SEO: How I Saved an Invisible Law Firm Blog Category

I am Jorge Argota a legal SEO expert, I’ve worked on many law firm website optimization challenges. But one case stands out. A bizarre situation made a law firm’s blog invisible to search engines, while other categories thrived. This shows the complexity of SEO for lawyers. It also shows the need for detail-oriented problem solving in law firm SEO.

The Unexpected Problem

I was doing SEO for a big Miami law firm. We had optimized their website and they were ranking well for most of their practice areas. But we noticed a strange issue. Any blog post in the “Employment Law” category would not show up in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, posts in other categories, like personal injury law and criminal law, ranked well.

My Detailed Analysis

An SEO audit using Google Search Console, SEMrush, and Screaming Frog found an issue. It was interesting. The employment law category page and all posts within it were set to “noindex” in the website’s robots.txt file. This SEO mistake blocked search engines from crawling and indexing the content. It made it invisible in search results.

The Unorthodox Solution

Removing the “noindex” wouldn’t fix the issue right away. So, we devised a multifaceted SEO plan:

• We fixed the robots.txt file and submitted the employment law category page for reindexing through Google Search Console.
• We made a clever internal linking structure. It was a “hub and spoke” model. The main employment law page was the hub. All related blog posts were the spokes.
• We wrote high-quality, long content on trending employment law topics. It had relevant keywords and legal expertise to show search engines it was an important category.
• We did targeted link building. We reached out to legal directories and industry publications to get backlinks to the employment law category and its posts.
• We optimized the category page itself with schema markup to clearly signal its relevance to employment law queries.

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The Results

Within 3 months of making these changes, we saw big results. The employment law category was in search results. It competed with other law firm websites. Organic traffic to employment law pages was up 215%. The firm saw a 70% increase in inquiries about employment law.

Takeaways

Even a well-optimized law firm website needs regular, thorough SEO audits.

Category-level SEO requires a 360-degree approach. It needs technical fixes, a content strategy, and link building.

Internal linking can boost a weak section of a website. It can increase its visibility and authority.

What I learned

This case study shows the importance of ongoing SEO in the legal industry. As a law firm SEO company, we know that SEO success isn’t just about broad strategies. It’s about finding and fixing issues that can affect a law firm’s online visibility. We combined technical skills with creative problem-solving. This turned an invisible category into an asset for our client’s legal marketing. This is now a key part of our approach to SEO for lawyers – we leave no stone unturned for our law firm clients.