SEOZoom Case Study: the revival of Legal for Digital
We are back again with the SEOZoom case studies, the corner dedicated to the first-person voice of the users of our suite, who can tell their own direct experience of using the various tools to accompany the growth of their online project. Today the microphone goes to Francesca Giovannetti, an italian user of the suite who in the last two years has worked on the improvement of Legal for Digital‘s rankings on Google Italy, making it one of the best positioned sites as a law firm specialized in web law thanks to the support of SEOZoom, as we will see!
The start of the project
Legal for Digital “has represented for me the return to great love: SEO and content marketing, after a short parenthesis as Facebook advertiser”, begins to tell Francesca, who from here on becomes a first-person narrator of her experience.
At the beginning of 2020, the customer presents me a project to build from scratch on a SEO onpage level: a website born from 5 months, with some services present, but which pages were not placed on commercial keywords, 4 articles written by the owner of the site, and SEOzoom, which was the tool that was entrusted to me along with the site.
The client had left the agency with which he had made the site, so there was no editorial plan for the blog, let alone a strategy: I should have “only” done the copywriter, but intuition made me feel that I should have had a much more active role.
Let’s roll up our sleeves
As a good lover of challenges and Law, I immediately got to work and I realized that if I had known the SEOZoom suite better, I could have given more to the project, so I enrolled in the Academy.
I had two goals with this site, and I could only rely on the blog:
- Place it in the right SERPs: that is, those responding to the queries of our potential customers
- Make it grow in authority in the legal sector so that it also acquired natural links
What was the knowledge I needed:
- To know my client’s services and buyer personas: interviews with him
- The queries that his potential customers are looking for, which are none other than their needs. Translated: what kind of search volume these requests have and how does the user express his needs? And here SEOZoom is a real anchor.
These two information can be translated with a single expression: “search intent detection“.
Each category of the blog corresponds to a kw research within the special tool of SEOZoom. I started by creating a Pillar content for each category, which would also be the backbone of the internal link structure.
Pillar content means starting from the main kw more generic that there is, and then branch the main kw smaller in the groups (related articles) inside which I inserted the long tail and related keywords.
For this reason, SEOZoom’s suggestions for related keywords and Infinity were very useful.
The interest finder makes me understand the priorities and find at a glance that term that is useful to me.
I also used the site builder as the first point of reference for the construction of the editorial plan.
What do I base the choice of keywords on? When it comes to keywords of a legal kind, such as GDPRs or trademarks or copyright, in SERP you can find giants. So I always looked at kw difficulty: when the site had no authority I chose the related closer and with less competition (I always based on the SEOZoom estimates). Then when we reached 40-41 of authority, I decided to dare.
Where are we after exactly two years
In just over a year I published an article a week (now we are up to 101 articles) and from March 2020 to June 2021 we went from Zoom authority 11 to Zoom Authority 42 and from a traffic volume of 7 to a traffic volume, before the Google update, of over 8500.
Then the June Google update, as I expected, killed us. But, in fact, I expected it.
We dropped our authority to 40 and we halved both the traffic volume and the kws placed on the first page.
How I perform a keyword research
I use SEOZoom from the calendar to the editing of every article: I always start from the SERP and the info the customer gives me.
I initially put all the keywords together in Favorites, from there I then divide them in the kw research groups, finally, from the kw research, I save the most important ones and I put them in the project.
About the choice of the topics of the article I used a lot the “preposition, questions, actions” section present in the related kws tab of the keyword analysis tool, which have now been put in the FAQ. To start now in the editing of a content, with the new suite, I find the “analysis of the SERP” section to be really great: from indications about if Google actually responds to the query, to the amount of pixels dedicated to content, there is not a single piece of information that is not very useful. But even the correlated keyword section offers so much more information than before.
For over a year I have thought only of writing articles with constancy and I have exploited a lot the authority of the author, which in digital legal matters is very well known.
This affected the cross-channel communication presence of my client. In fact in SERP we are present with all channels and we communicate constantly and consistently. The kws is not only useful on the site, but also represent what the user is looking for on all channels, where he although expects a different communicative approach.
The project of the new site
Then the new challenge presented itself, it was a nice project but still in half: all those kws searched by those who want to buy the service were missing, the so-called transactional and commercial keywords. The site was no longer in line with the studio’s growth and was not that versatile anymore so to accommodate new and more niche services. SEOZoom along with my searches was also crucial to the structure of the new site that went online in September. Here I worked a lot on the study of competitors and related sites.
But SEOZoom was not only useful for the on-page SEO, but It was also useful, and it still is, to analyze the health of the site at the level of technical SEO: just a few days ago I launched the spider and seeing strange errors (duplicate snippets) I realized that some redirects had not worked, in fact I had 10 duplicate pages, not only the snippet!
Legal for Digital today
We are placed on very competitive kws and quality traffic is coming.
Good placements for transactional kws are also coming, although there are fewer of them compared to less niche sectors.
In a year and a half we also acquired about 80 natural backlinks, but there is great potential to have more and more strategic ones coming. It is also an excellent orientation tool for choosing anchor text kws.
We are in position zero for numerous kws, and we can see that the serps are very difficult since the question box is never missing!
What I love about SEOZoom is that it stimulates insight. What I love about the SEOZoom Academy is that it drives you to reason and guides you in acquiring a working method.
What I currently do on the site
As for this site, my current goal is to optimize the crawl budget: as soon as I open SEOZoom my eye always points there. The new site counts almost triple the previous page and many, I am sincere, point much more on the UGC with short and very eye-catching texts rather than on kws in the first place.
Many pages then had lost ranking, and there were major technical SEO issues for which the site was penalized.
Today what I do is to create new content every 2 weeks, but I invest a lot more time to optimize the old. And in this SEOZoom really is an exceptional tool: starting from the analysis of monitored or declining pages, I often discover new kws to generate new content. The optimization of the old one is based a lot on the study of competitors, although there are few vertical sites like ours that challenge the SEO. But reading content that are better positioned than mine and doing SEO analysis on competitors opens up a world for me.
The results are there: the site has just returned to have the authority of the pre-Google update, the crawl budget decreases day by day and Google trusts the site again.
What I want to do now is to support the site with YouTube videos, and here too SEOZoom with the “discover keywords” tool, which I use a lot in other areas, can give us a big hand.
It is true that tools without method are not that useful, but SEOZoom leads us to build one!
