What Does Crisp & Co Need to Do to be Seen as One of London’s Top Family Law Firms?

Our in-depth Crisp & Co website analysis offers up some unique insight. We analysed their website and looked at their competitors to help show ways in which they could improve. And, how utilising some easy strategies could help them to become one of London’s top family law firms.

From February 2020 to June 2020, Crisp & Co website traffic increased from 17600 website visits to 31200 website visits.

This was an increase of 77%.

However, in June 2020, their traffic dropped 83% to 5000 website visits.

A quick side note:

This report is based solely on the period of February 2020 to July 2020. As such it is important to state that by August 2020, Crisp & Co had regained some of their traffic.

So, this looks like a temporary blip in traffic.

As such, this report will not focus on the origin or cause of this sudden yet temporary drop in traffic.

In June 2020, Crisp & Co had 77 keywords that increased their rankings, placing them in the Top 3 search positions.

For example, before June 2020, Crisp & Co ranked 7th for the keyword “family law solicitors london”.

In June 2020, they ranked 2nd.

Over the next 2 months, that ranking slipped to 3rd and then to 6th.

In this article, we will analyse Crisp & Co’s website and take a closer look at their online performance.

As such, we will cover the following areas:

Competitive Landscape

We will examine Crisp & Co’s market and see how companies in the industry grow.  We’ll also identify the main companies that are worth paying attention to. You can also check out our in-depth legal services competitor analysis report.

Website Analysis

By conducting a detailed website analysis, we’ll evaluate Crisp & Co’s on-page SEO and conduct a keyword analysis.

Content Audit

The purpose of the content audit is to understand the current state of the Crisp & Co. This will enable us to understand how they can potentially leverage existing content to improve their SEO.

Backlinks Analysis

We’ll take a look at the external links pointing to Crisp & Co’s website.  In addition, we’ll consider the amount and the quality of these backlinks. This will help give us a better understanding of their website’s ability to rank well in search engine results. 

First, we will provide a brief overview of Crisp & Co.

Visit the website: crispandco.com

Crisp & Co are experts in family law and they were founded in 1996.

The firm has 14 locations in London:

•  Angel
•  Canary Wharf
•  Putney
•  Guildford
•  Kingston upon Thames
•  The City
•  Covent Garden
•  Wimbledon
•  Camden
•  Richmond
•  Chelsea
•  Hammersmith
•  Reigate
•  Southwark

Crisp & Co are part of the Legal Services Industry.

“The UK legal services market…was valued at an estimated 37 billion in 2019, increasing by 4.6% at current prices on the 2018 market value.” – United Kingdom Legal Services Industry Report, 2020

Crisp & Co specialise in ‘Family Law’ and this sector experienced steady growth. Even though divorce numbers are expected to continue to fall – as they did throughout 2019.

This steady growth is attributed to other continual legal work. For instance, continued work on same-sex marriages and the Children’s Act. Alongside, domestic violence work and other international family law cases.

In this section we will take a look at the growth of Crisp & Co’s industry competitors and organic competitors.

First up, Crisp & Co’s industry competitors.

Crisp & Co’s industry competitor traffic was a total 10.6 million website visits in July 2020.  

Despite this, Crisp & Co received less than 0.05% of that traffic.

Between February and July 2020, overall industry competitor market traffic had increased slightly by almost 4%.

During the same period, Crisp & Co’s share of market traffic increased from 17600 visits to 31200 visits in June.

However, post June 2020, Crisp & Co’s traffic was reduced by 73% to 5000 visits.

Crisp & Co’s main industry competitor is lawsociety.org.uk who has an 8.15% market traffic share.

It is important to note that lawsociety.org.uk is not a legal services firm. They are “the independent professional body for solicitors in England and Wales.”

slatergordon.co.uk has the second biggest share of industry market traffic at 5.62%.

“Slater and Gordon Lawyers is one of the UK’s largest and well known law firms with offices in a number of locations throughout England, Scotland and Wales”.

They have offices in the following locations:

•  Birmingham
•  Cambridge
•  Cardiff
•  Edinburgh
•  Liverpool Central
•  London
•  Manchester
•  Watford

Crisp & Co’s main industry competitor, lawsociety.org.uk, was an ‘established player’ in July 2019. It had a fairly steady flow of consistent traffic.  

However, during that same period, Crisp & Co were considered a ‘game changer’. This is because whilst their website traffic was relatively low, their growth rate exceeded the market average. 

At this period, Crisp & Co could have become either:

•  Market leaders and established players;
•  Or niche players (if their source of traffic growth dried up)

Unfortunately for Crisp & Co, it was the latter. A year later, they became a ‘niche player’. In addition to this, their traffic volume dropped from 10300 to just 5000. 

In July 2020, Crisp & Co’s organic competitor traffic had a combined total of 2.1 million website visits.  

Crisp & Co received 0.24% of that traffic.

Between February and July 2020, while overall organic competitor market traffic increased by 14%, Crisp & Co’s traffic volume decreased.

