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Over 45 key traffic driving keywords recovered back to page 1 positions
Over 1,200 backlinks manually analysed
90+ new keyword opportunities identified
Full audit and report turned around within 3 weeks
Irwin Mitchell are one of the UK’s largest and best known full service law firms. With a wide spectrum of legal service areas, they also have more focussed specialisms and some of these had become a priority for them away from the more mainstream service offering. We were tasked with working with Irwin Mitchell on one of these specialist areas after an unusual organic traffic dip occurred as a result of some key rankings being lost. We worked specifically on their sub website for Accidents Abroad, a personal injury website for accidents and injuries occurring whilst outside of the UK for either a holiday or work.
What We Did
As Irwin Mitchell have an existing in house Digital Marketing team, some diagnostic reports had already been run by the time we were appointed, and it was felt that the main issue was around a series of old backlinks that may be categorised as spam. It was believed that an algorithmic link penalty may have been applied to cause the rankings decrease, as there were no manual penalty notifications being flagged in Google Search Console, although the SEO team were unsure as to the exact cause. We initially set about reviewing the existing diagnostic reports, and found a few things that had not yet been reviewed. The issues turned out to be two fold, with a duplicate content issue that had been previously undetected also in existence alongside the poor link profile. Whilst the links would undoubtedly cause issues in the future, the more immediate issue was the duplicate content problem, which was a new issue caused by some recent website changes, and this, being more recent than the link profile issues, was more likely to be the cause of such a sudden drop.
We manually reviewed the metrics for all backlinks pointing to the website, including relevancy and authority factors, and compiled them into a report which found that the primary issue was around relevancy. The client was surprised to find out that spammy backlinks, whilst not positive, are now largely ignored by Google rather than causing direct problems. We explained that this is indeed the case, and as there had been no manual penalty applied we recommended that instead of using the outdated and largely redundant Disavow tool we put in place an ongoing strategy to build more relevant backlinks to recover the backlink profile over time. This was combined with the more pressing issue of resolving the duplicate content issue, which turned out to be the immediate problem with rankings. Once this was resolved and the relevant canonical tags implemented correctly, the rankings fully recovered within a matter of weeks.
During the process of compiling our report, we also noticed that a number of Irwin Mitchell’s competitors for Accidents Abroad had broadened out their websites to include more specific terms that still had good search volumes, especially when the numbers for all were combined. We decided to include some complimentary keyword research within our report, and provided these to the client as added value for them moving forward.