Juice Squeeze: How Orange County’s Nordean Law Boosted Traffic & Rose In Local SEO Rankings

At a glance

We helped our client Nordean Law increase its organic web traffic by 58%.

Case details

– Client Type: Law Firm
– Business Name: Nordean Law
– Location: Costa Mesa, CA
– Period of Performance: May 2023 – Apr 2024

Results

Within our SEO strategies delivered:

Increase in leads and calls
Increased organic traffic
Rankings for high-value keywords

Schedule a free consultation

Client Background & Engagement

Nordean Law, a personal injury attorney headquartered in Orange County, CA, is headed by Sam Nordean, Esq., a distinguished legal expert with over 14 years of litigation experience. Sam’s firm focuses on negligence cases and prides itself on providing personalized attention to each of their clients. Yet despite their excellent service reputation, they were novices in digital marketing, which was hindering their online authority and client lead generation.

Aware of his need to improve in this area, Sam approached Blue Summit Solutions with a mandate to grow his firm’s digital presence. Upon initial analysis, we saw opportunities to improve business visibility in search results and add content to amplify our client’s deep expertise and commitment to client welfare. Realizing these opportunities would facilitate a rapid influx of new client leads for Nordean Law.

Glaring SEO Errors Requiring Immediate Fixes

Our clients are established experts in their chosen legal field, but they were struggling to convey in clear and succinct fashion their value proposition messaging. Issues like duplicate content and suboptimal location pages configuration were making it hard for potential clients to find them. These deficiencies were negatively impacting their growth trajectory and financial performance.

Duplicate Content: Too many pages with identical or highly similar content created a poor user experience and hurt their search rankings.
Underutilized Location Pages: They had many location-based pages, but they needed stronger content to connect with local clients.
Lack of Authority Signals: The website was missing a strong attorney bio page, which made it harder for Google to identify their staff’s high degree of expertise – which is especially important in the legal field.

These problems made it challenging for potential clients to discover and understand the firm’s services and develop an immediate sense of trust in them. This resulted in lost leads and missed opportunities for growth.

Our Step-By-Step Optimization Process

Blue Summit’s objective was straightforward: earn this law firm more website traffic and assist Mr. Nordean and his staff in closing more cases. We developed a customized strategic SEO plan to tackle their challenges and unlock their online potential.

Here’s what we whipped up:

Redesignined Practice Area Pages for Better Results

The problem with the original practice area pages was that they contained large walls of text, making it difficult for potential clients to find the info they needed right away. We completely overhauled these pages, focusing on shorter, simpler sentences employing techniques proven to increase reader engagement and conversion:

Client-Focused Structure: We put potential clients’ questions and concerns front and center. We carefully analyzed search queries and the firm’s intake process to identify the key questions potential clients had at each stage of their legal journey. We also organized this information in a manner that facilitated quicker comprehension and better understanding.
Built Trust: To establish credibility, we added attorney photos, testimonials, and awards. We also incorporated dynamic graphical depictions highlighting their specific practice areas. Short summaries of successful cases supported their claims with proof and showcased their expertise.
Calls to Action: We placed clear calls to action throughout the pages, guiding potential clients to schedule a consultation.
Focus on Accessibility: We made sure all of the website’s visuals were accessible, adding alt-text for screen readers and captions for videos. We carefully curated and constructed these elements to increase engagement and ensure the website was accessible to all users. This commitment to inclusivity conveys a direct message that the firm cares about its clients and follows website best practices.

These basic yet essential modifications made the firm’s practice areas’ descriptions more informative and compelling, which greatly enhanced its ability to turn website visitors into qualified leads.

Optimized Attorney Bio Page

We built a detailed bio page for Attorney Sam Nordean that showcases his background, qualifications, experience and commitment to securing positive results for clients. We included Google reviews and highlighted his professional memberships to enhance credibility further. These modifications demonstrated to potential clients – and to the Google Search results algorithms – that Mr. Nordean is a bona fide expert in his chosen legal fields.

