Client results: criminal defense and personal injury firm
Search up, phones down: when rankings and calls disagree
Rankings moved in the direction the strategy intended. The phones told a different story in one practice area, and I don’t yet know why.
Situation
A criminal defense and injury firm that already ranked well for criminal defense. At the start of the latest window*, the firm shifted its stated focus toward personal injury and car accident cases, including a goal of being cited by ChatGPT for those queries. Three earlier name changes had fragmented the firm’s identity online.
*Timing to be confirmed with the client before this page is published.
What I did
- Built out personal injury and car accident content: three pages early in the engagement, and five more near the end of the window
- Built trust signals so search engines and AI platforms recognized the firm’s current name and its personal injury practice. As of a spot check near the end of the window, AI engines named the firm by its current name.
- Expanded geographic targeting to capture searches from a larger neighboring city
What moved
Rank tracker, organic desktop, 66 tracked terms. Table shows how many of each group’s tracked terms ranked in the top 10.
| Group | Terms tracked | Top 10, baseline | Top 10, three months later |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home market, personal injury | 23 | 11 | 18 |
| Neighboring market, personal injury | 23 | 3 | 1 |
| Home market, criminal / DUI | 10 | 10 | 10 |
| Neighboring market, criminal / DUI | 10 | 10 | 9 |
The baseline already includes about two months of the early pages. The baseline-to-three-months gain in the home-market personal injury group is consistent with the work, but I’m not presenting it as proof.
Individual term movements, baseline → three months later
- Home-market “car accident lawyer”: 18 → 10
- Neighboring market “car accident lawyer”: not in top 20 → 18
- Neighboring market “personal injury lawyer”: 15 → 11
- Home-market “dui lawyer”: 6 → 3
Later in the window
Neighboring-market auto accident terms rose 14 to 26 positions (most to #7 or #8, one to #17). “Personal injury lawyer” reached #9 (+23). One accident term reached #1. Home-market criminal defense terms rose 3 to 7 positions. Most of these terms have about 10 searches a month.
What slipped
Home-market “personal injury lawyer” fell from 3 to 6, and two neighboring-market criminal defense terms also slipped.
The five later pages launched days before that ranking table, so I’m not crediting them for any movement shown here.
What did not move: the phones
Latest six months vs. the prior six months. These are adjacent windows, not the same season a year apart.
Real calls
1,041 → 875. Robocalls rose from 75 to 101, so the raw total understates the real decline.
Qualified calls (2 minutes or more)
262 → 194
By case type
Personal injury calls 14 → 9. Auto calls 9 → 8.
By market
Calls fell in every market, including the neighboring city’s calling area (309 → 279).
Case-type attribution
70% of calls (615 of 875) had no case type recorded.
An open question: criminal defense
Criminal defense calls fell from 186 to 119 (−36%) while its tracked rankings strengthened. The firm refocused on personal injury at the start of this window*, so the timing is consistent with that refocus mattering. It’s equally consistent with seasonality, changes in how calls are attributed, and shifts in effort. I can’t tell which from this data, and I’m not claiming cause.
*Timing to be confirmed with the client.
Looking back across the six months, this is the line I would investigate first:
- Monthly criminal defense calls, to see when the decline began
- Unattributed calls before and after, to rule out an attribution shift
- The same months a year earlier, to rule out seasonality
- Whether budget, Business Profile categories, navigation, or content for criminal defense changed at the start of the window
- Head-term rankings versus the tiny 10-search terms that improved
The lesson for any firm refocusing on a new practice: protect the core line while building the new one.
What the phone drop is worth
Modeled — not a claim about cause.
Personal injury and auto calls fell by 6. At close rates of 6% / 8% / 12% and gross fees of $4,000 / $6,000 / $8,000, a call is worth about $240 / $480 / $960 of modeled fee opportunity — so those six calls come to about $1,400 / $2,900 / $5,800. The personal injury dollars here are small. The larger question is the criminal defense line above.
Local findings
- Listing views, latest six months: 4,636 — 91% from Google Search, 64% on phones
- One office listing, over about 12 months: 222 call-button taps (not connected calls) and 0 website clicks in every month, pointing to a link or tracking issue
- Reviews, period shown: 22 at 4.6 average, no new reviews, 14% response rate
What I’d do next
Fix website-click tracking, tag calls by case type instead of inferring it, add truck accident and statewide terms to the tracker, set up a review routine, and answer the criminal defense question above before drawing a conclusion.
When rankings and calls disagree, the report is usually hiding something.
Rankings are an input and calls are the outcome. A change of focus takes longer than a six-month window, and leading indicators showed up in one market before the phones moved.
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