About the Client
Crouse Erickson is a five-attorney (and growing) family law firm in Spokane County, Washington. The firm is the largest, exclusively family law firm in the county.
A Note From the Client
“We are getting good contacts…I would say though that we are getting 1-2 good cases per week off of our website/Google leads on average.
We are totally full caseload-wise. The three primary litigators…are actually over-capacity…it is a good problem to have though. We have hired another attorney that starts in August…He will be excellent. We are also recruiting another attorney…Our current attorneys are happy about this as they have all gotten substantial raises due to the caseload volume they are handling.”
– David J. Crouse, Founding Partner
Before
After
The Challenge
In 2016, David Crouse was growing his law firm, adding and training new attorneys, and had a goal to build the largest exclusively family law focused law firm in Spokane County.
He realized that his existing brand and website did not reflect the firm that he was building. Furthermore, he was frustrated that his digital presence was not really generating any new business to his firm. He knew that if he was to grow his firm, he needed to supplement his referral business with new cases from people in Spokane County looking for a family law firm online.
When he hired GNGF, his website was outdated and he had almost no digital presence besides his website.
David wanted to see new clients come from the internet so he could feel confident that if he began hiring more attorneys and support staff, there would be consistent business to support the additional salaries.
The Solution
Marketing Strategy:
Our process, the GNGF Way, is to focus on a firm’s business goals, build a measurement baseline, and then build a yearly marketing strategy to help the law firm reach their business goals. As Crouse Erickson has been a client with GNGF for over five years, we have built multiple marketing strategies for their firm. Their goals and business have grown with consistent, quality leads flowing in from the internet combined with their amazing client service that has led to dozens of positive online reviews.
Our Strategic Account Manager identified that the first year had to incorporate a strategy to overhaul the firm’s brand identity and then focus on the foundation of a local search and search engine optimization traffic strategy.
As the firm continued to hit their goals, the GNGF team continued to work with them adapting their marketing strategy each year. For example, as the marketing tactics yielded more new clients, David Crouse, continued to make the tough, but smart business decision to reinvest some of the new profits into more growth.
With the additional investments and growth goals, our Strategic Account Manager built a marketing strategy that included more quality content to grow the firm’s search visibility and a paid advertising strategy with both Google and Microsoft Ads.
With the amazing team and culture that David Crouse has built combined with the consistent leads and revenue from their marketing strategies, the firm is now working with us to build marketing strategies to help them grow their footprint across multiple cities and states.
Marketing Tactics:
Branding / Brand Platform – The firm’s branding did not reflect the focus and expertise of the firm they were building. We started with a deep Branding exercise culminating in a Brand Platform that could drive design, content, and even be shared with offline advertising vendors. During this branding process, we helped the firm successfully change its name from “David J. Crouse & Associates” to “Crouse Erickson” as well.
Website Design and Development – As they were overhauling their brand, David Crouse also opted for custom design and development of their website, which we built on the WordPress framework for flexibility and portability. The new website is a multi-site, allowing for the firm to strategically grow into new geographic markets easily.
Local Google My Business / “Google Maps Pack” Optimization – In addition to supporting branded searches due to the strong referral business Crouse was receiving, we wanted them to dominate the local searches/maps pack in their area for all family law related searches.
Traditional Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Any family law-related searches around Spokane County that didn’t result in a “map pack” we wanted content from Crouse Erickson to appear in the page 1 search results.
Targeted Local Backlinks with a Local Giving Campaign – Because Crouse Erickson had a very weak digital presence when we started working with them, we needed to support the SEO efforts with local links. A scholarship campaign was used to generate PR and gain links from local schools and the community.
Content Marketing – The firm’s website had very little content and what they had was very thin. We built a content strategy to not only help support the search engine optimization efforts, but to match the interests, needs, and fears of their perfect target client to increase the number of conversions from the people that visit the site who take an action to contact his firm.
Paid Advertising (Google and Microsoft Ads) – After building a strong foundation, the firm wanted to invest to grow leads faster. We utilized paid advertising to increase search visibility and grow leads.
