Howard & Howard is a national leader in business law, with over 160 attorneys spanning 6 offices. What started as a small SEO engagement, blossomed into a comprehensive digital overhaul.
Keyword Research
Targeting prospective clients and lawyers.
88
13%
mergers & acquisitions
attorney
business litigation
corporate tax
increase in keywords on the first page of Google’s search results
automotive law
business law
securities litigation
88
13%
commercial real estate
hospitality
primary keyword targets
IP lawyer
Keyword Deliverables
Our research informed a site structure that helped increase visibility to practices and industries. Search behaviours in large corporate law consider an array of factors that dictated how thousands of keywords were mapped to onsite content.
Onsite SEO
Technically executed with a nod to brand voice
Onsite Deliverables
We built migration and onsite workbooks that included page-level meta data and a comprehensive redirect strategy. Our hand-written meta data was implemented on every page on the site. Schema was leveraged on specific data for full visibility of qualified classes.
Art Direction
Personality and purpose.
Typography
Big Caslon
Maison Neue
UX Design
Functional and fast in the boardroom.
Sitemap
We structured the experience to get users to their goals efficiently and fluidly. Knowing that many lawyers and prospective clients are multitasking on their mobile phones in meetings, we considered intelligent ways of producing intuitive journeys.
Wireframes
Traffic’s pixel-accurate high-fidelity wireframes helped establish layout, copy, and structural design. With the help of prototyping tools including InvisionApp, client approvals were collaborative and efficient.
Visual Design
Popping personality with the brand platform.
Design Comps
Traffic’s full color comps were focused on making the personality of each lawyer central to the site experience. We also focused on preserving a lot of the culture that came through in a discovery interviews.
Photography
Not your typical head & shoulders.
Photography
Being an attorney is a lot about relationships. So we aimed to capture the attorney's personalities opposed to your typical headshot that you see on so many law firm websites. We we able to bring in the entire team from all over the country over several months. With our photographer, Jacob Lewkow, we were able to capture the essence of their personality and still have it look polised and professional.
Development
A comprehensive MODX build.
Philosophy
Howard & Howard needed a website that would help them administer changes efficiently. We devised a back-end architecture that made onboarding a new client or practice area seamless. Our database design was focused on making attributable data shareable between attorneys, services, news and other informative content.
Tech Stack
We went right from Sketch to an HTML/CSS/JS static build. We built the highly functional back-end in MODX after reviewing multiple CMS options with the client. Almost every snippet of content is editable via the back-end architecture that was deployed.
Briefcase
We developed a briefcase feature as a PDF composition tool that allows users the ability to build a docket, much like a shopping cart, for easy content assembly and printing.
Attributable Content
All content is attributable to a lawyer, a practice area, an industry, or a media article. This made the process of developing integrated experiences possible.
MODX
The Howard & Howard website fully leverages MODX Revolution. This CMS was the most scalable given the goals of the project from a security, management, and licensing perspective.
14%
increase in organic search traffic after launch
17%
increase in site traffic
19%
increase in ranked keywords
