Like you, Rainwater, Holt & Sexton had worked hard to build a strong foundation. They had poured time and money into community engagement, offline advertising, and plenty of other marketing initiatives. They were a well-respected Arkansas law firm with a steady stream of new business. But they were missing something.

Rainwater was vying for organic traffic in a profoundly competitive personal injury market, and they needed a secret weapon that would elevate them above the fierce competition. In 2021, we collaborated with them to create that secret weapon: a hyper-targeted SEO strategy.

Over the next two years, we implemented our strategy with one mission in mind — driving unprecedented traffic to Rainwater’s site.

We started with a deep-dive analysis, focusing on:

• Core SEO ranking factors
• Search intent / UX alignment
• Internal linking structure
• Structured data markup
• Structural hierarchy
• Content optimization

To capture our analysis, prioritize next steps, and track our progress, our SEO team created a wonderfully detailed “micro-optimization guide.” Here’s a sneak peek of one: micro-optimization guide.

If you’ve ever taken a look at an SEO report and felt a wave of bewilderment wash over you, you’re not alone. Since we’re not in the business of hiding our work behind a curtain of technical mumbo-jumbo, we’ll walk through a couple of quick examples.

Enhancing Internal Linking

Google understands the internet in terms of links. Links help Google grasp what a page is about, why it exists, and how it’s important to the overall objective of the website. In other words, if your pages aren’t properly linked, you aren’t speaking Google’s language.

Rainwater, Holt & Sexton was facing this exact problem. They had a ton of great pages, but they weren’t correctly linked to each other, so Google was running into dead ends instead of picking up on important context.

Over time, the Magnetians optimized internal linking on dozens of pages, helping Google to understand the full story of Rainwater’s site. Google rewarded us by sending Rainwater a flood of new traffic — and more importantly, new business.

Humanizing Content

If you’ve spent time exploring the websites of local law firms, you’ve most likely encountered the same issue over and over: At best, the copy feels forced. At worst, it feels cold.

At Magneti, one of our core writing principles is “Obsess Over Audience.” We want to connect with the real people on the other side of the glowing screen, instead of simply meeting a keyword quota. To demonstrate, here’s a look at some of the old copy on Rainwater’s site:

“Proving negligence in a wrongful death case is not always easy. Insurance companies will often try to shift the blame for the accident onto other parties and even onto the deceased in an attempt to reduce their own legal liabilities. When this occurs, you need an experienced Arkansas wrongful death attorney on your side.”

Here’s how we shifted the tone to empathize with the reader:

“When you lose a loved one, you shouldn’t have to worry about bills and paperwork piling up. You need space to grieve and to heal. Our team at Rainwater, Holt & Sexton understands that, and we’re here to support you during this difficult time.”

Over the next 14 months, our dev, content, and tech teams worked together to make changes like these for countless pages, integrating nuanced user-facing and back-end upgrades to improve the site experience. But our job didn’t end there.

We view SEO as an ongoing process. Since our initial engagement with Rainwater, we’ve consistently followed up with rigorous performance analysis and content auditing to measure the impact of our strategy and iteratively improve it.

In a nutshell, our approach was precisely the opposite of the “set it and forget it” tactic that’s all too common with SEO teams today. When we implement a strategy for growth, we hypothesize, test, calibrate, hypothesize, test, and recalibrate. In a hyper-competitive market, it’s the only way to stay on top.