Traffic to your law firm’s website is IRRELEVANT… unless it leads to the phone ringing, a web form submission or a webchat.

AKA a PNC. Potential new client.

Leads are IRRELEVANT… unless they lead to new revenue to the firm.

A personal injury law firm I know in Houston hired a social media marketer to lead point for their SEO efforts.

Not sure why, but that’s besides the point.

I can’t blame this internal marketing hire for not understanding the nuances of legal website traffic.

BUT…

I can blame them for obsessing over the wrong KPIs when it comes to defining success for SEO.

You can lead a horse to water…

Why Website Traffic is a Waste of Time to Obsess Over

First, not all website traffic is created equal.

It’s amazing how shocked a lawyer is when I point out what kind of users are finding their website.

Let’s say you’re a Divorce attorney.

You write a blog post titled “How to know if my husband is a narcissist?”

Great hot topic. Should do well if it’s optimized for the city the firm is in.

But someone searching for that has LOW intent to hire a family law attorney. Maybe they need one in the future (maybe not), so there’s some brand awareness happening there.

But generally speaking, you would much rather show up high for a HIGH intent search term like:

”Divorce lawyer in {Name of your city}”

This user is looking for a divorce attorney to talk to. Like, right now.

The value of your website traffic measured by Google

Less can mean more.

Example:

There are two Personal Injury lawyers in Houston, TX.

Attorney A website gets 3k visits/mo
Attorney B website gets 3.3k visits/mo

Attorney A website traffic worth $326k in equivalent Google PPC spend.
Attorney B website traffic worth $59.8k in equivalent Google PPC spend.

Why is the Traffic Cost value so different? Traffic quality.

Even though the website traffic is nearly the same, Attorney B’s traffic cost value is over 5X more lucrative.

Here’s why:

Attorney A ranks for a lot of branded searches. Users trying to find the lawyer’s name or contact info. Probably referred by another lawyer or friend.

• Attorney’s name

• Firm name

• (other long-tail keywords with low intent of needing an injury lawyer)

Attorney B ranks for very lucrative keywords such as:

• Car accident lawyers in San Antonio

• Houston personal injury firms

• Product liability lawyers

How to know if your law firm’s website traffic is any good.

Ask your SEO provider. I personally use SEMrush to put in a law firm’s website domain and can analyze how good the traffic is.

If you’re responsible for measuring the success of the firm’s SEO investment, the keywords that lead to traffic matter.

You want high intent keywords. Someone needs a lawyer NOW. They have urgent legal questions NOW.

Low intent keywords are often research related. Sometimes FAQs with very little intent to actually hire a lawyer.

So, we looked at something new: Toxic backlinks.

What is a toxic backlink?

Toxic backlinks are like bad referrals on the internet. Just as good recommendations can boost your reputation, bad ones can harm it.

They're links from shady or low-quality websites that can hurt your own website's credibility and ranking on search engines like Google. It's important to steer clear of them to maintain a positive online presence.

How we found them

We use SEMrush as our SEO tool of choice, and ran a backlink audit on the law firm’s domain.

SEMrush then produced a list of all backlinks including their toxicity score, which we exported into excel.

Looks something like this:

Check out the Toxic Score in column D. These are high toxicity scores!

It’s also clear a lot of these based on domain authority and Source Page Title are total garbage.

None of these are backlinks to the law firm’s website because of exceptional content.

How to Remove Toxic Backlinks

1. Run a backlink audit in SEMrush.

2. Export the list.

3. Open ChatGPT and share the list, then prompt ChatGPT to create a disavow .txt file from the list.

4. Go to Google Search Console, select the proper web property, and upload the file there to tell Google to remove these backlinks

We checked the website rankings report after 1 week and discovered something amazing.

Once Google disavowed the toxic backlinks, here’s what we saw in this law firm’s website rankings:

He moved up 717 total positions across the most important keywords that lead to new signed cases.

This is insane.

All from bad backlinks.

Bottom line:

Your website’s ability to attract new law firm clients organically on Google is all about understanding the details.

There is no 1 silver bullet strategy out there.

It’s all about testing and leading with the data.

Subscribe now