Chicago Law Firm Partners with Marketing Agency to Generate Leads Online

Cooney & Conway is an established, successful personal injury law firm based out of Chicago, IL. Their website hadn't done anything memorable for them in the past and didn't effectively portray their national presence or who they represent. The site was static; a simple "brochure-style" website by today's web design and web marketing standards.

Recognizing they needed a change in order to meet their lead generation goals, the firm's partners decided to put the next generation of attorneys in charge of finding a web development company to design a new website for their firm that better communicated who they are and where they're going.

This next generation of attorneys understood that having a new, updated website wasn't going to automatically generate the web traffic they needed to convert more visitors into quality leads. They needed a strategy that included SEO (search engine optimization), content writing, downloadable content offers, and a growth-driven design approach to make website design changes as they gathered more data on their ideal audience over time. The team knew implementing a web marketing strategy would give their newly designed website the best possible chance to generate new leads and acquire high-quality cases directly.

As Tribute Media began our partnership with Cooney & Conway, our first order of business was to identify their top three goals:

1. Be seen as THE best personal injury law firm for Illinois plaintiffs

2. Reduce the number of outside referrals and increase the number of direct cases

3. Determine a baseline and gain traction with Roundup-related cases

THE CHALLENGE

Since Cooney & Conway wanted to be the go-to mesothelioma, asbestos, and personal injury law firm in Chicago, this meant they needed to amp up their online presence.

Competition in the legal industry is high, and Cooney & Conway would be up against big spenders and well-established firms. Some had Google ad budgets of over $100,000 a month alone! We'd need to compete smarter on behalf of this law firm if we were going up against big, national law firms with huge budgets. 

Most of the forms that were submitted on Cooney & Conway's website were spam or people who didn't know who they were as a firm. These "leads" were all dead-ends and never resulted in cases for the firm to take on.

While the blog generated traffic, it was ineffectual from an SEO standpoint. The keywords were attracting the wrong traffic with the wrong user intent. It was clear organic users coming to their site through blog posts had no need for a personal injury attorney. 

THE SOLUTION

• Keyword research to identify what they were currently ranking for and where improvements could be made to get the results they desired.
• Competitor research to identify any gaps in keywords and content. This would help us build a solid content strategy that would fill the gaps in the buyer's journey on the website.

• Content creation that positioned the law firm as a strong legal resource online. This included downloadable content offers, informative blogs, and the addition of resource-rich sections to main website pages. This would help attract and educate leads pre-conversion.
• Optimizing all existing content. This included a three-month deep dive into cleaning up blog posts to remove irrelevant keywords and posts and combining pages that weren't performing well enough on their own due to low word-counts and duplicate content.
• Creation of resource-rich Pillar Pages to provide in-depth information on topics relating to cases the law firm specializes in.
• Ongoing keyword research and website optimization based on any resulting updates in keyword focus.

THE RESULTS

Cooney & Conway has seen astronomical changes in their online presence and lead generation abilities as a result of Tribute Media's web marketing efforts. 

After just over a year of search engine optimization efforts, the law firm is now ranking at the top of search results in Chicago for the keywords "mesothelioma lawyer" and "asbestos attorney near me."

Year-over-year, from June 2020 to June 2021, their law firm experienced an 87% increase in organic search traffic. This means that more leads are able to find them right away when they are searching related keywords and topics. 

Their website has become a lead generation machine, generating anywhere from 10-20 direct leads per month. This nails their #2 goal of increasing direct cases and reducing the need for outside case referrals.

Their website pages now have an average bounce rate of 13.9%, meaning that the large majority of visitors to their website were truly searching for their law firm's services and are interested in the content on their website. 

THE BENEFITS

Most law firms enlist Google PPC services to boost their leads through search engines. Cooney & Conway didn't, and instead, we focused on bulking up their SEO efforts. It paid off in spades! While PPC services can help boost short-term results, strong SEO is a long-term win. If you were to view it as a race, PPC is a sprint and SEO is a marathon. In this case, SEO provides a steady stream of cases for Cooney & Conway to work on in the future. 

Now, Cooney & Conway has a website that builds trust with leads and directs them through the buyer's journey effectively. They will continue to see high-quality leads come through their website thanks to content that continues to attract the right leads in search engines.