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The Lawyer's Guide to Turning Clicks Into Clients · by Braden Pollock
An Internal SEO Audit Case Study
By Darbi Bodie, Managing Director, Legal Brand Marketing
We audited a website we genuinely believed was doing fine. What we found became a nine-month strategy that transformed our organic visibility — and our business.
Request Your Free SEO AuditThe Results After 9 Months
Legal Brand Marketing's website was performing well by most SEO standards. We had a strong domain, consistent organic visibility, and years of content supporting our brand.
But we were also spending thousands of dollars on our own branded paid search without seeing the conversion performance we expected.
Rather than simply spending more, we decided to look inward. We conducted an internal SEO audit on a site we genuinely believed was doing fine.
What we found surprised us.
Our SEO foundation was solid, but the audit uncovered a handful of legacy, human-error issues that had accumulated over the years. More importantly, it exposed opportunities we had not fully appreciated: keywords sitting just outside the top 10, existing pages that could perform better with focused optimization, and entire groups of relevant keywords we had not intentionally targeted.
We turned those findings into a nine-month SEO strategy that combined technical fixes and existing-page optimization with an aggressive but structured content schedule of five new posts per week.
The results included
The biggest lesson was not that our SEO had been bad. It was that "doing fine" and reaching your organic potential are two very different things.
Our decision to audit our own SEO did not start because traffic had collapsed or rankings disappeared.
It started with paid search.
We were spending thousands of dollars on our own branded search terms, yet those campaigns were not converting at a level that justified simply continuing to increase the budget.
That raised a bigger question:
Were we paying to capture demand that our website should have been capturing organically?
Neil Patel has written about the enormous amount of advertising spend businesses waste each year and the importance of looking beyond simply putting more money into sponsored advertising.
For us, that meant taking a closer look at an asset we already owned: our website. We had an SEO strategy. We were producing content. We ranked for relevant terms. Nothing about the site suggested an SEO emergency.
We expected the audit to validate much of what we were already doing. It did. But it also showed us just how much opportunity was hiding beneath the surface.
The audit confirmed our SEO foundation was solid, while uncovering a handful of legacy, human-error issues and several high-impact growth opportunities that were not immediately visible without a deeper review.
None of the issues we uncovered were catastrophic, which is precisely why they were easy to overlook.
The audit surfaced a small number of legacy issues, largely the result of routine updates and human error over time, that did not break performance but quietly limited scalability. These included:
Individually, these issues were subtle. Collectively, they placed a ceiling on growth that was not obvious without an intentional audit.
One of the most valuable findings was how many keywords were already ranking just outside the top 10. We were not starting from zero. Google already understood our relevance. What we had not done consistently was reinforce it.
The audit identified:
This became an important part of our strategy: near-page optimization.
The audit also showed that our existing content could work harder for us. Some pages needed refinement. In other areas, we needed additional content to properly support core topics and keyword themes.
The audit highlighted pages that:
That led to a dual approach. We strengthened and clarified existing pages where appropriate while creating new supporting content where our coverage was thin or incomplete. Instead of choosing between optimization and content production, we did both intentionally.
Beyond improving what we already had, the audit revealed relevant keywords we were not targeting at all. Not because those searches were unimportant, but because they had never been intentionally mapped into our content strategy.
Once we could see those gaps, they stopped being missed opportunities and became part of the roadmap.
This gave our content team clearer direction about what to publish, why we were publishing it, which keyword it should support, and where that content fit within the larger site.
Throughout this case study, we use near-page optimization to describe a focused SEO approach that prioritizes keywords and pages already ranking just outside the top results, typically in positions 11–50.
These are sometimes referred to in the SEO industry as striking-distance keywords. Instead of starting from zero, we identify pages Google already considers relevant and strengthen the signals surrounding them through content optimization, internal linking, structure, search intent, and other on-page improvements. The audit gave us a roadmap for finding these opportunities rather than optimizing pages based on assumptions.
The audit itself did not produce these results. Execution did.
The audit gave us the roadmap. The next nine months were about following it consistently. Our strategy developed along several parallel tracks.
We addressed the technical and structural issues identified in the audit rather than allowing small problems to continue accumulating. This improved the foundation supporting everything else we planned to do.
Near-page optimization gave us a way to prioritize existing opportunities. Rather than assuming every SEO gain required a brand-new page, we looked at content Google was already rewarding and asked:
Small changes became much more strategic because they were based on actual ranking data.
Optimization alone was not enough. Our audit had also shown us how much keyword territory we were missing, so new content remained a major part of the strategy. We committed to publishing five new pieces of content every week for nine months.
But volume alone was not the goal. Each piece had a purpose. Content was built around:
Publishing five times a week gave us scale. The audit gave that scale direction. That distinction mattered.
Another part of becoming more intentional about SEO was thinking beyond traditional keyword placement. Search itself was changing.
People were no longer discovering businesses exclusively through a traditional list of blue links. AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other answer engines were changing how information was being discovered, summarized, and cited. That influenced how we approached content structure. We wanted our pages to be easy for both people and machines to understand. That meant clearer:
Schema markup was no longer something we viewed purely as a technical SEO task. We began thinking about it as another layer of context. Where appropriate, we used structured data to make the relationships between our organization, articles, FAQs, services, authors, and other content clearer.
