Want to prove SEO works? The Brazil Results are in!
Just two months before heading to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the Lawyers Associated Worldwide (LAW) annual conference we discussed with the host firm, Lacaz Martins et al. their interest in using the internet to seek referrals from US law firms.
Our initial investigation showed that they didn’t exist on the first ten pages of any geographic-, industry-, practice-, or sub-specialty-specific Google search we conducted. Great firm, no real internet presence.
Just 45 days before the conference, we undertook an aggressive search-engine optimization (SEO) campaign (discussed here) to elevate their US Google rankings before the LAW conference.
We had extremely limited content to work with, because their materials were almost entirely in Portuguese. Regardless, they have particular tax expertise and great people, and we were confident that we could show some real results. In the brief time available, we didn’t seek to optimize their website (which would have been our preference), so we opted to create a series of blogs, and use link-building, and other SEO tools
So? How’d it go? They think it went pretty darned well, obtaining a variety of number-one and other high-level organic Google search rankings for their preferred search terms, including searches relating to general, geographic, and practice-specific terms, as well as high-value sub-specialty queries. More specifically:A general search for “legal services sao paulo” yielded two of the top three links, above 3 million other results (after “Places”):
The Lacaz Martins firm has a particular expertise and leadership in tax law but hadn’t shown up in any Google searches relating to this practice.
Afterwards, a new practice-specific search for “sao paulo tax law” resulted in the top two rankings of over 20 million results:
We even did well for the general search for “Brazilian law firm,” which yielded a page-one result for our own blog: Of course, with the aggressive competition for all of these terms from other firms and organizations, if these rankings are not proactively maintained, they’ll decline quickly.
The next step, of course, is converting highly placed search results into hard leads, and the leads into paying clients. We were recently speaking with a small international firm that generates nearly one million Euros per year in new business alone just from these types of SEO efforts.
But that’s a discussion for another day, and another blog post.
