Hello, avid SEO enthusiasts,

Today, I’m here to share an exciting SEO journey of LegaMart and how it grew into achieving more than 11 million impressions and 223000 clicks in just 1 year.

According to Google search console data, the daily visitors on the website grew from 124 to 1650 visitors per day.

website grew organic from 124 to 1650 visitors per day

This has been achieved by just 4 people, including 2 part-time writers, who have made this possible.

LegaMart latest SEO statistics:

Based on the above picture, LegaMart performed much better over the past three months than in the same time frame last year, with over 490% organic clicks and a 640% organic impression increase.

The journey has been full of learnings, disappointments and success stories. As the website was developing, we made a primary list of targets that were required with the following:

1. Increase organic traffic
2. Improve keyword rankings
3. Boost domain authority
4. Content development
5. Technical optimisations

About LegaMart

LegaMart is a legal technology business based in London that facilitates connections so that legal professionals and clients can build beneficial partnerships tailored to their unique needs.

LegaMart is a go-to platform for anyone looking to hire, meet, consult, or engage with licensed and experienced lawyers for the legal needs of their small or medium businesses, general counsel in need of paralegals, and lawyers who want to be a part of a growing and robust legal community and establish an international legal practice.

Website history and development

The website has been built and running since 2020. The site has over 500 articles covering all sorts of legal topics, like immigration, trade, business incorporation, and family. However, despite having high-quality content, the website faced issues getting to the right audience, with the reach stagnant to less than 130 visitors in Oct 2022.

make sure you read the report until the end.

1-Increase organic traffic

Producing high-quality legal blogs requires extreme care, domain expertise, constantly updated knowledge, and ethical boundaries not found in most niches. But, the effort can pay off with increased organic traffic and authority.

Now that we’re talking about organic traffic and strategies to increase it, it’s crucial to draw your attention to a compelling statistic provided by Ahrefs. According to their findings, a significant 90.63% of all indexed pages receive zero traffic from Google, while 5.29% receive just ten visits per month or less.

This information serves as a solid starting point for our discussion on boosting organic traffic, emphasizing the prevailing challenge faced by many web pages in gaining visibility on Google.

Our challenges in producing content:

Creating authoritative legal blog content within YMYL (Your Money Your Life) categories is uniquely challenging. These topics hold the potential to significantly impact individuals directly engaging with the content, as well as others affected by their actions, extending to broader societal implications.

In the legal sphere, the responsibility is immense, as misinformation or poorly conveyed advice can profoundly affect lives and societal interactions. Striking a balance between authoritative information and simplifying complex legal concepts is a perpetual challenge in legal blogging within the YMYL landscape. Here are some challenges that we face in comparison to other YMYL categories:

1. Geographical Relevance: Laws vary widely between countries and even within states or regions. Ensuring that legal blog content specifies the relevant jurisdiction is crucial to providing accurate information to the readers.
2. Ethical and Legal Risks: Providing definitive legal advice without the proper qualifications can be unethical and risky.
3. Precision in Legal Terminology: Legal terminology must be used precisely. Incorrect terms or vague language can convey inaccurate information and mislead readers.
4. Depth of Exploration: Legal topics often require in-depth exploration to cover nuances and complexities adequately. Longer, well-researched posts may be necessary to address these complexities.

Competition in the Legal Space: The legal niche is highly competitive. Standing out with competitive content and building backlinks to gain visibility can be challenging, especially when addressing YMYL topics requiring high trust and authority.

To augment organic traffic to our website, we are implementing a multifaceted strategy.

First and foremost, we are intensifying our content marketing initiatives by introducing a series of new blog posts catering to the evolving interests and needs of our target audience.

we are proactively leveraging social media platforms to promote our newly published articles.

One big issue was making sure the management understood what we were aiming for.

We had to reduce the number of articles we published, increase the number of updates we made, and check the quality of the articles we already had.

And to make things even more interesting, we had to do all this on a tight budget. Money was tight. But we learned to be creative with what we had.

Instead of seeing the budget as a roadblock, we treated it like a challenge to find innovative and affordable ways to produce quality content.

For this reason, all additions to our blogs were viewed from the perspective of adding quality rather than quantity, as it was the only way to make things better since building out a lot of new content wasn’t in the scope of our team as there were just the two of us at the time.

Did this strategy help us get results?

Indeed yes!

Yearly performance of LegaMart website(As of 17th Oct 2023)

The below chart shows the performance from 17 Oct 2022 till 17 Oct 2023. Here, you can see the comparison between the daily visitors, total clicks and impressions, average CTR, and average position.

Legamart performance from 17 Oct 2022 till 17 Oct 2023

our #2 challenge:

Improve keyword rankings

When we started to work on optimizing the site in 2022, our situation was this:

In the initial stages, our website’s performance metrics were as follows:

1. There were a total of 1,950 organic keywords associated with the website.
2. Among these keywords, 68 held positions in the top 1–10 search results.
3. Seven keywords ranked within the highly competitive 1–3 positions.

However, the website faced specific challenges, primarily due to limited resources. These challenges included a lack of article updates and a lack of customization in feature images and other visuals used in blog posts, resulting in a less visually appealing experience for our readers. Addressing these issues became crucial in optimizing our online presence and improving user engagement.

To further enhance our SEO performance, we closely monitored keyword performance and conducted comprehensive research to identify untapped opportunities.

This is our current status in 2023 after implementing the tactics that we’ll mention:

As of 19 Oct 2023, Ahrefs.com provided the following information regarding the reach of the website.

