Thiessen Law Firm

Brief

One of our longest-standing client relationships spanning 10 years, Thiessen Law Firm has evolved from a growing Houston criminal defense practice into one of the region's most recognized law firms. Through attentive and aggressive digital marketing across search, paid advertising, and social media, we've built an online presence that consistently delivers high-value criminal defense and personal injury cases — and matches the energy of their larger-than-life founder.

Our integrated approach combines aggressive SEO tactics, data-driven paid search campaigns, and breakthrough social media strategies that prioritize engaging and converting audiences across all platforms.

The challenges

Building authority in a hypercompetitive market

Law firm marketing is one of the most competitive digital landscapes out there. Both criminal defense and personal injury keywords are extremely hard to compete for organically, and are exorbitantly expensive in paid search. Thiessen Law Firm came to us with a lofty goal: they needed to establish themselves for high-intent search terms but keep cost-effective lead acquisition going, winning in the short-term while preparing themselves for long-term success.

Balancing credibility with engagement

The firm's social media presence was characterized by scattered, meme-heavy content across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, with minimal professional representation on LinkedIn. Without a cohesive brand voice, strategic direction, or clear business objectives, their existing content was attracting people who wanted to laugh rather than potential legal clients. 

Scaling across multiple revenue streams

With expertise spanning both criminal defense and personal injury law, TLF’s marketing strategies need to effectively target diverse case types and client needs while not diluting their overall targeting or message — all while maximizing return on their digital marketing spend across all channels.

Developing (actually) integrated strategies

Playing the long-game with SEO

Since the beginning, our SEO strategy has focused on establishing Thiessen Law Firm as the dominant law firm in Houston's criminal law market. To achieve this, we’ve spent years making technical improvements and regularly adjusting content marketing strategies to land him at the top.

After a website redesign, we structured his content to establish authority in Thiessen’s most critical lines of business, for which he now sits atop the SERPs. We did this with a commitment to regularly publishing high-quality content, combined with the following subgoals:

• Regular publication of insights, case studies, and educational resources

• Local SEO optimization for Houston-area searches

• Authority-building through thought leadership content

Thiessen has flourished as we enter the age of AI-driven search, because his content is written based on search intent, with real users in mind. Both algorithms and end users find Thiessen’s content useful, authoritative, and easy to navigate. 

Precision targeting with paid search

Our paid search approach has always emphasized strategic budget allocation across a number of platforms. We want to maximize reach and maintain profitability across many practice areas, without asking Thiessen to break the bank.

We developed platform-specific strategies that leveraged each channel's unique strengths:

• Google Ads campaigns targeting high-intent legal keywords

• Facebook advertising for brand awareness and retargeting

• Local Service Ads for immediate visibility in local legal searches

More importantly, continuous refinement and optimization based on data-driven insights have helped us sustain performance improvements:

• Continuous A/B testing of ad creative and landing pages

• Advanced audience targeting and retargeting campaigns

• Real-time bid management and budget optimization

A powerhouse gains a public on social media

TLF’s social media transformation required balancing their existing audience’s expectations for engagement with the need to attract serious legal clients through professional, credible content.

Our strategy centered on four key pillars designed to achieve sustainable growth without alienating existing audiences: 

1. Content evolution focused on a gradual transition from memes to relevant trends, maintaining humor while adding substantive value and strategically participating in trends that aligned with the legal industry and the TLF brand. 

2. Educational authority building positioned the firm as thought leaders through valuable legal insights, tips, and expertise-driven content that built credibility through educational reels. 

3. Multi-platform optimization ensured content was tailored for each platform's unique audience while maintaining consistent brand messaging and implementing platform-specific growth strategies. 

4. Community building emphasized authentic engagement with the existing community, attracting new followers through valuable content, and fostering trust and long-term relationships that would translate into business opportunities.

We implemented these changes gradually, but one massive change had to happen from the jump: in house asset capture. To maximize the amount of authentic content we could capture — and do so as cost-effectively as possible — we launched an in-house asset capture program that completely changed how we created video content for the firm.

The program operates on a concentrated production model where our team:

• Researches and identifies trending content opportunities aligned with the legal industry

• Develops scripts tailored to Thiessen Law Firm's brand voice and legal areas of expertise

• Executes an entire month's worth of video content in a single on-site production day

• Captures authentic, office-based footage that showcases the firm's professional environment and team dynamics

This approach helps ensure consistent content quality while minimizing disruption to the firm's daily operations, creating a scalable system for quick collaboration and ongoing social media success.

The results

SEO Performance

After years of building up TLF's content and fine-tuning their technical SEO, we've turned them into the go-to law firm for people searching for criminal attorneys in Houston. We continually grow their rankings by paying attention to what people need to know and how they’re searching it, producing not just vanity metrics, but incredibly profitable work that brings in qualified leads. 

Paid search performance

Our paid search strategy is all about being smart with budget allocation across different platforms. The secret is that we never set it and forget it. We're constantly testing new ad creative, adjusting bids in real-time, and refining who sees what ads based on what's actually working in the market.

Social media transformation

We’ve proved that you don’t have to mortgage your credibility or chase virality with your social content. You can create content people actually want to watch while still positioning yourself as a serious attorney, and you can do so without breaking the bank. Our in-house video shoots let us capture authentic content that shows off Mark's personality without back-breaking production costs, so that the feeds can stay lively and drive engagement year-round.

Our methodology: what makes it work?

We’re consistently able to deliver these results for Thiessen Law Firm because we treat SEO paid search, and social media as complementary, rather than competing, channels.

There are a lot of ways in which this integration of marketing channels informs our overall strategy:

• SEO keyword research drives non-trend social content topics

• Organic and paid search can be used to fill month-to-month gaps in the other service

• Organic social insights can inform paid-social targeting and spend

• Brand identity is reinforced across channels

• Paid and organic budget allocation can change based on channel performance