Case Studies
Case Studies
Rainmaker Digital Strategies Success Stories
Be Consistent
The graph above shows website traffic growth for one of our creditor’s rights clients. It could be you. They started like most small creditors’ rights attorneys, with zero business from the web. In fact, their site had been compromised and was blacklisted by Google. For them, our Rainmaker strategy was a staged effort.
- Overcome the blacklist.
- Slow steady growth for momentum
- An onslaught of digital activity to force hypergrowth
- Settle in to a sustainable steady growth pattern.
Strong And Steady
This law office client was in a totally different place. They are a young, full service but “smallish” practice (six attorneys) with two main focus areas – Family Law, and Criminal Law. They had a website that they LOVED the look of, but it was broken in some areas, unfinished in others, and simply not performing at all in search with almost no traffic. During discovery, we agreed that the look is right and no new website was needed, at least visually. Behind the scenes however, the site was a literal train-wreck. The firm was evolving operationally and adding new staff members consistently. Explosive growth couldn’t have been supported at that time. Long term, steady growth however was imperative to help fund the business transitions that were underway internally. Their Rainmaker Digital Strategy had to be strong, consistent, and conservative to meet the business needs of the firm.
- Rewrite the site to look the same as the original but with search ranking architected into the design AND allmistakes fixed.
- Begin a steady social media campaign to consistently grow site traffic, (and firm revenues) in the most profitable of the two focus areas – family law.
- Once family law was entrenched in search, expand the social media campaign to include both family and criminal law.
When Just Enough, Is Enough
This was a remarkable client. Through longevity and business connections, they were already fairly dominant within their state in their creditors’ rights practice. They also have excellent in-house marketing team producing fun, informative, high quality content. The firm was predominantly, but not entirely creditors’ rights. They also practiced business law, especially in Oil and Gas, and Business Law. They were already doing a great job, but thought that they could be doing better. During discovery, we were very impressed with their internal talent. The video series they were running and publishing was excellent. They were well represented in the the creditors’ rights associations and had “good” site traffic. Their website, however, was not built in any way to attract search. In addition, back in their history, someone had used black hat search methods (backlink spamming), and Google had punished the site for it. At another time, a different firm had recommended a gray hat strategy that generated a lot of duplicate content – not Google Search best practices. The Rainmaker digital strategy for this client was maintenance and cleanup.
- Cull the thousands of spam junk backlinks that were black hat SEO and in violation of Google Search best practices.
- Groom the entire site (over a thousand pages) and update everywhere for proper search with no front-end site revisions – purely doing what should have been done originally.
- Delete a large swath of the site that was duplicate content – again, a part of an earlier gray hat SEO campaign that backfired.
- Speed up this huge site so that it was an appropriate speed for Google to give search love to.
- Keep the site maintained and technically pristine.
In the end, the site lurched up in traffic and settled in being dominant in their market for their search terms. It requires very little maintenance to keep it going, once the black hat, and gray hat SEO from their past had been removed, the site had basic search elements added to it’s backend, and the site technically improved for speed. we continue to monitor competitive pressures to ensure against slippage.
The Full Monty
This case study speaks to what happens when a client fails to stay the course, and loses faith in the process. The client is in a competitive cut throat market. Their existing site was “pleasant”. If it were ice cream, it would have been vanilla, a reasonable quality vanilla, but still vanilla. The client was tired of not seeing themselves in search, and had been quoted rates, well over 10 times our rates for SEO services, and just didn’t see the value in it. We can’t blame them. If you’ve never seen the traffic from the internet, it’s’ hard to believe what the internet can really do. It is easy to become fatalistic, and feel that a website is simply a necessary part of establishing your legitimacy as an operating business, but tales of waves of new customers, were just that, tales, and not credible to them. Our Rainmaker Digital Strategy came in phases, with rest between, and didn’t end well.
- Create a web presence that appropriately represented their high quality reputation and brand, architected appropriate for search.
- Then, the client balked at moving ahead with SEO. The site saw incremental growth, because it was better architected, but growth was lackluster. Because expectations were lackluster, expectations were met, and the rest of the Digital Marketing Strategy was “mothballed”.
- Nearly a year later, after speaking socially with other clients of ours that had been the benefactors of tremendous growth, and increased revenues, they mustered up the courage and funds, to kick off the second phase or the Rainmaker Digital Strategy. Because the campaign was built on a well architected site, there was immediate and explosive growth.
The client, not believing the traffic was due to the Rainmaker Digital Strategy, and listening to outside advice stopped the campaign abruptly, before they had adequate momentum, and traffic faltered as dramatically as it rose. Only firms that want to dominate their area of search and have the fortitude to go “all in” are appropriate clients for StudioHOF. We wish them well, they continue as professional friends. The data, however, speaks for itself.
Graphs provided by SEMRush, an independent website tracking and analytics company.
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