PNC Legal

The Challenge

PNC are dedicated professional negligence solicitors, specialising exclusively in resolving compensation claims against other professionals. They provide expert legal advice and representation to corporate entities and private individuals nationwide.

While PNC Legal’s reputation in the industry means frequent recommendations to clients from other professional advisors, they were eager to reach a wider network of prominent businesses and individuals who may benefit from the specialist expertise and breadth of knowledge of a professional negligence solicitor.

We immediately identified SEO as the ideal service to boost PNC’s organic reach and drive a consistent stream of new, relevant traffic to their site.

With huge potential for a high ROI due to the complex nature of resolving a claim, it was vital we developed a finely-tuned strategy that would target searchers in the research phase of their buyer journey, and demonstrate PNC’s credentials as specialists.

What We Did

After an initial website audit and thorough keyword research based on estimated monthly search volumes and competition levels for content ideation, we identified an excellent opportunity to create a series of new pages for the site that would form a strong foundation on which to base our SEO strategy.

We targeted 12 major business centres across the UK, including London, Manchester and Newcastle, optimising these new service pages for the key term ‘professional negligence solicitors’, plus the location.

We also carefully created and optimised content targeted at niche legal, finance and property sectors, as well as emerging areas including consultant engineers, insurance brokers and barristers, building content hubs around the key industry and service pages that were our focus.

We tailored the content to not only reflect the buyer persona of the target audience, but to demonstrate PNC Legal's wealth of experience and legal knowledge.This meant developing a consistent authoritative, educated, tone.

This was consolidated with the addition of testimonials, a locations hub and relevant FAQs to build trust and credibility, while highlighting expertise at a glance.

The layout of each page was optimised to maximise conversions and drive users to arrange an initial consultation via phone or form submission. This included adding headshots of each solicitor to foster trust, breaking up text with subheadings and a table of contents, improving page speed and strong internal linking with relevant anchor text for easy navigation and crawlability.

Throughout the process, we worked closely with owner and consultant solicitor Jonathan Watmough to ensure all copy remained compliant with the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and with Keystone Law, through which PNC’s solicitors practice exclusively.

Results

We transformed PNC Legal’s organic ranking performance, with excellent increases across target keywords that now sees them compete with (and frequently outrank) other major UK law firms.

Our SEO strategy has led to 27 new top-10 rankings, with 16 of these reaching the top five, in addition to 7 new #1 rankings. Most notably, PNC Legal now rank in the top #10 for their main keyword ‘professional negligence solicitors’, up 91 places.

Although an 18.7% increase in organic search visibility is impressive, it is the increase in conversions on site that truly showcases the power of a successful SEO strategy.

The average click-through-rate rose by 23% (YoY), with a significant increase in calls and form submissions via organic traffic.