Case study: personal injury, Pompano Beach, FL
How Frankel Injury Law went from page two to the Map Pack in six months
The audit, the methodology and the results, from the strategist who led the engagement.
The challenge
Ken Frankel had invested in SEO before. A campaign in 2017 got results at the time, but the strategy never evolved. Four years later, that gap had become the whole problem.
When Ken came to Verdict Digital Marketing in June 2020, his firm wasn’t on page one, organically or in Google’s Map Pack, for any core personal injury term: car accidents, motorcycle accidents, truck accidents, construction accidents, slip and fall. No calls and no organic traffic. The site took nearly ten seconds to load on mobile, and the content read as if it were written for keywords, not for the people typing them.
Starting position: what the audit found
| Organic rankings | Stuck on page 2 for every core practice-area keyword |
|---|---|
| Google Map Pack | Not appearing for any target location or service |
| Site speed | Mobile 7/100, desktop 26/100 (Google PageSpeed) |
| Site architecture | Page-builder template loaded with bloated plugins |
| Internal linking | Broken links, plus internal links pointing to a different law firm with a similar name |
| Local citations | Missing the most authoritative local citation sources entirely |
| NAP consistency | Three firm-name variations across citations and content: the real name, a keyword-stuffed brand name and an older retired name |
| Content | Thin (600–900 words) and keyword-targeted, with duplicate blog titles |
| Content substance | Marketing-driven, with little on negligence, liability or the legal substance a client needs |
What we did
Competitive and content gap analysis
Benchmarked the firm against attorneys already on page one in Pompano Beach and Fort Lauderdale, finding where their content went deeper, where their backlinks were stronger and which directories listed them but not Frankel.
Site rebuild and speed
The page-builder architecture and plugin bloat were hurting mobile and desktop performance, a direct factor under mobile-first indexing. We rebuilt the site on a faster foundation with a cleaner layout.
Technical cleanup
Removed internal links to the unrelated firm, fixed broken links and corrected the name inconsistencies a prior agency had introduced.
Entity and schema authority
Added structured schema across landing pages and built consistent firm profiles across legal directories, clear signals to Google about who the firm is, what it does and where it operates.
Local SEO and citation cleanup
Audited the full citation footprint, filled the gap in the strongest local sources and rebuilt everything under one consistent name, removing the inconsistency likely suppressing Map Pack visibility.
Content strategy
Rewrote core service pages as long-form pillar content (1,500–2,200 words, up from 600–900) grounded in what a client needs to know, then organized by location so Pompano Beach and Fort Lauderdale each linked to their own targeted pages.
Results
Site speed went from failing on both mobile and desktop to passing on both. That fix unlocked the entity and citation work behind it.
Google PageSpeed score, before and after
Scores out of 100, June vs. December 2020
| Organic traffic | +314% over the six-month engagement |
|---|---|
| Client calls | +6,000% |
| Google Map Pack | Not appearing → appearing for target service areas |
Why it worked
The site wasn’t slow for lack of effort. It was built on the wrong foundation, and no amount of content or link building fixes a site that fails Google’s speed thresholds before a visitor sees it. Content can’t fix unclear entity signals either: Google can’t confidently recommend a business it can’t confidently identify, and three name variations were working against that.
The fix wasn’t “more SEO.” It was resolving the technical and entity foundation first, then giving the content the depth and local specificity to rank, in that order.
Want results like this for your firm?
If you’ve paid someone for years to get you on page one and it still hasn’t happened, that’s a strategy problem, not an effort problem.
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