Established Authority and Relevance via Targeted Link Building

We launched a strategic link-building campaign to get this firm high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources in the legal field. We focused on reputable legal directories, industry-related blogs and relevant local organizations to help build a robust and highly relevant online presence. We emphasized the following characteristics:

Quality over Quantity: Obtaining links from several trusted websites is more important than getting linked from dozens of questionable web sources. Therefore, we prioritized links from websites that directly connected to the firm’s areas of expertise.
Niche Focus: We targeted websites related to the firm’s practice areas and secured links that Google considers trustworthy within the legal field.
Local Connections: Links from reputable local organizations can help attract clients in the firm’s area. For optimized signaling, we used keyword variations related to the firm’s practice areas within the backlink anchor text.

By strategically building these backlinks, we showed search engines that the site is relevant and trustworthy. This helped boost its rankings for important keywords.

Eliminated Duplicate Page

Duplicate pages with identical or highly similar content were confusing potential clients and hurting the website’s search rankings. We addressed this by:

Identifying Duplicates: We used site crawling tools to find any pages with too much overlapping content. This was especially a problem for the location-specific practice area pages. For example, the pages for “Orange County car accident lawyer” and “Costa Mesa car accident lawyer” were basically the same, except for the city name. This similarity leads to duplicate content problems and negatively impact the website’s search engine rankings.
Consolidation & Redirects: Wherever possible, we combined duplicate pages into a single, stronger page. In other cases, we set up special redirects to make sure visitors and search engines always ended up on the right page.
Canonicalization: We used canonical tags to let search engines know which version of a page is the “main” one. This was especially important when we needed to keep slightly different page versions.

These optimizations made the website much easier for search engines to understand. This means better user experience and a stronger chance of ranking well.

Revised and Edited Content

Our content strategy was fueled by data analytics, NOT guesswork. Tools like Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics helped us focus on improving existing content and getting rid of pages that weren’t helping.

Ahrefs for Keyword Insights: Ahrefs helped us find high-value keywords the firm should be targeting and showed us where we could improve existing content to rank higher in search results.
Google Search Console for Search Queries: GSC showed us the exact search terms people were searching to find the site. This let us tailor the content to perfectly match what potential clients were looking for.
Google Analytics for User Behavior: Analytics data showed us which pages had high bounce rates or low engagement. This allowed us to either fix or get rid of any content that wasn’t helping visitors.

This data-driven approach made sure our optimized content targeted the areas that would have the biggest impact. The results? Better search rankings, more engaged website visitors, and ultimately more high-quality leads for the firm.

Google Business Profile (GBP) Optimization

We made sure the firm’s GBP listing was accurate, complete and packed with the right keywords that would attract a Top 3 spot on local maps. We focused on these key elements:

NAP Consistency: We made sure the firm’s Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) were exactly the same on the GBP listing, website and all other online directories.
Detailed Profile: We populated the firm’s GBP profile with all critical elements, including business hours, eye-catching recent photos and a detailed, accurate business description.
Keyword Optimization: We strategically incorporated location-specific keywords and practice area terms into the GBP description and other fields.
Review Management: We helped the business solicit more client reviews on their GBP listing and respond to them thoughtfully. These positive signals helped their visibility in local search results.

These optimizations helped the law firm secure and maintain a prominent position in Google’s “Map Pack” results, driving more calls and website visits from potential clients searching in their local area.

Conclusion: More Qualified Leads, More Cases

Our SEO strategies delivered the following results in just 6 months:

58.3% increase in website clicks while strategically streamlining content for optimized visibility, implying higher quality. This means higher quality traffic and better lead generation.
37.1% increase in form fill-ups, demonstrating our SEO work directly translated into more potential clients contacting the firm.
Optimized “OC car accident lawyer” page resulted in a significant increase in clicks and impressions, boosting the firm’s visibility.