Industry: Law

How we cleaned up while increasing traffic, leads, and cases for WKW

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Getting burned by previous marketing agencies

Wilson Kehoe Winingham is an Indianapolis-based personal injury law firm. Its mission is to help those who have been wrongfully injured rebuild their lives, and its marketing goal is to become a significant player in the Indianapolis market.

WKW previously worked with two other marketing agencies that claimed to follow Google’s best practices; however, as time passed, WKW became suspicious that the efforts were risky—and they were correct. Their previous agencies used black hat SEO tactics, which risk being penalized by Google and simply do not work.

Metric discovered these issues and began cleaning up, including removing over 40,000 spammy backlinks, removing hidden content and optimizing technical page structures. WKW was able to start rebuilding its domain authority after the cleanup was completed.

How we cleaned up while increasing traffic, leads, and cases for WKW

WKW, like many other law firms, was most concerned with the results. If they were to make a significant investment in digital marketing, there had to be a clear return. WKW was right to be skeptical of working with another agency at the start of the relationship. To foster mutual trust, our team was completely transparent in its operations and communicated our mission in working with them, as well as justifications for any recommendations we made. Unlike their previous agencies, we did not bind them to long-term contracts. As an agency, we let our results speak for themselves.

Our mission: to drive qualified traffic to wkw.com, increase intakes, and ultimately, cases.

Many items were discovered during the website audit. We determined that a complete website rebuild was required to improve user experience and rank for the highly competitive legal terms. Having a beautiful site custom-built for fast loading and performance is a good starting point for developing technical SEO strategies. In addition to improving SEO efforts, our team wanted to investigate other avenues that would drive cases, such as paid search, paid social, community outreach, referring attorney outreach, email marketing, etc.

Before moving on to execution, we began with research and development.

Our Digital Marketing Process:

1. Research & development: search engine optimization (SEO) and paid strategies
   • Perform technical audits
   • Perform keyword and competitor research
   • Develop buyer personas
   • Develop SEO strategies
   • Develop paid advertising strategies
2. Brand guide & website rebuild
   • Ensure that the site’s appearance and feel correspond to the law firm’s quality.
   • Organize the site’s navigation, URL structure, and internal linking structure to be optimized for both human users and search engines.
   • Ensure that the WKW team can easily edit and update the website.
   • Build according to Google’s webmaster & accessibility guidelines, including mobile-first design principles.
3. Onboard HubSpot, a marketing CRM
   • Integrate customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools to enable A/B testing, on-site reporting, enhanced lead and intake tracking, and marketing automation.
4. Increase online visibility and generate qualified leads
   • Implement SEO strategies such as site speed improvement, site structure optimization, building out Google My Business listing, improved keyword targeting, and content development to increase awareness and drive qualified traffic to wkw.com.
   • Implement paid advertising strategies, such as paid search and paid social, to reach a wide range of buyer personas, from injury victims to referring attorneys. Examine ad performance regularly and optimize for conversion of prioritized case types.

The Results on the Back End

Over the past few years, we have seen a significant increase in traffic, intakes, and cases as a result of implementing a multi-channel marketing strategy.

Organic average position data (December 2019 → April 2021)

Traffic data (June 2017 → April 2021)

Intake data (2018 → 2020)