How we helped a boutique law firm grow their organic enquiries by 300%

The challenges

Our client is a specialist boutique corporate and commercial law firm and was struggling with:

• A broken website infrastructure that limited search visibility.

• Declining keyword rankings for corporate, commercial and disputes terms.

• Fragmented organic marketing activity with no unified strategy.

The firm relied on word-of-mouth referrals but recognised the need to build a sustainable inbound lead engine.

Our organic marketing strategy

We created a unified organic marketing strategy split into 5 key steps:

1. Rebuilding the website for technical performance and scalability.

2. Improving visibility for high-intent keywords that drive enquiries.

3. Building authoritative backlinks to strengthen domain authority.

4. Developing high-level thought leadership content with consistent brand tone.

5. Implementing email marketing to nurture leads and past clients.

1: Deep Technical Website Rebuild

The client’s site had broken URLs, duplicate pages, and outdated architecture. Many important service pages were buried or inaccessible to crawlers.

This is a big problem - good overall website architecture is a key ranking signal for search engines, and doing these fixes safely by a web design & SEO professional is critical to improving organic online growth.

What we did

• Full technical SEO audit and redirect mapping of old URLs.

• Implemented structured data across the website to improve its search engine crawlability.

• Optimised hosting and caching layers for sub-1.5-second load times.

• Created a logical site architecture with clear topical clusters and internal linking.

• Rebuilt the site on a lightweight, secure content management system (CMS) optimised for speed. We recommend using Google's PageSpeed Insights to test how quick a website is. While this isn't a ranking factor, it does boost overall user experience (UX) by having faster loading times which decrease bounce rates (i.e. how quickly a user leaves your website after clicking). We are strong advocates for walking the walk when it comes to client work - see the Elmfields website score below:

2: SEO Strategy

When we began, the client was effectively invisible in search results for the keywords that drive enquiries to their business. Their generalist competitors were capturing the majority of organic traffic, leaving the client’s highly specialised offering buried beyond page three.

The site also lacked location-based pages and a Google Business Profile, meaning Google had no clear relevance signals for specific regions.

Read our article on how you can create location-specific Google Business Profiles to increase your service area visibility.

What we did

• Created a comprehensive SEO roadmap based on short, medium and long-term ranking opportunities and focused on transactional and geographic intent. We use market-leading tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush as well as Google Keyword Planner, and the foolproof method of manually analysing the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for the highest priority terms to match the intent on those SERPs.

• Developed a network of service and sector pages around priority areas such as commercial litigation, shareholder disputes and professional negligence. Each page was built around the specific legal issues clients search for, the remedies available and the types of disputes the firm handles.

• Created content hubs around major practice areas (e.g. commercial litigation, shareholder disputes, professional negligence) with internal linking to the relevant service pages.

3: Building Authority

Despite strong technical foundations and better keyword targeting, the client’s site still lagged behind competitors with years of accumulated domain authority via backlinks.

In our experience, backlinks remain an important part of organic search performance. We focused on building a more natural and relevant backlink profile from credible legal, business and professional sources.

This was further complicated by the fact that the previous marketing agency the client had worked with provided them with backlinks that were definitely not suitable to their business - aimed at artificially boosting their 'Domain Authority'.

We needed to disavow these links first as in our experience, these do far more harm than good in terms of having a natural, contextually relevant backlink profile and can actually end up in your website being penalised as spam by the search engines.

What we did

Guest Posting: We identified and pitched to niche legal, business and professional publications, contributing useful articles around corporate, commercial and disputes issues.

Niche Edits: We secured editorial link placements within existing, high-performing content on relevant domains. This helped transfer topical authority directly to key service pages.

4: Elevating Thought Leadership and Content Quality

The client’s existing content was technically informative but inconsistent in tone and presentation. Service pages lacked depth, blog posts were sporadic, and there was no cohesive structure to position the firm as a recognised authority in corporate, commercial and disputes work.

This limited both credibility with solicitors and visibility in search results, especially against well-established competitors producing regular legal content.

What we did

We developed a content and thought leadership plan designed to showcase expertise, improve user experience, and support SEO growth. The goal wasn’t just to publish more content - it was to create a library of professional materials that reflected the firm’s authority across civil work.

In our experience, good legal content marketing is about turning real conversations that people are having with your firm - and generally in the sector - into high-quality content that showcases your firm's authority.

We designed reusable, high-level templates for expert CVs, case summaries, and presentation decks. We also produced both short form topical blogs and in-depth pieces addressing evergreen questions from prospects, which were all internally linked on the clients website to help with the overall SEO strategy.

5: Email Marketing and Lead Nurture

The client had accumulated a sizeable list of past and potential contacts - mainly general counsel, in-house legal teams, founders, investors and senior management - but had never used it effectively.

Emails were infrequent, informal, and sent without segmentation or tracking, which meant no clear nurture process and little visibility into engagement.

We implemented a structured email marketing and lead nurture system to improve retention, build relationships, and convert more existing contacts into active clients.

What we did

List segmentation: Cleaned and categorised the database by region, service type, and engagement level (e.g. active solicitor, lapsed contact, or new lead).

Automated nurture sequences: Built short, educational drip campaigns that introduced the firm’s solicitors, outlined service areas, and shared insights (that we were publishing anyway as part of our content marketing strategy).

A/B testing: Constantly tested variations in subject lines, send times, and content formats to identify what resonated most with their audiences.

Performance tracking: Integrated open and click-through tracking with the client’s CRM to identify high-intent contacts for direct follow-up.