Just over a year ago, Kate Denning of Denning Insurance Law got in touch with us to help her improve her results online. The Denning Insurance Law website had been online for a while, but was simply not getting the traffic or visibility she wanted.
Denning Insurance Law provides legal services of a high quality, with great results for their clients.
Kate Denning herself has qualifications and knowledge that sets her apart from most others in her field — holding the title of an accredited specialist in Personal Injuries Law. This specialist status is something that takes a huge amount of study and expertise that few are able to pass.
This expertise, and their great success rate, sets Denning Insurance Law apart from the rest. But despite this, they still were not getting the results they should have online.
The challenges 💪
The industry for legal services is extremely competitive. And tricky with what you can and cannot say — for example, until recently, you couldn’t even refer to Personal Injury Law as such online — with Compensation Law the only acceptable term back then.
Because of the competitiveness of the industry itself, and the value of leads in this area being high (therefore driving both competition and difficulty up for any SEO keywords), the search term for ‘Personal Injury Law’ is notoriously difficult to rank for in Google. In fact, it’s widely known by search engine marketing specialists as one of the top three to ten most difficult.
With this, and other factors around the rules and regulations of advertising legal services — not only in terms of the act of advertising, but also the individual platform’s rules on social media and search engines — meant that the traffic generated by their website was minimal. Across SEO and other channels.
So, Kate came to the team at Excite Media to find some solutions.
The solution 💡
We quickly established that their (now previous) website needed some improvements and optimisations to perform at its best — so much so that a new, rebuilt website would be the best course of action.
The content needed to be on-point, the user interface easy to navigate, the site layout easy to make sense of, and the website speed optimised. Basically, the website needed to be created with UX (User Experience) and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) at the forefront.
The website needed to show off the company’s best benefits, their services, their way-more-than-the-usual qualifications and expertise, and their experience. Their website’s copy and content needed to do a fantastic job of explaining all of this, in a nutshell, and in a way that would be easy for the intended audience to understand.
All this, while ticking all of the SEO boxes — with a solid SEO kick-start, right from the beginning of the website’s launch. Ongoing SEO was a must to stay visible in this highly competitive vertical.
The key to Denning Insurance Law’s success:
- A new, optimised website
- Digital Foundations (our SEO kickstarter)
- WebIQ – SEO ongoing
Here’s how it went down…
Hint: One short year later, her online traffic had increased significantly, SEO traffic had more than doubled (and we’re not talking tiny numbers either), and position #1 has been maintained on Google organic search across a bunch of relevant, high-value keywords.
That, and Kate is so happy with the results she’s signed up for a second website — to cater to an additional part of her now-expanded target market. Read on to learn more.
Phase one: new website launch — complete with Digital Foundations 🧱
July 2021
On Monday the 12th of July 2021, a new and shiny website was launched for Denning Insurance Law, geared for user experience, readability, CRO and SEO.
The content and copy did a great job of selling all of the reasons potential clients should choose Denning Insurance Law.
Because a Digital Foundations package was part of the strategy, the foundational SEO elements gave the website a great footing right from the get-go.
The Digital Foundations SEO kick-starter saw to it that the site got an excellent head-start for online presence and organic search — with all of the off-page SEO elements it needed to enter the digital world successfully in this uber-competitive vertical.
This meant the website launch encompassed some early wins for SEO, with all of the work, insight and expertise put in before the launch date, behind the scenes.
Some of the SEO wins from this website launch included:
- An updated domain name from dennings.com.au to denninginsurancelaw.com.au which better reflects what they do (and also exact-matches a key search term, insurance law).
- A redirect from the old domain to the new meant any authority of the old domain was passed to the new one.
- A sitemap that makes sense for humans and bots alike.
- The website’s content was also written with SEO in mind — ticking all the on-page SEO optimisation boxes.
- The site was engaging and user-friendly, setting it up for fantastic engagement metrics and positive signals to Google’s algorithm.
- The technical elements of SEO all accounted for, including the very-important site speed.
- Killer content that helps the reader to find exactly what they’re looking for quickly, while doing a great job of communicating what it is that makes Denning Insurance Law stand out from the pack.
The new website’s layout, design, content, SEO elements and UX all set them up for maximum success online.
