At WeaveSEO, we recently partnered with a sole practitioner's law firm best known for its track record in personal injury and discrimination cases. The firm set an ambitious goal: to establish a new veterans disability practice group and significantly expand its online footprint. As they ventured into veterans disability claims—a niche with its own set of complexities—they needed a robust SEO strategy to stand out among well-established competitors.
If you’re an agency, consultant, in-house legal marketing professional, or even a law firm owner, you’ll find this case study instructive. We’re sharing how we combined foundational SEO techniques with AI-driven content to boost the law firm’s organic keyword rankings by 25,400% in just 2 weeks.
Ryan's marketing agency, WeaveSEO, took on the Law Firm as a client, improving organic keyword rankings over 25,400% in just two weeks, multiplying clicks by over 65 times at the time of writing this blog post.
If you’re an attorney or law firm, this case study can be instructional for growing demand for your Law Firm's services by combining WeaveSEO's AI tools with our SEO expertise.
The primary objective for the Law Firm is to boost its visibility in search results significantly and to improve brand awareness among prospective clients.
SEO Challenges in the Legal Industry
SEO in the legal sector is particularly challenging due to high competition from well-established law firms that have invested years in building their online presence.
The complexity of practice areas like personal injury, employment law, and veterans disability also complicates keyword targeting. You need a deep understanding to identify and rank for realistic search terms that speak to potential clients.
Moreover, this law firm had previously done minimal SEO work, compounding the difficulties. We had to lay the groundwork from scratch—covering everything from keyword research to content strategy.
Below are 6 lessons gleaned from our efforts to increase the firm’s organic keyword rankings by 25,400% in just 2 weeks:
1. Identify your most important keywords
If you look at the rise in organic traffic for the Law Firm's website, you'll notice that their growth isn't slow and steady.
It's almost like our content team knows exactly which topics to go after.
Which is nearly true.
Our team's keyword research strategy is quite simple.
We start by identifying high-level topics that make sense for their audience and business and then find related subtopics in the same niche.
This allows us to create a topical map that we can then blindly follow.
"We planned articles using WeaveSEO's AI Tools and published the articles in clusters." - Managing Partner at the Law Firm
For example, their core topics may look like,
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va disability information
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va legal counsel
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va benefits access
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va claims process
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va disability ratings & calculator
Entering "va disability lawyer" into WeaveSEO's AI Tool generates a list of related keyword ideas suited to our client's business.
WeaveSEO highlights the pillar page and supporting pages for a topical cluster so our writers don't have to perform any additional SEO analysis.
Identifying your main keywords is important, especially if you have a small team like we did.
By figuring out which keywords are the most relevant, you'll be able to maximize your SEO efforts.
For the Law Firm's SEO strategy, this was the difference between getting lost in the vast sea of online content and seeing tangible results.
When you engage with WeaveSEO, we continuously generate fresh topical maps using our advanced AI tools, all within just a few minutes of work.
2. Focus on one topic at a time
The SEO team we provided for this Law Firm comprised of 2 technical writers and 1 SEO strategist.
That doesn't leave much room for experimentation or a "throw and see what sticks" approach.
So our team at WeaveSEO doubled down on SEO fundamentals.
Instead of spreading ourselves thin by writing about everything the target audience may be interested in, we invest all our efforts into covering one topic at a time.
Pro Tip: Focusing on a single subject at a time allows the small team to write comprehensive, well researched articles that exceed the quality of other pages our clients are competing against.
So rather than writing about va claims process, ptsd ratings and disability percentages simultaneously, we first published articles on just "va disability lawyers." The narrow focus enables our small team to build and share internal knowledge on select topics reflected in our content.
Writing high-quality articles in a single niche signals subject expertise to Google, helping our Law Firm client's pages rank higher in search results.
Working on a single cluster at a time can also simplify internal linking and content workflow.
3. Cover subjects in comprehensive depth
Legal Services is a competitive industry.
I mean look at those competitors that a casual search unsurfaced.
So how could a much smaller Law Firm compete against the likes of Hill & Ponton and CCK Law's content marketing?
Topical authority.
Topical authority is your site's perceived expertise in a specific subject area, achieved by creating comprehensive and authoritative content that covers a topic in depth, signaling to search engines and users that the website is a go-to resource for that subject.
The team's SEO strategy is twofold.
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Focus on one topic at a time
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Cover it in great detail
Publishing enough content on a cluster like "va disability lawyer" increased the site's visibility for related searches and built trust with the audience, positioning the brand as a knowledgeable resource in their field.
Using the topical map WeaveSEO generated for them, we can see that a cluster for "va disability lawyer" has 102 articles with a monthly traffic potential of 343,320 visits.
Here is a list of suggested pages for the cluster.
Even though "va disability lawyer" is the main cluster under our core topic, there are several related topic hubs that our team continues to write about.
Covering these topics in great detail with high-quality content helps the Law Firm website reach prospective clients that are veterans seeking to legal counsel to appeal their va disability benefits, driving targeted traffic to the site.
