The most important SEO decision you’ll ever make is finding someone who can put together the right strategy. I like to compare it to a sports general manager. Regardless of how good your coach is, if you can’t draft good players and mix in quality free agents, it’ll be hard to contend for a championship.
I’m going to walk you through an attorney-client. We quadrupled their visibility after revamping their SEO strategy.
I will also share a B2B manufacturing company. We increased their SEO visibility by 13% but more importantly, drove more qualified leads, allowing their sales team to home in on higher-quality prospects.
The purpose of this article is to help readers understand the types of questions we ask and our holistic approach to SEO. This will help you think more clearly about your SEO strategy and be more strategic moving forward.
My SEO Experience
I’ve been running a marketing agency since 2010. I’ve helped devise strategies for billion-dollar companies, local dental practices, law firms, among many other industries. My favorite part of SEO is the strategy (aka constructing the team who will eventually take the field).
If you look at the Cleveland Browns, bad draft picks and free agency moves have been setting the franchise back for 25 years. The same holds true for SEO. If you don’t devise the right strategy and have someone to execute it properly, it’s a significant opportunity cost for your business.
I wanted to share examples to help you understand the tactics we’ve used for hundreds of businesses.
What To Be Leery Of
There are many agencies that hand you an “SEO Audit.” It’s an automated report that shows you slow page load speed, broken links, and other technical issues. These reports can be generated in seconds, and I don’t consider this to add much value. Yes, it’s important to have strong technical SEO, but this isn’t what is going to improve your rank.
Learn how we approach SEO strategy differently
Example from Legal Client
The Donahey Law Firm is a client of ours. When I inherited their account, it was a lot to process.
- They had a physical location in Columbus
- They created 8 satellite offices throughout the state to improve rank in other markets
- They were blogging daily
- They were paying a company to acquire backlinks
- They had hundreds of practice area pages based on all of their satellite offices
Asking The Right Questions
The first question I asked was, “What percentage of revenue comes from a 60-mile radius around Columbus?” This is where all of their attorneys worked from, where they spent money on TV advertising and billboards. The answer was a shocking 75%.
I also asked them what areas of the practice drive the most revenue. Many personal injury law firms outsource medical malpractice cases, but their firm is one of the best in the state.
I told them that our goal should be to dominate their own backyard (aka Columbus) and, from the outset, to gain market share in medical malpractice.
Bold Action Items Based On Client Insight & Data
When I analyzed all of their keyword rankings, they weren’t ranking well for anything. Their firm was middle of the pack across the 8 Ohio markets. As the saying goes, the best place to bury a dead body is the second page of Google.
I made the following bold recommendations based on this insight:
- Close down all satellite offices
- This would save them thousands annually
- Remove 300 pages of satellite office content from the website
- Removal of location pages
- Removal of location-based practice area pages
- Optimize the website for Columbus
- Columbus is where they were making their money, and we wanted to double down on this
- We optimized each page for “Columbus-based firm serving all of Ohio,” allowing us to rank well in Columbus, provide transparency to where they were actually based, while letting people know they can serve the entire state
- Deleted all blog content
- A prominent legal marketing company was farming out content to non-experts that was duplicative of what they’d publish for other legal clients. The content was also thin in nature and didn’t provide much value.
- Discontinued the backlink building
- The legal marketing company was acquiring terrible backlinks for this client, which was doing more harm than good.
The Results
The client started ranking well in the local pack for coveted search terms pertaining to medical malpractice.
For the holy grail keyword, “Columbus Personal Injury Lawyer,” Donahey Law Firm achieved Top 3 rankings on Google.
Since starting with their firm, their visibility has more than quadrupled to a 40% in the Columbus market. Yes, we interviewed their attorneys for unique content and optimized the title tag and descriptions. The reason they’ve had such success is that we were able to look at everything holistically, understand their business objectives, and act accordingly.
Example from B2B Manufacturing Client
Jones Metal had an issue. They were getting too many unqualified leads and had subpar rankings. Their sales team was drained from having to speak to individuals, not businesses.
“Hydroforming Company” wasn’t ranking in the Top 5 on Google, and this was the core service they wanted to promote.
We knew the mission. I want to share with you our thought process on strategy
SEO Action Items Based On Client Insight & Data
- The client had hundreds of blogs, many of which weren’t getting much traffic and were competing with the site’s core service pages. We determined which ones to delete, enhance, redirect, or keep.
- For example, there was a blog post on the benefits of hydroforming with sheet aluminum. This was already covered on their core service page, so there was no need to keep this blog.
- Each of the service pages was hard to understand. It was written by a technical expert many years before we inherited the account.
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- The client informed us that decision makers don’t always have technical prowess. We interviewed their team of experts and ensured it was written in a way that would be easy for a CEO, an engineer, or an administrative assistant to understand [check out the hydroforming page to see the content quality].
- We created a more pillar-based strategy. For example, hydroforming was the pillar page, but after truly understanding the process, we created the following blog posts, which provide great internal linking opportunities.
- How to Know If Your Part Is a Good Candidate for Hydroforming
- Why Aerospace Engineers Specify Hydroforming for Complex Metal Components
- How Hydroforming Handles Exotic Materials Like Titanium and Inconel
- Their blog was on a subdomain and not associated with their primary URL. It’s imperative to have the synergy of one domain across all pages on your site.
- The client was creating superb video content. We started uploading the videos to YouTube and strategically picking the right pages to embed them on.
The Results
#1 organic positioning for their core keyword, “Hydroforming Company.”
Videos ranking for many informational queries, like “hydroforming.”
We achieved a 13% increase in overall visibility and, most importantly, drove more qualified leads for the client.
“2025 was our best year on record. Our lead quality was superb. It’s no coincidence that this aligns with when Media Captain revamped our website with an SEO strategy that emphasized quality.”
In Closing
Execution without strategy is meaningless. SEO is weird in the sense that you can spend hundreds of hours on SEO, but if the strategy is misguided, it can do more harm than good. For example, I see this all the time with lackluster blog strategies.
Whoever is working on your SEO, make sure they can do the following:
- Explain the strategy to you in layman’s terms
- Working on areas of your website that align with business objectives
- Report on wins they’ve actually accomplished based on their execution
If you’re not seeing an uptick in business, it could be time to evaluate your SEO strategy. Now you know the types of questions and strategies we’re deploying for our clients. It’s time to take this insight and run with it for your business.
Want to focus on the areas of SEO that actually drive results? Schedule a consultation with The Media Captain.