Phase two: ongoing SEO 📈
From the new website’s launch, ongoing
From here, simultaneous with the new website’s launch, the ongoing SEO effort kicked into gear.
Right from week one of the new website launching with all of its SEO readiness, our digital marketing experts worked hard to get Denning Insurance Law ranking for relevant organic search terms in a highly competitive market.
Here’s the rundown from one of our digital marketing masterminds on the case, alongside a team of our best in SEO and digital strategy.
The SEO brief:
Maximising the SEO for Denning Insurance Law, a new website – which is a challenge in itself and even more so in this super-competitive industry.
It was important for Denning Insurance Law to perform well across a wide range of potential searches for both personal injury and insurance law. Some common examples being:
- Personal injury lawyer Brisbane
- Workcover lawyer
- No win no fee lawyers
- Best personal injury lawyers Brisbane
- Compensation lawyers
- Lawyers against insurance companies
- How much does a no win no fee lawyer charge
- Workers compensation lawyer QLD
- Accident lawyers
With direct competition against giant firms with multi-million dollar advertising budgets, we knew it was going to have to be a carefully-researched and well-executed strategy, to give us the best chance of winning the attention of potential customers on Google.
The approach:
Looking at the main areas of SEO, off-page authority, on-page SEO and technical SEO and with the benefits of the early wins, we hit the ground running with SEO optimisations.
Off-page authority:
The correct redirects from the old site certainly helped with the domain authority. One of the key steps for establishing the off-page authority involved continually chasing high Domain Authority through quality and relevant backlinks.
This is especially important for a legal client where Google has very strict guidelines, and holds websites in these areas to a higher standard than some other industries. With two of the difficult ‘categories’ (with higher Google quality standards) applying to Denning Insurance Law (financial and legal), there was an extra level of effort required in this area. The backlink quality had to be top-notch to have a weighting with Google (even more so than ‘the usual’).
On top of that, with multiple locations, the Google Business Profile optimisations and citations were also essential parts of the SEO tactic for Denning Insurance Law.
Of course, there are several other factors that come into play, and maintaining SEO is a continual effort that needs constant attention — but these were some of the largest focus areas first off the bat.
On-page and Technical SEO
The Digital Foundations helped a lot with some of the early wins with both on-page and technical SEO elements.
The site being new meant there weren’t a huge amount of issues to fix that old sites can sometimes have — such as multiple 404s.
We also went to the extra effort to ensure that the technical SEO elements and on-page SEO elements were all covered to get maximum results online. This involved taking care of elements such as page speed, creating a plan for content development, ensuring the site’s content ticked all the right boxes for the target keywords and search terms, and more.
We also did a lot of work on the core web vitals, schema implementation, technical audits and more.
As with off-page SEO, on-page and technical SEO are ongoing activities that need to be actioned regularly to keep results high and keep everything performing the best that it can.
The Results 🎉
Milestone: March 2022: their BEST EVER month (until then, anyway!)
In March 2022 Denning Insurance Law had their best month in terms of traffic (organic search and total website traffic) and engagement metrics.
In the uber-competitive vertical of personal injury law, this is an amazing result to see.
June 2022 - Organic traffic up 77%
As we approached the one-year mark since the new website launched, we took a look at stats over the six months previous. (This date range encompassed the then ‘most recent’ six months, vs the six months prior, which were the first six months of the new site’s lifespan).
And the results are fantastic.
Overall organic performance was really strong.
In fact, we more than doubled the SEO traffic in the second six months, versus the first six months of the new site. That’s not even a comparison to the previous site, which had a much lower number of online visits (hence the need to come to us).
And we got this new website to rank #1 in Google across a large number of super competitive keywords and search terms in what’s largely known as one of the trickiest verticals to rank in. Including a search term known as one of the trickiest search terms to rank for, ever.
- #1 rank achieved in a number of “personal injury law” and “insurance law” related keywords, that were directly relevant to Denning Insurance Law’s business offering.
- These topics are notoriously difficult to rank for, with “personal injury law” being one of the top 10 most competitive keywords in Australia.
- Examples of some of the keywords that were ranking #1 thanks to the ongoing SEO efforts were:
- Lawyer for auto insurance claims
- Lawyers for auto insurance
- Lawyers that specialise in insurance claims
- Experienced insurance solicitor
- Experienced insurance lawyer
- Insurance claims litigation
- Workers comp for mental illness
- Auto injury claims
- Psychological injury insurance claims
- Accident claim attorney
- Insurance claim attorney
- Truck crash attorneys
- CTP payout amounts QLD
- And a bunch of other related terms.
