress) and optimized content structure (added headers, paragraphs, and other formatting).
Removed approximately 30% of pages that had some copy-pasted news from other sources and redirected all pages to the main blog page (crawling budget save).
Created a content plan executed by a client, where we publish a few articles per month relevant to traffic ticket offenses.
After the first 6 months campaign, the client decided to continue
Implemented separate landing page for each location, optimized on-page by adding relevant cities, courts, and most common offenses for each province (based on traffic and keyword analysis).
Fixed CTAs (Call-To-Actions) were not correctly set (for example, some phone numbers were unclickable)
Recovered lost backlinks. Due to its long history domain had some powerful backlinks to pages that no longer exist (existed in 2003-2020). Made redirection to relevant new pages.
The client recovered access to Google Business Profiles, where we set appropriately structured data markup for each location page on the site (LocalBusiness schema) and configured each profile in Google.
Registered each location in local directories, getting backlinks and more exposure across the web for each location.
During the campaign (18 months) organic traffic increased by approximately 550%. Campaign to be continued further.
Organic traffic for July 2021 to December 2022
The event tracking was configured in May 2022. In July there were 31 forms filled (from organic traffic), while it’s already grown to 50 in December (where December is not the most active month)
The event tracking clicks on phone numbers was configured in May 2022. In July there were 11 calls (from organic traffic), while it’s already grown to 28 in December (where December is not the most active month)
