MissionCase study · SEO retainer
How we grew a law firm's monthly organic clicks from 2,000 to over 10,000
Eighteen months of a fundamentals-first SEO retainer took a multi-disciplinary law firm from 2,080 monthly organic clicks in Month 1 to 10,646 in Month 18. Organic impressions grew nearly nine-fold in the same period.
- 10,646From 2,080. +412%
- 332,253From 37,911. +776%
- 10,646From 3,124. +241%
- Month 18From Month 1. 18 months
01The client
Client snapshot
A multi-disciplinary law firm covering employment, commercial, family, property and estates law. The website was the firm's primary channel for new client enquiries. At Month 1 the site was ranking on a small number of practice-area queries but pulling roughly 2,000 organic clicks a month, well below what the size of the addressable search demand suggested was possible.
02Hazards
The problem
The site was under-optimised at almost every layer. Technical SEO issues meant a rising share of the site was being crawled inefficiently or not being indexed at all. Meta titles and descriptions were inconsistent across the site, internal linking was thin, and there was no explicit page architecture matching the firm's practice areas to the questions their prospective clients were actually typing into Google. The content that existed was competent legal copy, but nothing about the site's structure was helping Google understand which page belonged to which practice area, or why any of them should rank above the dozens of national law-firm sites competing for the same queries.
03The route
The plan: SEO fundamentals, run at pace, month after month
No exotic tactics, no growth hacks. Four workstreams running in parallel from Month 1 onwards, then compounding.
Technical SEO
Crawl and indexation cleaned up, Core Web Vitals fixed, redirect chains flattened, canonical drift corrected, sitemap and robots audited. The foundation-level work that lets everything else compound.
On-page SEO
Meta title and description discipline across every practice-area page, H1 and H2 hierarchy enforced, internal linking expanded to move authority to the pages we were building out, image alt text corrected. Not glamorous, but this is where the ranking movement happens.
Keyword research tied to practice areas
Every practice area of the firm mapped to a cluster of high-intent queries surfaced from Search Console data and structured keyword research. Each cluster ranked by search demand and by commercial intent, so the content programme knew which pages to build next and in what order.
Landing page architecture
Dedicated landing pages built out for the practice-area queries that had real demand. Each page written to be genuinely useful to a prospective client, structured for extraction (Google's answer surfaces reward this), and internally linked from related practice areas so the whole cluster lifted together.
04Telemetry
The trajectory
The graph tells the story cleaner than the copy could. Organic clicks lifted from around 2,000 a month at Month 1 to over 10,000 a month by Month 18. Impressions grew nearly nine-fold in the same period, meaning the site was being found on many more searches and clicking through at a healthier rate.
05Debrief
The takeaway
Two observations worth flagging. First, Month 4 shows a dip against the trend. That was the December holiday period, where organic legal-services demand quietly falls off a cliff and picks straight back up in January. Second, the sharp acceleration from Month 13 onwards is the compounding effect of a year of foundations landing: technical fixes stabilise the crawl, the landing-page programme starts earning position gains at scale, and Search Console feeds back with more click data that Google uses to reassess relevance. Compounding SEO always looks slow for the first six to nine months and then bends the curve. That is what this graph is a picture of.