1. The number of organic keywords is 22901
2. Keywords that rank between positions 1–10 are 1421
3. Keywords that rank between 1–3 are 236

Here are some tips on how LegaMart improved keyword rankings based on the current SEO concepts discussed:

1. Conduct in-depth keyword research to identify high-priority keywords not yet ranking on the page. Look for good search volume and relevance.
2. Optimize existing on-page content around those target keywords. This includes meta titles, headers, image alt text, URL, etc.
3. Publish new blog posts and landing pages dedicated to ranking for specific keywords. Ensure excellent on-page optimization.
4. Monitor ranking movements for focus keywords in real time using rank-tracking software. Identify issues quickly.
5. Analyse competitors’ ranking above LegaMart for ideas on improving page content, backlinks, etc.
6. Leverage keywords in schema markup like FAQ schema to improve rankings.
7. Identify keywords ranking on page 2+ that may be easier to target and work up to page 1 ranking.

The blue circle is Legamart.com

3-Boost domain authority

One of our core SEO focuses is improving our overall domain authority through targeted link-building and amplification efforts. High domain authority signifies trust and credibility with Google, which can improve our organic rankings and visibility.

To build authoritative backlinks, we aim to be featured on mainstream media publications, legal associations, and other high-trust sites relevant to our industry. Our content and outreach strategies specifically target mentions on domains with DA 50+.

Here you can see that on 24 Sep 2022, our domain range was 13 and the referring domain was 95 before implementing the building program.

We are also actively building relationships with legal influencers, pursuing speaker opportunities, and leveraging press releases to earn editorial links from authority sites. Listing LegaMart across extensive legal citations and directories can further signal relevance.

In addition, we produced in-depth legal guides and resources that attract natural backlinks and engagement. By being a thought leader in our space, we can organically build citations.

Pursuing domain authority requires an ongoing, concerted effort across many channels. However, the rewards can be immense in the form of improved SEO performance. We were committed to implementing best practices that position us as an authoritative resource.

After implementing the link-building program, the domain rate grew to 31 in July 2023, and our referring domain is 407.

Also, it is important to remind you that based on the Ahrefs report more than 66% of the pages have zero referring domains, we tried to create high-quality referring domains for our important pages via guest posts

4-Content development

Creating legal content

Creating legal content is quite distinct from other types of writing. To ensure its quality, someone with legal qualifications should prepare it since people rely on the guidance and advice provided in the content, which can significantly affect their lives.

Legal content creation involves thorough research. We need to dig into complex legal documents, such as laws, case histories, and precedents, to back up our arguments and check government websites for the latest laws.

Some of the most important factors that we had in mind and any legal content writer and editor should consider are:

Selecting the Right Legal Topics:

When creating legal content, it is important to focus on topics that are contemporary and relevant to your audience.

Points to keep in mind while working on an SEO campaign

1. Cross-Team Collaboration for Website Maintenance: Other teams that contribute to the website’s design and functionality directly impact our content ranking, page loading speed, and the appearance of images in our blogs or content shown on Google. Our SEO efforts intertwine closely with their work, ensuring that any changes made align with our optimization strategies for better ranking and user experience.
2. Synergy with Graphic Designers for Visual Content: Visual appeal is a key player in capturing user attention. Having clear discussions with our graphic designers is crucial to ensuring the visual elements of our website are top-notch. We need to discuss color schemes, logo placement, image dimensions, and content fonts. This collaboration ensures our visual content remains visually pleasing and consistently engaging, resulting in better user experiences and higher user retention.
3. Aligning SEO Objectives with Management Expectations: Communicating realistic SEO goals with reporting managers is imperative.SEO is a long-term strategy that requires patience and consistent effort. Stakeholders must understand that results evolve gradually, akin to a marathon, not an immediate sprint. Clear communication helps manage expectations and maintain focus on long-term growth.
4. Content Quality and Relevance: Creating high-quality, relevant content is the cornerstone of SEO success. Ensuring that content is informative, engaging, and aligned with user intent not only attracts visitors but also encourages sharing and backlinking, contributing positively to search rankings. We’ll talk more about this in the next section.
5. Headings and structure: Effective headings and a well-structured outline create the initial impression of your blog or any written piece. Research has revealed that the average reader’s attention span is eight seconds. Without clear headings and a solid structure, your SEO can suffer. Therefore, it’s essential to give utmost consideration to the content you’re about to publish.

After executing all strategies and planning, the conclusive outcomes are evident in the results showcased in Image #9, demonstrating significant progress from Oct 2022 to Oct 2023.

Here, you can see the comparison between the daily visitors, total clicks and impressions, average CTR and average position.

In October 2022, LegaMart recorded 8,949 impressions, while in October 2023, we nearly reached 80,000 impressions.

5-Technical optimizations

The ultimate step in our series of actions to achieve these results involved implementing comprehensive technical SEO optimisations. These enhancements were carefully designed to improve LegaMart’s website performance, with the overarching goal of enhancing its search engine-friendliness and user-friendliness:

• Tools and Tactics: Utilize tools like Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and Screaming Frog.
• Identifying Issues: Look for crawl errors, slow-loading pages, and unoptimized content.
• Action Plan: Develop a checklist of identified issues for systematic resolution.
• Image Compression: Reduce image file sizes without compromising quality.
• Caching is Key: Enable browser caching for faster load times on repeat visits.
• Link Maintenance: Regularly check and fix broken links.
• 404 Error Management: Implement redirects for a better user experience.
• Structured Data Accuracy: Ensure your structured data is error-free.
• Search Console Monitoring: Keep an eye on site crawl errors.
• Code Minification: Reduce file size by removing unnecessary characters.
• Authority Sharing: Use internal links to distribute page authority throughout your site.
• Improved Navigation: Enhance user experience with thoughtful internal linking.

Dedicate time regularly to maintaining site health through technical SEO audits and fixes. This strengthens the SEO foundation.