SEO case study

8k Traffic Increase (and Rising) for Law School Prep Site

SEO is an integral marketing channel for the legal industry. 

How do we know?

According to research by BrandMuscle, 79% of legal professionals ranked SEO as their #1 most effective marketing channel.  

Not only that but SEO boasts a higher conversion rate (4%) than other marketing channels (which convert at an average rate of 2.4%). 

So, if your legal marketing strategy doesn’t include SEO, you’re missing out on the most effective way to generate new clients. 

Also, SEO doesn’t just work for law firm websites, either. 

In this case study, we’re focusing on a client who operates an online legal education site that sells online courses focused on preparing for law school and passing the bar exam. 

After working with us, their traffic shot up by over 8k, and it hasn’t let up yet. 

As proof, here’s what their organic traffic looks like (represented by the orange line):

As you can see, their traffic began to skyrocket around August of 2024, which was when our strategy really took off. 

Want to learn the secrets of how we achieved such rapid success?

Then you’ll have to stay tuned! 

The Client: A Website Selling Law School Preparation Courses 

There are plenty of websites in the legal space that aren’t tied to specific law firms, and they still need to market what they do – hence the need for SEO. 

Examples include legal news sites, forums, and sites selling legal courses, like the client in today’s case study. 

They operate a website selling specialized courses that help legal professionals prepare for law school and pass the bar exam. 

It’s the perfect site for individuals eager to pursue a career in law. 

So far, they’ve helped over 100,000 students, and they’re just getting warmed up. 

However, as you can see by the graph linked in the intro, they were generating next-to-no traffic for quite some time. 

This was concerning, as it was vital that they rank for keywords (search terms) related to the courses they sell. 

Also, the rule of SEO is that if you aren’t ranking for a relevant keyword, one of your competitors will be, so they knew they were leaving money on the table. 

That fact prompted them to seek SEO agencies online, and they came across a few of our legal case studies. 

One free SEO consultation later, and we got them set up on a HOTH X campaign. 

HOTH X is our fully managed service where a dedicated campaign manager develops an in-depth SEO strategy based on your needs. 

Clients love it because they get to enjoy amazing results without having to do any of the heavy lifting themselves. 

For this client, their goals were to:

  1. Rank for more relevant legal keywords 
  2. Build valuable backlinks to boost authority on Google and rank higher 
  3. Find a way to generate more traffic to the main law school pages on the site 

We had a lot to do, so we didn’t waste any time getting to work. 

The Strategy: Link Outreach and Implementing Case Briefs 

For this client, we put a truly unique strategy in place, and it paid off in a very big way. 

First, we cleared crucial technical SEO factors like loading speed and indexing errors with a thorough audit, which is the way we begin every HOTH X campaign. 

After that, we started to brainstorm how we could generate lots of traffic to the client’s website. Keywords related to law school preparation were extremely competitive, so we needed to take a different approach. 

That’s when our campaign manager had a brilliant idea, which was to start publishing case briefs. 

What are those?

Case briefs are detailed breakdowns of real legal cases that legal students can use as educational resources. 

Each case brief outlines a real case, covering all the:

  • Facts
  • Issues
  • Holding
  • Reasoning

There’s also an in-depth discussion surrounding each case, including its importance and crucial legal implications. 

These case briefs were AMAZING because:

  1. They allowed us to target atypical keywords (mainly case names like masterson v. sine). 
  2. They’re an extremely valuable educational resource for law students. 
  3. We could hit each case brief with an enticing call-to-action (CTA) to encourage readers to sign up for a course. 

This meant we could generate a ton of traffic, leads, and sign-ups without having to compete with major websites (like Justia) for super-popular keywords. 

The Results: 8k Traffic Boost, Ranking for 32k Legal Keywords, $7.1k Traffic Value 

Once the case briefs started to take off, we saw the massive 8k spike in traffic shown in the intro. 

They were also goldmines for keywords and backlinks, as we were able to get the site ranking for over 32,000 relevant keywords, and 379 of them are in the top 3. 

Also, they bring in $7.1k worth of traffic to their site each month! 

Do you want to achieve results like this for your legal website?

With HOTH X, our team will take the wheel so that you won’t have to lift a finger for your SEO, all while enjoying great results like these, so don’t wait to sign up!