The Results
The average ranking for local search keywords grew from “not even being ranked in the first few pages of Google” to consistently appearing in Top 3 rankings for family law related keywords. Google Search Console shows a huge growth from under 500 impressions per month to over 4,000 – a growth of over 700%.
This also resulted in organic traffic to the website growing by over 775%. But growth in vanity metrics like impressions and traffic do not matter if they are not turning into quality leads. Increased visibility and traffic has resulted in a growth of 135% in consistent monthly leads from the firm’s organic digital presence.
Local Search / Google My Business
The firm went from not existing on page 1 to dominating searches in Spokane County, WA. In fact, taking the time for the first few months to build the local search foundation led to page 1 map rankings in only about six months, much faster than we expected for how far back in the rankings they started.
The firm is now consistently ranking in the top 3 results throughout the entire county.
For example, here’s our client’s ranking for “divorce attorney” with the center of the map being our client’s office location.
Results
Branding / Brand Platform – Crouse Erickson now has a strong Brand Platform that describes, amongst other things, their perfect target client and what makes them unique. This exercise included interviews with their entire team and a competitive analysis. Their brand platform is more than just colors and logos, we could dig into the fancy brand marketing terms like USP, personas, voice, tone, and experience but essentially it describes the specific way the firm is able to meet the needs of its prospective clients better and different than the competition. Taking the time to get this right in the beginning resulted in better conversion optimized copywriting and design which we feel has led to the higher than average conversion rates on their website. In fact, the Brand Platform, almost four years old now, is still often referred to when writing content and designing online and offline assets.
Custom WordPress Website – Crouse Erickson now has an award-winning website (2022 Lawyerist Top 10 Legal Websites) that we built completely from scratch to perfectly match the firm’s needs today and also in the future. With our multi-site framework, the firm currently serves clients in multiple states (Washington and Idaho) and can expand to new markets much easier than ever before.
Content Marketing – We monitored the page level website analytics, used content research tools, and focused on the prospects journey through Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action to optimize the main pillars of content and the top converting pages. As we discuss at length in our book, Divorce in Washington, we focus on using a ‘Customer Advocacy’ approach to show the consumer that Crouse Erickson truly understands their issues and emotions. Our ‘Customer Advocacy’ approach reinforces the fact that Crouse Erickson is the firm they can trust to help them.
While we know that is a lot of fancy marketing-speak, what you really need to know is that we saw the number of people who visited the website then reached out directly to the firm (via a phone call or consultation request form) increase from a less than 2% conversion to more than 13% conversion rate – to explain why that is exciting – typically, as SEO starts working and a website ranks on more and more keywords, traffic to a website grows and some can be lower quality traffic. As SEO really starts driving traffic many websites will even see a slightly lower conversion rate. By focusing on the right content for the right traffic, we were able to increase conversion rate by more than 10%. To put this into perspective, according to the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark report, the median conversion rate for Legal websites is 4.4%. Furthermore, the expanded quality content led to being ranked in Google searches for more and more keywords each year.
Paid Advertising (Google and Microsoft Ads) – The firm has had tremendous success with their paid advertising. Paid Advertising has generated such a positive ROI that Crouse Erickson has reinvested much of that return back into spending on their paid advertising. This tactic has grown from nothing to driving over 500 visits to the website each month. These new visits have resulted in hundreds of new leads to the firm.
The Correct Strategy = More Revenue
Crouse Erickson has made great business decisions around hiring, process, and training over the past five years that they have worked with us. They have also made the tough but sound decision to take a percent of the net profits from their growth and reinvest that back into more marketing. They are positioned well to grow into the new markets they are looking to serve in the years ahead. While we all love a beautiful chart showing organic traffic growing by 500%, what really matters is the impact that increased visibility has on revenue.
Increasing revenue (and profit) is what really matters to our clients and our team. We rely on the data to show us that we’re on the right track along the way, but it is always great to see when our work positively impacts the firms that we work with every day.
Are You Ready to Grow Your Firm?
Contact us today to see how we can create a marketing strategy that will grow your firm this year. We’re looking forward to featuring your firm in a future case study!