Case Study

MLF

Building a website from scratch and increasing visitors from 0 to 1.3 million with exceptional content marketing

Summary

Starting in May 2017 with Motorcycle Legal Foundation (MLF), we took this niche foundation from no website to 1.3 million annual website visitors in three years. Using a combination of SEO, content, and affiliate marketing strategies, we built the MLF website from scratch and transformed it into a value-packed resource for motorcyclists worldwide. This niche authority then provided the opportunity for the website to be used additionally as a case referral network where people can go to find the best legal representation for their accident-related cases.

 

Results
  • Annual Growth Rate of Sessions: 2287.12% (1,105,547 sessions increase)
  • Annual Growth Rate of Users: 2175.93% (1,324,697 increase)

The Client

Motorcycle Legal Foundation (MLF) is a legal resource for motorcyclists worldwide. The website now maintains a popular blog that aims to inform and educate viewers with gear reviews, how-tos and riding advice, insurance, and other motorcycle-related topics.

Industry:
Legal
Location:
USA
Website:
https://www.motorcyclelegalfoundation.com/

Objectives & Challenges

The client was looking to retire, and he wanted to be able to rely on MLF as a source of retirement income. The goals were therefore relatively straightforward: create a website, increase its organic traffic and drive more case leads to lawyers via MLF.

The challenge, however, was a bit more complicated. Legal content is generally quite dull, and valuable backlinks to legal websites are often in short supply. It soon became clear, to hit the goals we’d defined, that we had to build out a strategy that turned the website into a consistent supplier of valuable, appealing, and authentic content that motorcycle enthusiasts wanted to read.

The Solution

Our first port of call was to define the target audience and understand what they were talking about and what they needed. We joined motorcycle forums, did a large amount of research into the industry, and started brainstorming topics that could be both beneficial to this niche audience and realistic to rank well for in SEO.

“It was really hard for MLF to get links initially because nobody wants to link to a lawyer site. So, as a result, we had to somehow make this site appeal, feel authentic and really provide value to motorcycle riders.” – Spencer, CEO

We then built these ideas out into blog posts and ‘10x content’ – a technique we use to improve site traffic by creating a piece of content 10 times better than anything else available on the same topic. We continued to supplement this base consistently with ‘shoulder niche’ articles – topics that aren’t strictly ‘legal’, but can lead into the topic of legal issues such as motorcycle gear – and informative graphics.

One of these pieces was an article on lane splitting. The lane splitting rules are different from state to state, and to increase the value of the article we added a graphic to give readers an easy, at-a-glance overview. Since the rules change often, this article is routinely updated and serves as a reliable source of information for readers – bringing in a lot of traffic to the MLF site.

“We noticed a lot of conversation online around hand signals in forums, so we went to the National Highway Safety Institute assuming they had a graphic, but they didn’t. Seeing this gap, we went about creating one that could be shared in forums and across related niche websites. This was one of the first motorcycle hand signal graphics that was really comprehensive and well made, leading to it being shared thousands of times and increasing the site traffic to MLF dramatically.” – Dan, Senior Growth Advisor

Once these articles had created a reliable and credible foundation for the website, we extended into targeted affiliate marketing and started to switch more towards a transactional audience – specifically people looking for legal representation for their car-related accidents

The Outcome

With our strategies in place, we took the website from 12,702 users in 2017 to 1,118,249 users in 2020. This equates to a staggering annual growth rate of 2175.93%, which helped to drive a new volume in case leads for the website.

“I track the leads I get very carefully. There’s definitely been a significant increase in leads since we started working together. Search Nurture is much better to work with than others I’ve worked with in the past; they’re much more responsive and effective.” -Michael Padway, Owner MLF

The website continues to be updated with back-end optimizations to keep it performing according to new SEO standards, and we’ve worked with MLF to create their initial vision: a legal case referral platform.

  • Annual Sessions Growth Rate: 2287.12% (1,105,547 sessions increase)
  • Annual User Growth Rate: 2175.93% (1,324,697 increase)