This strategy ensures content depth and breadth, appealing to search algorithms that favor comprehensive topic coverage.
4. Use internal linking
Adding relevant internal links is a simple SEO practice that can share link equity with other pages and help readers and search engines discover new content.
"We always internally link articles in a cluster and linked them to the pillar page" - Managing Partner at the Law Firm
The topical map feature in WeaveSEO groups related pages by the same content hub, making it easy for the team to know which pages they have to link to and from within a cluster.
For example, here are the pillar page and supporting articles for 21 pages in a cluster for "va disability lawyer [location]."
Internal linking is a low-hanging fruit to supplement your content marketing efforts and should be part of your on-page SEO optimization.
5. Adopt programmatic SEO
Our content team for the Law Firm realized that there are thousands of searches for VA disability calculators.
It makes perfect sense to go after these keywords. There are hundreds of them, and combined, they have sizable searches for a highly relevant audience.
However, creating such a vast amount of content typically demands a large team of writers.
Instead, the team combines programmatic SEO with AI content generation.
"The next two months were planned with a programmatic SEO approach where we created articles for veterans with disabilities seeking legal support." - Managing Partner at the Law Firm
Programmatic SEO is a way of publishing hundreds of pages in an automated manner.
Large companies have been doing it for ages. But until recently, programmatic SEO was only reserved for the big guys because it requires coding skills and integrating various data sources to create hundreds of pages.
Now, with AI, programatic SEO is a realistic SEO strategy within reach for smaller legal service providers like this Law Firm.
The agency, WeaveSEO, was able to leverage their AI capabilities, so the client didn’t need a large writing team or an expanded budget.
Take the example of va ptsd rating created for our Law Firm client's competitor, a keyword with over 3,600 monthly searches.
The content team used WeaveSEO's AI Tool to generate search engine-optimized articles like this in a few minutes.
We created 20 articles in bulk for veterans seeking legal support with their disability benefits using WeaveSEO's AI content generation capabilities.
The team adopted a good AI content practice by using AI to generate programmatic SEO content and then reviewing it by humans before publishing.
Programmatic SEO with AI is a low-effort opportunity for Law Firms of all sizes to automate their content generation, saving time and expenses while scaling up content and traffic.
For example, their competitor's page on va disability calculators drives over 46,000 monthly clicks from organic searches.
WeaveSEO helps them churn out hundreds of articles on these topics, which would have been an unfeasible Law Firm SEO strategy with their limited team and budget.
And their competitors have 1,000 such pages.
6. Scale with AI
In the past, websites could rely on fewer pages to rank well.
However, modern SEO requires websites to create helpful content consistently, where the frequency and speed of publishing play important roles in SEO success.
The emphasis on fresh, regularly updated content is more pronounced.
With only a few writer-editors, writing hundreds of articles isn't a realistic strategy to achieve significant results from SEO in a relatively quick timeframe.
Yet their team publishes about 20 articles each month using WeaveSEO's AI Services.
"We post around 20 (plus minus 5) articles each month" - Managing Partner at the Law Firm
By automating parts of their SEO workflow, such as keyword research, drafting outlines, and writing optimized articles, WeaveSEO's AI tools enable them to maintain a high content velocity that contributes to their performance on search engines.
If you are working with a client or need to create content at scale, AI content generators like WeaveSEO's AI Tool can help you produce more articles at reduced costs and effort.
Besides these steps, the team didn't engage in additional Law Firm SEO strategies like link-building campaigns or digital PR.
Results
For Ryan and his agency, the ability to quickly produce a large volume of content meant the Law Firm client could cover more topics within their niche and target a range of keywords, allowing them to quickly expand their website's footprint and build topical authority in their domain.
WeaveSEO grew the Law Firm website's organic traffic to 66 visits per month, recording an increase of 6,500% in 2 weeks.
That's an increase of 66x in monthly organic visitors.
Google's algorithm updates
As you can see, Google's core algorithm updates had no negative impact on the website, even though I've demonstrated their wide use of WeaveSEO's AI-Driven content.
Unlike GPT wrappers pretending to be AI content generators, WeaveSEO's AI Tool relies on proprietary algorithms that create humanized content for search engine rankings.
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Key Takeaways
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Identifying and focusing on the most relevant keywords for your niche can significantly amplify your SEO efforts and drive targeted traffic to your site.
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By diving deep into one topic at a time, you can create comprehensive content that establishes topical authority and outperforms competitors in search rankings.
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Strategically linking related articles within a content cluster can improve user experience and help search engines crawl and index your site more effectively.
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Leveraging programmatic SEO and AI content generation allows for rapid scaling of content creation, targeting numerous high-potential keywords with less effort.
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Producing a high volume of well-researched, authoritative content is key to staying relevant and competitive in today's SEO landscape.
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Utilizing advanced tools like WeaveSEO's AI Tools for content generation can safeguard against negative impacts from Google's algorithm updates, ensuring consistent performance in search results.
