Case studies
A national law firm with a practice running from family law to corporate and land asked me to review its full digital footprint. The same website had been in place for over five years, and paid traffic was being sent to external landing pages with no connection to the main site. I audited the estate and delivered a RAG-ranked action list covering templates, navigation, landing pages, content and forms. In the first six months after the remedial work, conversion across the site rose 333%, with PPC conversion moving from 1.5% to 5% and organic from 2.8% to 6.2%.
The firm had had the same website for over five years, with very little change apart from news items.
To help PPC conversion they had built separate external landing pages with no connection to the main website at all, and conversion was shocking.
With a product offering running from family law to corporate and land and everything in between, the site had been set up the way the lawyers wanted it: organised around budget centres rather than around what a client was trying to do.
I ran a digital audit to establish a benchmark for the current site, quantitative and qualitative.
The quantitative side covered analytics, with a full review of data going back three years, which was as far as Google Analytics went: what users were doing, sources, content, landing and exit pages, funnels, bounce rate patterns and search queries. Then SEO, whether meta was set up and each page had a unique title and description matching its content; technical SEO and page speed; and traffic, where it came from, which of it converted best and whether any of it was bogus.
The qualitative side covered usability, whether users could find information and how it was structured; brand, whether the digital touchpoints followed the guidelines; and conversions, which topics converted best, which products needed nurture and which were instant sales. Alongside that, a competitor analysis, and a review of the incumbent agency's reports against actual results, to see whether they matched and whether the agency was giving the whole picture.
The delivery was a full action list in a RAG report, red, amber and green, showing the impact and priority of each issue. The template changes pulled the old short pages, each with lots of internal links to other short pages on the same topic, into single rich information pages with clear actions. Landing pages were created to cater for targeted traffic and keep users on the main website. The navigation was reworked around user needs, which reduced the number of products and streamlined the content. Calls to action and forms were updated. And a content plan, including social media usage, rewrote the copy to simplify the opening paragraphs and draw users down the page.
In the first six months following the remedial work, conversion across the site rose 333%.
| Metric | Before | After | Period | |---|---|---|---| | Conversion across the site | baseline | +333% | first 6 months after the work | | PPC conversion | 1.5% | 5% (+333%) | first 6 months after the work | | Organic conversion | 2.8% | 6.2% (+221%) | first 6 months after the work |
Returning users rose, and the client noticed customers starting to buy more than one product from them.
A website organised around a firm's internal budget centres will always fight the client trying to use it, and no amount of paid spend fixes that from the outside. Sending paid traffic to landing pages disconnected from the main site is the same mistake twice: it treats a structural problem as a traffic problem. Fix the structure and the traffic you already have converts differently.
The review behind this is a digital health analysis. On testing whether an agency's reports match the data, see your agency's monthly report is a sales document.
They had been built outside the main website with no connection to it, so paid traffic landed somewhere that shared none of the site's navigation, content or trust signals. Bringing that traffic back onto the main site is most of why PPC conversion moved from 1.5% to 5%.
Red, amber, green against every finding, scored for impact and priority. A firm with a diverse practice cannot act on forty equal findings, so the report has to say which ones cost the most and which to do first. Without that ranking a review is a list, not a plan.
Because clients do not arrive thinking in departments. A site built the way the lawyers wanted it, by budget centre, splits one client need across several short pages. Reworking the navigation around user needs is what reduced the number of products and streamlined the content.
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