Subsequently, this was a 76% decrease, going from 17600 to 5000. 

Crisp & Co’s main organic competitor is slatergordon.co.uk with a 28.99% share of organic competitor market traffic.

Remember, Slater and Gordon Lawyers are also Crisp & Co’s second largest industry competitor. They have a 5.62% share of industry competitor market traffic.

co-oplegalservices.co.uk has the second largest share of organic market traffic at 19.20%.

“Co-op Legal Services has over 600 staff working in different businesses with offices in Manchester, Bristol, Stratford-upon-Avon, Sheffield and London”.

They claim to be “the largest provider of Probate and Estate administration services in England and Wales, trusted to deal with over £1.3 billion in Estates annually”.

In July 2019, both of Crisp & Co’s main organic competitors; slatergordon.co.uk and co-oplegalservices.co.uk, were ‘established players’. Each with steady flows of traffic that were neither stagnant or decreasing.

One year later, as Crisp & Co were losing over half of their traffic, both of their top competitors (industry and organic) became market leaders.

Unlike Crisp & Co, neither slatergordon.co.uk or co-oplegalservices.co.uk specialise solely in family law. 

So…what is Crisp & Co doing (or not doing)? 

What is preventing them as being seen as one of London’s number one family law firms?

Let’s begin to answer this question by taking a closer look at their website.

First, we’ll delve into their overall site health.

The Crisp & Co website is relatively healthy. 

It does not have a large number of problems. However, fixing the errors and warnings will ensure that the website is healthier. And as such, better optimised for search engines and much more user-friendly. 

Even though the website is relatively healthy, we did come across a particularly troublesome error.

This is a DNS resolution error that leads to the following page.

This DNS resolution error is one of the main issues we found on Crisp & Co’s website, crispandco.com.

This is a server-side issue that would need to be resolved by Crisp & Co’s web host. It requires technical support to investigate and fix the issue.

Let’s move on to look at Crisp and Co’s On-Page SEO.

Although Crisp & Co are solicitors who specialise in family law, their meta information doesn’t reflect this.

In fact, the Page Title and Meta Description for Crisp & Co’s homepage states that they are “London divorce solicitors”.

While they do include “Family Law London” in their description, it isn’t as specific as “family law solicitors london”. Which is the keyword they were ranking in 2nd position for in June 2020.

More to the point, Crisp & Co specialise in 12 family law services – divorce is just one of them.

Currently, Crisp & Co are missing opportunities by not promoting any of these specialisations to their potential clients or Google.

However, there are only three headings on the homepage. None of these include any of the names of their services. And worse still, none feature the word ‘solicitors’, ‘London’ or the phrase ‘family law’.

All in all, Crisp & Co’s website has a good overall design.

However, there are a number of improvements needed to get the website in front of Crisp & Co’s target audience.

Next, let’s analyse the keywords that the Crisp & Co website currently ranks for. That way we can grasp what needs to be improved.

In the UK, Crisp & Co get the majority of traffic (13.44%) from searchers using the keyword: “divorce rate uk”.

This keyword has an estimated 4400 monthly searches.

The traffic attracted to the website by this keyword is directed to a page called “Divorce Statistics”. The page contains an infographic and a 1267 word article about it.

This page mentions the word divorce of 53 times.

In fact, 914 of the website’s 2300 keywords (39%) contain the word “divorce”.

To put his in greater context, let’s analyse Crisp & Co’s service keywords based on the services shown in their menu:

Here are some of those services:

•  Divorce
•  Children
•  Family Law
•  Cohabitation
•  Domestic Violence
•  International Divorce
•  LGBTQIA Family Law
•  Mediation
•  Pre-Nups

When we check the website for each of these words we are able to find out the number of related keywords.

As we can see, the service keyword “divorce” has the highest percentage of related keywords.

No other service keyword comes close.

Subsequently, if we were to go solely by this data, we might infer that the business specialises mainly in divorce.

This explains the “welcome headline” we saw on the homepage:

Perhaps Crisp & Co have always been divorce solicitors, but have branched out into other areas of family law.  

The homepage does a good job of presenting all their services. However, as a whole, the website does not.

Let’s move on and have a look at the actual content.

The Crisp & Co website has 503 pages.

Despite this, only 21% of those pages (106 pages) rank in Google’s Top 100 organic search results.

Here are the top 15 pages on the Crisp & Co website:

Overall these 15 pages account for 89% of the entire Crisp & Co website traffic.

46% of the top 15 pages are service pages. For instance, once of these is their Divorce Service page.

This page receives the largest percentage of the website’s traffic.

It has 1489 words and the hero section houses the h1 page title. It also includes the page intro copy, which is in a paragraph tag.

This service page has three main conversion systems at the bottom of the page. This is in addition to the phone number and ‘contact us’ links in the header. Here they are highlighted below:

1.  “How can we help” contact form (also seen in the page’s hero section)
2.  Link to Crisp & Co’s location map
3.  A clickable phone number

These are all commercial intent actions or primary call-to-actions (CTAs).

