CASE STUDY: Optimize Atlanta’s Law Firm SEO Campaign Propels Martin Law Offices’ Web Traffic By 1,533%!
Posted by Brian in Case Studies on November 20, 2009
The Law Offices of T Michael Martin have been providing elite legal services to the south metro Atlanta area for almost thirty years. Mike Martin, a well respected member of a myriad of law organizations, also has served as Municipal Court Judge for over twenty years. Experience counts for everything in the courtroom, and Mike has defended jury trial cases numbering in the hundreds, with more than a dozen of them being cases where the State sought the death penalty. He has yet to have a client executed.
Clearly this Fayetteville Lawyer provides a level of service that clients would clamor for. Any person in need of credible, reliable legal representation deserves to know that the services of this firm are available to them. Up until recently however, the firm’s website couldn’t be found anywhere in search engine results pages, where a vast majority of potential clients were looking.
A high-quality search engine optimization campaign was sorely needed, and fortunately Optimize Atlanta fit the bill.
After only 3 short weeks, the Martin Law Offices website was ranking on the first page of Google’s search results for a majority of the terms targeted by the law firm SEO campaign. Needless to say, the firm was elated. Even the Optimize Atlanta Team was shocked at how quickly the program generated these kind of results for such a competitive market. The firm’s website traffic skyrocketed 1,533% within the first month!
Now, only into the second month, traffic continues to multiply and the firm has already booked clients that found them online via search. Perhaps the greatest thing about this particular campaign is the fact that it has just begun. With ongoing search engine optimization efforts, the probability for future success is remarkable, and The Law Offices of T Michael Martin will continue to get quality visitors who are in need of their services.
Summary of Key Milestones:
- Ranked on first page of Google search results within 3 weeks
- Increased website traffic by 1,533% in the first month
- Already booking clients who found them online less than two months into campaign
Optimize Atlanta at Digital Marketing World
Posted by Sara in Company News, Events on September 21, 2009
While Brian’s been busy educating Atlanta’s business owners about search engine optimization (SEO), other members of the Optimize Atlanta team have been busy with SEO, search engine marketing (SEM), and other initiatives. The online marketing landscape is changing rapidly, especially with regards to social media; to ensure we can advise you on the latest and greatest for your digital marketing strategy, we recently attended the Fall 2009 Digital Marketing World conference.
Hosted by MarketingProfs, this “virtual conference” was unlike anything I’d attended before; although I regularly sit in on webinars regarding all things marketing, this was — I have to admit — very cool. Hosted online, the conference included almost everything you’d find at a “real world” conference, including tracks on marketing to businesses and consumers, exhibitor “booths,” networking lounges — even conference schwag! The online format also allowed for chat sessions on specific topics of interest for attendees and a greater level of interaction during each of the sessions with moderated Q&A toward the end of each session.
The keynote address was given by Tina Brown, a force to be reckoned with in the media world. Formerly editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Brown now heads up the crew over at The Daily Beast, a great source for the latest in news, culture, and entertainment. Along with other speakers, Brown emphasized the importance of delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time. Other sessions focused on strategies and tactics for social media marketing, building customer loyalty online, and optimizing conversion rates for customers on your website through great landing pages, targeted testing, and nurturing online leads through the sales cycle.
I know I got a lot out of the B2C-track sessions I attended, and all reports are that the other sessions were great as well. Thanks to MarketingProfs for hosting such an innovative online event!
What Exactly is SEO?
This is not for the tech savvy. This is written for the small business owner that wants someone to answer the question “What exactly is SEO?” without having to use a technical jargon translator to decipher the code.
After speaking with several business owners recently in the Atlanta area, I realized that a good bit of you really wanted to understand SEO and online marketing better, but didn’t know exactly where to begin. This is my attempt to get you started down a path of learning, and if it helps even slightly shed a ray of sunlight on the cloudy subject that is SEO, then it was worth it.
SEO is a widely used abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. That’s as technical as we’re going to get today, so don’t worry. What this means to you, the business owner, is that SEO is a way to get your website to show up when people are searching for products or services similar to what you offer. Often they will even be searching for exactly what your business offers, but if your website isn’t properly optimized, you likely won’t be found.
Modern search engines have changed our culture. (For more on this, read John Battelle’s “The Search”) People use search engines for everything. For example, let’s say you come home from work and you have a water leak in your basement. (It has happened to me) It’s far easier and much faster to google “Plumber Atlanta” than it is to pull out the phone book, find the yellow pages, flip to “P”, and sift through all the irrelevant other businesses that start with the letter “P”, finally find “plumber”, then…well you get the point.
Now most cell phones are even equipped with a full browser, or at the very least a basic search function. It’s how we find everything, from the latest electronic gadgets, to the newest Coach purse design, to the plumber that is available 24/7. The only caveat is, your site has to show up when someone searches for it.
That’s where SEO comes in.
Most people, when searching for something specific, typically won’t go beyond page 2 or 3 of their search results, so it’s important that your site ranks fairly well for your industry in your target market. Ideally you’d like to be on page one, because that’s where the vast majority of clicks occur. The organic search results here are highlighted. These are the first 3 results for the search term “shoes.”
SEO takes practice, and can take some time to get the results you want, especially if your business happens to be in a very competitive market. It’s better to think of it as an on-going process in which you are constantly learning, testing, and tweaking. There is, however, a good bit of bad information available on the subject, so you have to be careful about where your information comes from. Search engines will penalize you for using less than noble practices. It’s important to use the current best practices to make sure that the campaign will have the most impact, and also fall within the guidelines of preferred techniques for the major search engines.
Many business owners are finding that it’s far more beneficial to budget for making sure their websites are ranking well and getting good traffic than to budget for newspaper or magazine ads. The ROI is simply much better for online marketing campaigns because of the sheer volume of people that use the web. Think about how many searches are performed each and every day. Now compare that with the number of people that have time to read the newspaper everyday. Admittedly, I didn’t survey everyone for this article, but I can guarantee you that it’s not even close.
There is a plethora of different SEO techniques that can be used to improve your rankings and make your website easier to find. Just like with any other aspect of business, some techniques are harder to master than others, but anything that you can learn and implement will be a step in the right direction.
I encourage you to take some time to read and learn as much as you can about SEO and online marketing in general, and how it can help your business grow.