The results didn’t stop there of course — as our ongoing SEO effort continued (and is still ongoing today), we continue to see strong organic search results and #1 and top 10 rankings across a number of highly relevant keywords in this uber-competitive vertical.
Statistics – one year on, (365 days of active website) 📊
Google Analytics
Traffic: 18,947 sessions
Engagement:
An average session duration of 1:08
80.75% of visitor sessions are new visitors
Pages per session 1.37
Goal competitions: 469 (including form submissions, phone call link clicks and ‘book an appointment’ outbound links).
Goal completion break-down:
The top two goal completion sources were organic search, and direct traffic (which are often returning visitors from previous sessions.
As organic search is the source of the most of the website sessions, (15,645 of 18,947 sessions), a large portion of the direct traffic can be attributed as returning organic search users who returned directly (via typed or auto’-filled URL).
The below chart shows a breakdown of the goal completions over time, and the breakdown of each type of goal completed.
Google Search Console (organic search results)
Google Business Profile (local results on GBP listing):
Authority
Organic keyword performance
The below table shows the top performing keywords over this date range.
Top 3 performers for traffic (excluding brand terms)
| Keyword | Clicks |
|---|---|
| Permanent impairment payment amounts QLD | 685 |
| Compensation payouts for psychological injury | 252 |
| Workcover qld permanent impairment | 193 |
| TOTAL for all terms (about 5,000 related keywords and search terms, including many longtail) | 14,498 |
Top 3 performers for impressions (excluding brand terms)
| Keyword | Impressions |
|---|---|
| Workers compensation lawyers | 11,915 |
| Insurance law | 10,377 |
| No win no fee lawyers | 10,368 |
| TOTAL for all terms (about 5,000 related keywords and search terms, including many longtail) | 1.31 mil |
Huge traffic value
These organic search results are obviously awesome. But looking at the numbers and dollar figures of the value of this traffic blows it out of the park. We’ve mentioned this field is uber-competitive to rank keywords for. And we’ve also mentioned that the value of a lead in this vertical is excellent. But what about how much it would cost to get these same results via Google Ads? You’d better sit down.
For one keyword that seems fairly specific, permanent impairment payout amounts qld, the month of July 2022 saw 165 clicks for this keyword for Denning Insurance Law. This keyword has an estimated PPC Cost Per Click of $16.57 if you were to go after it on Google Ads. This is $2,734.05 in value for just one search term across one month in organic search results.
The organic traffic value across the board for Denning Insurance Law has been on a steady upward trend since the launch of the new website over a year ago. The screenshot below shows this trend from July 2021 (website launch) until the end of July 2022 – a year from the website’s launch.
Recent total monthly traffic value results?
- June 2022’s organic traffic value was $6,055
- July 2022 was $5,865
- August 2022 was $5,140
All from organic search traffic, for the relative keyword cost per click, if Google Advertising on the same search keywords was to be set up.
And these numbers don’t even take into account the large number of keywords without CPC estimate data, such as the thousands of long tail keywords and other search terms that have resulted in 15,645 sessions on the website in the first year since just after the website launched. (31 July 2021 – 31 July 2022).
What does this mean in layman’s terms? We’ve seen huge value in the organic search keywords that Denning Insurance Law is being seen for since the website launch.
Fast forward to August 2022 ⏩
A year on, Kate was so happy with the website and ongoing SEO results, that she signed off on a second website
- A second website, with content and messaging focused towards a new audience
- Digital Foundations – to ensure this website is geared for success organically from its beginning
We don’t want to give away too much before the launch of this second website. Keeping Kate’s cards close to our chest and all 😉
But let’s just say that we’re excited to be a part of her continued business growth and strategy as we continue to see excellent results for our work to date and into the future.
As for Denning Insurance Law, the website is continuing to perform, SEO performance is still killing it — thanks to the hard work of our SEO and digital marketing specialists — and Kate is set up for the future, with everything from Google Analytics’ latest GA4 tracking set up to ensure visibility into the awesome results moving forward, to an on-point SEO strategy to see success well into the future.
