A little over a year ago, a local Tampa criminal law firm came to us for SEO help. They had been with another web marketing firm for over 9 months and had seen very little progress organically – while the firm kept advising them to funnel more and more money into pay per click advertising and other additional (and costly) services. Needless to say, the lawyers were pretty skeptical by the time they made their way to us.
Anyone who lives in Tampa, or likely anyone who’s even just driven through the area, knows from all the billboards, TV ads and radio spots that Tampa Criminal Defense attorney law is an incredibly saturated market. This is also a uniquely competitive market online, as the top ranking sites in this industry for highly searched terms like “Tampa criminal lawyer” have been targeting these terms aggressively for years. If you’re going to be competitive in this market, we told the lawyers (who at the time were not ranking in the first 10 pages of Google for the term) it’s going to take a lot of work over time to get and keep you there.
See, Google likes to test you a bit I think. Ultimately, if you want top rankings for a very competitive search term, you can’t let up once you get there. After just a couple months of on-site overhaul and progressive, quality one-way link building, our Tampa criminal attorneys were making their way to Google’s first page for these very competitive terms. They went from “nowhere to be found” to teetering between #6 and #8 for “Tampa criminal lawyer” pretty quickly. But then, as quickly as they’d skyrocketed up 10 pages on the search engines, Google knocked them down a few pegs to the second page, where they stayed, much to our frustration, for several more months.
Now most people don’t like to hear that things are simply just going to take more time, especially when the financial health of their business hangs in the balance. The lawyers were no exception. But they hung with us. And we kept at it.
Now, after about a year of aggressive – but more importantly, consistent – work, Tampacriminaldefenders.com is #1 for “Tampa criminal lawyer”, and staying there. And they are solidly in the top 3 positions for other highly searched (and super competitive) terms like “Tampa criminal attorney.” This consistent top positioning over the past month has skyrocketed their website traffic. Oh, and their expensive pay-per-click account? We turned it off. That means they are getting record traffic, minus the thousands of dollars of monthly click spend in paid search.
Why bring this up? No, I’m not simply tooting my own SEO horn here. This truly is the perfect case-in-point of what can happen when you invest in quality SEO and link building. It is not an overnight solution, and you must keep at it. But if you do, the rewards can be big. Really, really big.