There are a lot of law firms out there. A LOT. Central Florida seems to have more attorneys per capita than just about anywhere. The field of personal injury law is especially contentious with many well-known names and even more lawyers scrapping to make a name for themselves, coming at you on daytime TV, radio, billboards, and print. As the field grows increasingly competitive, more lawyers and firms are embracing digital channels to gain impressions, connect with community, and drive new business.

Bogin, Munns & Munns is a Central Florida law firm near Downtown Orlando for over thirty years. Their sturdy reputation and solid work ethic has earned them notoriety and the highly coveted word-of-mouth that businesses crave and most law firms simply don’t have. They are a full-service law firm specializing in all aspects of personal injury law, business law, tax law, criminal defense and more.

Despite all their clout, they enter a digital market space that is crammed with lawyers. The sheer volume of attorneys makes it difficult to be heard, let alone fight the search engine optimization battle. The good thing is that lawyers tend to spend most of their time lawyerin’ so many individual attorneys and law firms suffer from a tragic web and social media presence. This creates opportunity to strike. We were able to create a full digital strategy document that covered website user experience, content strategy, search engine marketing or PPC, social media community management, and social media marketing. Deep Dive was even able to oversee and execute content and social media strategy.

The Law Firm Website

In sort of a gray-hatted SEO move the law firm’s prior web firm created three separate websites. The core website, boginmunns.com, serves as a portal into the separate business law  and personal injury law sites. We believe the plan here was to focus content on specific practice specialties in order to optimize both sides of the firm separately. The Panda and Penguin updates from Google crushed those attempts to divide and conquer by putting more focus on domain authority, brand, and content. This was clearly seen because most queries for any law brought up the main site and not the secondary sites.

Our proposed plan: Build a website that combines all three websites into one powerful, streamlined presence under the main domain. The new site should feature more robust attorney profiles with ways to share and contact attorneys instantly. The new site would also clearly explain the 10 Central Florida locations clearly and allow each office to have a presence through its own optimized location-based landing page.

The Law Firm Content

The firm’s content was there, but it had some problems. Content about the legal specialties and practice areas was diluted by being spread across three different properties. Much of the copy was “over-optimized”  with superfluous internal linking and slavish attention to anchor text (the text being linked to another page) to the point that it ruined the user experience. Six hundred words of copy could have as many 10 links with multiple links actually linking to the page you were already on! Nuh-uh. Not in my store.

Content was refined, the internal linking strategy revisited, images and video added, and unique meta page titles and meta descriptions for every page. Images were reviewed for optimization and all WordPress tools were utilized in an effort to optimize the site for search engines.

The blog and social media channels were invigorated. Pop culture, local news, and current events were fair game for the firm’s unique voice on different legal perspectives. We could grab a headline, find a legal expert and expound on the legal ramifications of a story. This worked two-fold by establishing various attorneys as experts in their field while organically building longtail keywords and shared content.

The Law Firm Social Media

With the content invigorated social media could open up a little. Unique, native content can be the best way to develop a robust social media community. We defined a different voice and mission for each channel; LinkedIn: career information, firm news, and career-related law stories; Google+ was for sharing native content, attorney profiles, and anything related to areas of practice; Facebook shared fun law-related pop culture, events, insights into the law practice, and native content; Twitter focused on local businesses, Central Florida related news and highlights, native content and establishing relationships with local media as sort of a PR strategy. The Google+ channels gained over 120 followers, Facebook went from 265 followers to over 1,100, and Twitter grew from just under 60 to over 300.