Large Local Law Firm Looks To Mitigate Losses

Langleys is the largest law firm in York and Lincoln with some of the best minds in UK business, insurance, and personal law working tirelessly to provide their clients with a level of service unparalleled elsewhere. They regularly feature prominently in the Legal 500 and Chambers and Partners’ Best Law Firm guides.

Courting Disaster

Historically, Langleys had enjoyed strong levels of online traffic, but 2016 brought about a sudden change in fortunes:

“Leads through the website were a major source of new business for our fee earners and when more and more of them began asking why they were starting to dry up, we knew we had a serious problem that had to be addressed.”

Their original SEO services provider had initially made significant gains, but those had now plateaued and were starting to reverse.

Decisive Action Against The Downturn

“Naturally, our first port of call was to work with our existing SEO provider to understand the underlying reasons behind the decline.”

Various efforts were made to resolve the drop in traffic, but to no avail. After several further months of dwindling site visits and leads, Langleys felt they could wait no longer and had to act.

“It became clear that our original provider was out of their depth in understanding the nature of the decline and how to resolve it. It was at this point that we began to consider alternative SEO partners that could help us.”

Tackling Technical Turnarounds With Tenacity

“Our original SEO provider was good enough to refer us to Edge45®, who had greater experience and expertise in resolving technical SEO issues. We were particularly impressed with how Edge45® had helped Vantage Leasing recover from a sudden loss of organic traffic.”

Langleys had read Edge45®’s Vantage Leasing case study which detailed how we had helped Vantage recover from sudden losses of traffic due to various algorithmic updates across the major search engines. Our findings, and consequent fixes, resulted in Vantage becoming the UK’s leading lease supplier of Range Rover’s iconic SUV, the Evoque.

“We were left in no doubt that Edge45® could help us, so we introduced ourselves to them and requested a meeting to begin the process of recovery.”

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Pinpointing The Problem…And Solving It

Edge45® was born out of engineering, analytical reasoning, and drawing insights from deep data analysis. Solving problems like the one faced by Langleys is what gets us up in the mornings.

As a renouned technical seo agency, we quickly initiated one of Edge45®’s industry leading audits, focusing primarily on performance and technical SEO. It didn’t take long for our team to come up with a report that showed:

  • Where the drop in traffic occurred.
  • Which rankings had suffered.
  • Which pages were responsible for the loss in traffic.
  • And, when exactly this had all begun.

Edge45®’s deep dive analysis pinpointed that Langleys’ declining traffic was due to not one, but two algorithmic updates rolled out by Google:

“When Edge45® showed us how difficult our main menu was to navigate – due to the cluttering caused by excessive links to pages that were too keyword heavy, yet thin on substance and message, and why that would frustrate a user and not meet their search intent – things really began to make sense.

Edge45® had distilled and crystallised the source of the problem and did it in a way that we all understood and were on board with to fix.

Our previous SEO provider had led us to believe that it was all about keywords…the more the better. Therefore, we had lots and lots of similar pages targeting variations of the same keyword which, of course, being advised by an ‘expert’, we believed was the correct thing to do. 

However, Edge45® educated us in the importance of content quality, user intent, and the concept of E-A-T which was a revelation.”

Kate Went - Marketing Manager, Langleys

E-A-T is an acronym for Expertise, Authority and Trust and is a major component required for successful modern day SEO. If a website cannot exhibit sufficient levels of E-A-T, all things being equal, it won’t rank as well as another site that does.

Efficiently Executed Expertise

In order to arrest the decline, and ultimately bring about a reversal that took Langleys back to historic highs, Edge45® implemented the following changes:

  • New site: Recommended, advised on, and oversaw the development of a new website built from the ground up to leverage modern SEO tactics and strategies.
  • Increased content quality: Consolidation of smaller articles into broader, stronger pieces helped match visitor’s search terms and target their intent in a better fashion.
  • Easier navigation: The removal of superfluous and/or badly optimised pages, resulting in a more streamlined user experience and easier navigation across the site.
  • Key service pages improved: Priority landing pages bolstered by better content, thus improving both traffic numbers and conversions from visitors.
  • Workshops: Conducted workshops with Fee Earners to discover, and then address, any fears, uncertainties, or doubts prospective clients may have.
  • PPC reimagined: After taking over management of Langleys’ PPC campaigns, we redesigned their Pay Per Click landing pages and improved both conversion rates and ROI.
  • Updated USP’s: Worked on strengthening Langleys’ on-page value propositions.
  • Ongoing SEO support: Content creation and outreach campaigns to ensure that Langleys maintain their healthy position in search results.
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Judgement Time – Part I

Edge45®’s expertise enabled Langleys to:

  • Arrest the decline and stabilise organic traffic within two months.
  • Increase organic traffic within 10 months.
  • Ensure average monthly organic traffic levels are at their highest and on a par with the pre-decline days of 2015:
  • Push organic new users up almost 23% YOY.
  • Show a 101% increase in traffic driving keywords ranking on page one.
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Judgement Time - Part II
increase in PPC click through rate.
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increase in conversion rate from PPC.
increase in PPC lead generation.
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“Edge45® have been absolutely instrumental in restoring our website’s performance to its historic best levels. Not only this, but thanks to their work on improving our PPC campaigns and spearheading the need, design, and launch of our new website, we’ve seen conversions across all digital channels improve significantly.

Their assured confidence in what they do, their diligence, and their transparent, logical approach has been a breath of fresh air in what is a traditionally difficult market to understand.

We can’t thank them enough.”

If having read our SEO case study, you want to know more about how SEO might help you, visit our SEO services page here.