We made organic search this firm's best source of cases.
When we took over SEO in July 2025 the firm held just 7 top-three rankings, its lowest point in two years. Twelve months later it holds 82, and first-page rankings went from 31 to 191.
Google rankings, July 2024 to July 2026
Semrush Organic Research, US database, monthly. The year before the engagement is included so the decline it started from is visible.
Measured, not guessed
Under a year of compounding organic growth.
Ranking figures are from Semrush Organic Research for the US database, read monthly. Lead volume is illustrative of a typical outcome and is not measured data.
The playbook
The challenge
The firm wasn't invisible. It already ranked in Google's top three for a handful of terms and held first-page spots for others. The problem was the gap: it was missing the core, high-intent keywords that actually sign cases, the "[city] personal injury lawyer" and "car accident attorney near me" searches where the real case volume lives.
So the highest-value searches went to competitors, and growth still leaned on paid ads and referrals with a rising cost per lead.
The approach
- Technical foundation: fixed crawl, indexation and Core Web Vitals issues holding pages back.
- Money-page build-out: practice-area and city landing pages built for high-intent local search.
- Local and map pack: rebuilt the Google Business Profile, reviews and citations to win the local 3-pack.
- Authority: earned relevant local links and digital-PR coverage.
- On-page and internal links: tightened around the keywords that convert.
The outcome
Rankings had been sliding for a year before the work started. July 2025 was the floor, and the recovery turned into growth from there.
The breakthrough came in early 2026: top-three rankings went from 19 in December to 82 by July, peaking at 104 in June.
We stopped worrying about the ad budget. The cases just started coming in.
Managing Partner · Personal-Injury Firm
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