Josh Maness

Case Study

Personal Injury & Civil Litigation Lawyer
✓ DFY Digital Marketing ✓ Revenue-Driven Marketing

Client Overview

  • Name: Josh Maness, Attorney at Law

  • Industry: Legal Services – Personal Injury & Civil Litigation

  • Website: www.joshmaness.com

  • Location: Waskom, TX

Josh Maness is a respected attorney specializing in personal injury, toxic torts, and civil litigation. While based in Waskom, Texas, his primary goal was to dominate the legal search space in the much larger and more competitive Marshall and Harrison County areas. Despite not having a physical Google Business Profile in Marshall, the goal was clear: establish a top-ranking, high-converting presence in the region through advanced SEO.

Business Goals

Resilient Roofing Ltd primary goals were to:

  • Generate Organic Leads: Increase organic visibility and lead generation in Marshall, TX and across Harrison County

  • Improve Rankings: Improve keyword rankings for high-intent legal terms like “personal injury lawyer,” “toxic tort attorney,” and “truck accident lawyer”

  • Convert Traffic: Convert targeted traffic into qualified legal inquiries

  • Outperform Competition: Outperform better-positioned local competitors with physical offices in Marshall

Challenges

Josh Maness faced several SEO challenges at the start of the engagement

  • Under-optimized Google Business Profile: His Google Business Profile was located in Waskom, not Marshall, which limited local pack exposure

  • Poor Keyword Rankings: Many valuable keywords were either not ranking or not being tracked, despite appearing in GSC data

  • Out Ranked By Competition: He was outranked by law firms with stronger historical SEO footprints in Marshall

  • Low Domain Authority: Domain authority and domain rating were extremely low, limiting trust from search engines

Kato360's SEO Strategy

Localized Technical & On-Page SEO

We built and optimized location-specific service pages such as:

  • /marshall-texas-toxic-tort-lawyer/

  • /personal-injury-attorney-marshall-tx/

  • /auto-truck-accidents-attorney-in-marshall-tx/

We implemented schema markup, improved internal linking, optimized headers and metadata, and ensured clean, SEO-friendly URL structures. Core Web Vitals and mobile usability were improved to pass technical audits and enhance UX signals.

Content Development

We created long-form, conversion-focused landing pages and blog content tailored to personal injury, toxic torts, truck accidents, and oilfield injuries. These assets targeted both transactional and informational queries — positioning Josh as a topical authority.

Examples include:

  • “Unraveling the Legal Maze of Toxic Torts in Marshall”

  • “Why You Need a Personal Injury Attorney in Harrison County”

Each piece was optimized for semantic relevance, keyword intent, and internal SEO alignment.

GSC Optimization & Data Mining

We analyzed Google Search Console (GSC) to surface high-value, non-tracked keywords like “injury lawyer Texas,” “family lawyers near me,” and “top rated medical malpractice lawyer.” These were then integrated into copy, meta tags, and internal linking.

These keywords consistently showed average rankings of 1.0–1.2 — a huge hidden opportunity that was captured and expanded upon.

Competitive Benchmarking

Through comparison with local competitors, we identified key ranking and authority gaps. Despite most competitors having offices in Marshall, Josh quickly outpaced them in Top 5 rankings, keyword footprint, and backlink strength.

Authority Building: Domain Rating and Domain Authority

Domain Rating (DR), tracked via Ahrefs, increased from 0.8 to 46. DR is a metric that reflects the strength of a website’s backlink profile and its trustworthiness compared to others in Ahrefs’ index. A higher DR indicates greater SEO potential, link equity, and ability to rank competitively.

Domain Authority (DA), tracked by Moz, rose from 18 to 38. DA is a predictive score for how well a domain is likely to perform in search results. These increases were achieved through high-quality backlinks from legal and local domains, niche edits, and digital PR — without spammy tactics.

Results & Performance Highlights

Keyword Rankings and Local Search Dominance

  • “toxic tort lawyer near me” moved from “No data” to #1

  • “personal injury attorney marshall tx” rose to #5

  • “marshall truck accident attorney” entered the Top 5

  • “injury lawyer” — a national keyword with 49,500 monthly searches — ranked as high as #10

Despite being based in Waskom, Josh Maness ranked in the top 3 for high-converting legal keywords across Marshall and Harrison County. This showcases the power of well-structured SEO over proximity-based competition.

GSC Traffic Signals

Multiple pages including:

  • /personal-injury-attorney-marshall-tx/

  • /josh-maness-your-trusted-injury-attorney-in-marshall-texas/

    averaged positions of 1.0 to 2.0 in GSC over time.

Clicks were limited only by query volume, not position — indicating total SERP ownership where visibility existed.

Competitor Benchmarking

Josh Maness’s site outperformed competitors across all tracked metrics:

Top 5 Rankings: 22 (vs. 7 competitor average)

Keywords Tracked: 51

Avg Position: 31–40 (competitors: 34–59)

Backlinks: 40

Referring Domains: 27

Pages Indexed: 101

He held over 3× the number of Top 5 positions, with more consistent performance across multiple location-specific search engines, including Waskom, Marshall, and broader Texas results.

Through a strategic mix of technical SEO, content targeting, authority building, and local optimization, Kato360 helped Josh Maness break through the limitations of location-based SEO.

His Google Business Profile may be based in Waskom, but his digital footprint dominates Marshall and Harrison County across dozens of competitive legal queries.

This case study demonstrates that smart SEO can outperform physical location — and drive real legal business results through organic visibility and authority.

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Additional Visual Insights

DA Before
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DA Before

DA After
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DA After

DR Before
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DR Before

DR After
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DR After

Rankings: Marshall, TX
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Rankings: Marshall, TX

Rankings: Harrison County
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Rankings: Harrison County

These rankings also shows Google Map rankings (small location pins in the screenshot) (as this is where the client has a physical location, even though not a focus of the campaign)

Rankings: Waskom, TX
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Rankings: Waskom, TX

Competitors
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Competitors

GA4 (1st 2 Quarters in 2025)
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GA4 (1st 2 Quarters in 2025)

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