Schema does not magically produce rankings or guarantee an AI citation. What it can do is make content more explicit and machine-readable, which supports the broader goal of making it easier for search engines and AI systems to understand what a page is about. That became increasingly important as our definition of "search visibility" expanded beyond Google rankings alone.
SEO rarely moves in a straight line. Some improvements appeared relatively quickly. Others compounded as more pages were optimized, more content was published, and Google had more opportunities to crawl, understand, and rank the site. By the end of the nine-month initiative, the difference was substantial.
| Metric | 2024 Baseline | 2025 Performance | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic Search Impressions | 166,904 | 4,081,277 | +2,345% |
| Organic Search Clicks | 1,254 | 9,437 | +653% |
| Average Organic Position | 45.93 | 14.79 | Improved 31+ positions |
| Total Ranking Keywords | 219 | ~1,056 | +382% |
| Top 1–3 Keyword Rankings | 7 | 68 | Nearly 10x |
| Top 4–10 Keyword Rankings | 9 | 105 | More than 11x |
| Keywords in Positions 11–50 | 63 | ~627 | Significant opportunity pipeline |
| Engaged Organic Sessions | 2,513 | 5,167 | +106% |
| Average Engagement Time | 1:01 | 1:08 | +11% |
| Organic Key Events | 26 | 729 | +2,704% |
Organic search performance compares 2024 and 2025 reporting periods. Keyword ranking figures reflect year-end ranking snapshots. Data was compiled from Google Search Console, Google Analytics and SEO ranking reports.
The visibility numbers were exciting, but they were not the numbers that mattered most to us. We did not undertake this project simply to make an SEO dashboard look better. We wanted SEO to contribute more meaningfully to the business. It did.
Over the measurement period, we saw:
That was the real validation of the strategy. More keywords are useful. More impressions are useful. More traffic is useful. But if those improvements never translate into business outcomes, the strategy is incomplete.
For us, the combination of increased visibility and increased revenue was the clearest indication that we were reaching the right people, not simply reaching more people.
The nine-month timeline was important because the results were cumulative. Early work focused heavily on correcting structural issues and strengthening existing pages. Near-page optimization helped us capitalize on opportunities that were already relatively close to page one. Meanwhile, publishing five posts every week steadily expanded the number of searches for which the site could compete.
As those strategies began working together, the effects compounded:
There was no single SEO trick responsible for a 382% increase in ranking keywords. It was the cumulative effect of making many intentional decisions consistently.
Our website was not failing when we audited it. That is precisely what made the findings so valuable.
Human errors, old updates, internal linking inconsistencies, and structural gaps may not cause an obvious ranking collapse. They can simply make growth harder.
Near-page optimization became one of the most actionable findings from our audit because it showed us where Google already saw relevance.
Five posts per week gave us scale, but keyword mapping, intent, structure, and internal linking gave that content a purpose.
We needed both. Existing pages represented opportunities we could strengthen. New content allowed us to expand into keyword territory we were missing.
The most meaningful outcomes from this initiative were not keyword counts. They were the increases in organic revenue and closed business.
Traditional Google rankings remain important, but content also needs to be understandable to AI-powered search and answer systems. Clear structure, authority, context, and structured data are becoming increasingly important components of visibility.
Common questions about this case study, the audit process, and what results like these require.
Get Your Free SEO AuditNo. Our SEO foundation was solid, and the site was already generating organic visibility. The audit identified a handful of accumulated issues along with opportunities to improve efficiency, scalability, keyword coverage, and alignment with modern search behavior.
Because rankings tell you what is happening, but they do not necessarily show you what you are missing. An audit can uncover keywords sitting just outside the top results, pages that could perform better with additional optimization, structural inefficiencies, content gaps, and opportunities that may not be obvious from topline traffic alone.
Near-page optimization is the term we use for prioritizing pages and keywords already ranking relatively close to page one, generally within positions 11–50. Rather than starting from zero, we strengthen pages Google already considers relevant through focused improvements to content, structure, internal linking, keyword alignment, and search intent.
Very important. We published five new posts per week for nine months. That consistency allowed us to significantly expand keyword coverage and topical depth while supporting existing pages through internal linking. The difference was that the content strategy was informed by the audit rather than based solely on publishing volume.
Both mattered. Optimization allowed us to capitalize on authority and rankings we already had. New content allowed us to target missing keywords and build deeper topical coverage. The two strategies reinforced one another.
Schema gives search engines and other systems explicit information about a page and the entities or relationships it contains. It is not a substitute for quality content and does not guarantee rankings or AI citations, but it can improve machine understanding and is one component of a well-structured modern SEO strategy.
A strong candidate is often a website that has been established for several years, already has some domain authority, existing content, and keywords ranking within reach of page one, but has not undergone a comprehensive SEO audit recently. These sites may already be performing reasonably well while still carrying years of accumulated technical issues, under-optimized pages, missed keyword opportunities, or content gaps. The exact results will vary by site, market, competition, and starting point, but an audit can help determine where the greatest opportunities exist.
Your website does not need to be failing to have an SEO problem. Sometimes the biggest opportunity is hidden inside a site that appears to be doing just fine.
Request an SEO audit and find out where your next organic growth opportunities may already be hiding.