Yet, these are only attractive to people who are looking to make immediate or purchases. As such, they make up a very small percentage of website visitors.

Unfortunately, Crisp & Co’s service pages do not have any secondary call-to-actions for informational seekers.

Similarly to most business websites, crispandco.com has been designed with a heavy focus on people visiting with high commercial intent.

However, it is important to understand the differences between the four  categories of search intent:

1.  Informational – The searcher is looking for information
2.  Navigational – The searcher is looking for a specific website
3.  Transactional – The searcher is looking to make a purchase
4.  Commercial investigation – The searcher is in the market for a specific product or service but has yet to make a final decision on which solution is right for them

However, understanding the differences between these will help Crisp & Co focus on the right kind of content.

Increased content optimisation will satisfy specific searchers needs. It will also help Crisp & Co to incorporate the most suitable next steps. This includes adding primary and secondary call-to-actions in each piece of content. 

For example, blog posts are perfect for providing regular content that provides answers to simple questions. They can also provide more in-depth answers.

In addition to this, blog posts are perfect for lead generation. This is because extra information can be offered in return for the site visitors giving up their contact details.

Let’s take a look at Crisp & Co’s current blogging strategy.

Firstly, Crisp & Co’s blog has multiple names. It is referred to as “Latest News”, “Legal news” or simply “News”. This is confusing to potential site visitors.

Secondly, 62 of the Crisp & Co website pages that rank in Google are blog pages.

Yet, only 25 of these posts receive any traffic.

Overall, those 25 blog posts account for 21% of the website’s traffic.

The first post was published in November 2018. With the last post published in August 2020 (at time of writing).

The most popular blog post is called 10 Common Misconceptions About Adultery and Divorce, published in October 2019.

Similarly to Crisp & Co’s service pages, their blog posts are missing clear or valuable call-to-actions.

For example, in the image above:

1.  The “online enquiry form” link takes you to a page with exactly the same form as the one you can see on the page
2.  This “giving us a call” link doesn’t open a phone dialer – it leads to a locations page listing their offices

Yet, the clearest, most visible user-friendly option is the unclickable phone number in their header. This is likely to cause site visitors to leave, increasing the pages bounce rate.

Finally, let’s analyse the amount and quality of Crisp & Co’s backlinks. This will help give us a better understanding of the sites ability to rank well in search engine results. 

In September 2020, at the time of this analysis, Crisp & Co had 2100 backlinks from 354 referring domains. 

This pales in comparison to their top industry and organic competitors who are seeing more backlinking success.

Due to this, Crisp & Co have never beat their June 2019 performance best of 3702 backlinks.

Since June 2019, Crisp & Co have lost 43% of their backlinks.

Not to mention, they went from 3702 backlinks to 2100 backlinks in July 2020 alone.

As such, it’s obvious that Crisp & Co need to acquire more backlinks to keep up with their competition.

But what is the quality of their existing backlinks?

Let’s take a look.

When we look closely at the 354 referring domains of Crisp & Co’s 2100 backlinks, things click into place. The quality of their backlinks is not ideal. This is because 35% of these domains have an Authority Score of less than 20.

These domains are providing extremely low-quality backlinks.

And, only 50 out of the 354 referring domains (14% of all referring domains) have an authority score above 50.

Putting this into context, let’s compare Crisp & Co with their top organic competitor: slatergordon.co.uk.

Clearly, Slater and Gordon is miles ahead of Crisp & Co website when it comes to quality backlinks. With a little work building a stronger backlink profile, Crisp & Co may just be able to catch up. 

However, this is just one of our suggestions.

In conclusion, in order for Crisp & Co website to increase visibility on Google they need to reassess their strategy. To be seen as one of London’s top family law firm there are some key areas they could work on.

However, we think that the priority areas that require attention are conversion optimisation, SEO optimised content and backlinking. Here’s what we would suggest:

1.  Optimise all pages for conversions (commercial and informational conversions)
2.  Create more regular keyword optimised content
3.  Acquire more high-quality backlinks
4.  Create content silos for each service category to improve Google’s understanding of the website
5.  Create conversion optimised landing pages for selling their services

With just a little bit of work on just one or two of these areas, Crisp & Co should start to see significant improvement to their key metrics.

In addition, this would start to help them move towards a site which is much clearer. And, most importantly one which has the ability to turn traffic into sales.

From there, they could focus on other areas such as content marketing, paid media and social media. Aligning them all towards a common goal will provide Crisp & Co with a robust marketing strategy that works.

We work with hundreds of companies who are looking to understand how to grow their businesses online.

Our detailed website analysis and marketing strategies provide practical and logical roadmaps for businesses. We help companies to understand where they are currently, what growth is possible and how to get there.

We want to provide companies with focused growth. To ensure they have marketing campaigns which are completely aligned to their goals.

If you would like to have an obligation-free chat about your company, then submit your details for a personalised competitor report or get in touch.