Client results: personal injury, three-office firm
Traffic up, phones flat: reading a three-office firm’s real numbers
Search visibility improved across the board. Call volume barely moved. The two aren’t the same metric, and this is what the gap between them looked like.
Situation
A regional personal injury firm with three offices. Only the home office ranked well when I took over the account, and the existing campaign had plateaued.
What I did
- Content strategy and new case-type pages, launched in two waves
- Rebuilt location pages with local, entity, and semantic signals, plus schema
- Updated Business Profiles with more detail and pointed them to the correct location pages
- Geographic backlinks
- Built what I call a “Social Fortress” — consistent, authoritative profiles on the platforms search engines and AI assistants expect an established brand to have, even where the firm doesn’t actively use them, so the firm’s identity is easier to confirm
Results
Latest six months vs. the prior six months. These are adjacent windows, not the same season a year apart.
Organic sessions
5,231 → 6,315, but front-loaded: 1,201/month in the first three months, 904/month in the last three
Average Google ranking position
Search Console’s average across all tracked queries — not a single rank. The largest move came early in the window, when the first content launched.
Calls by office
Attributed by Business Profile tag, then landing page, then caller city. 231 calls could not be assigned to a city.
High-value case-type call volume
Catastrophic injury, truck accident, and industrial injury calls — the categories that grew.
Web-form leads
146 → 174 (+19.2%)
Real calls, overall
391 → 383 (−2.0%). Missed calls fell from 25 to 12.
Where it fell
| Practice area | Prior 6 months | Latest 6 months | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premises liability | 17 | 3 | −82.4% |
| Medical malpractice | 30 | 22 | −26.7% |
| Workplace injury | 14 | 8 | −42.9% |
| Attributable calls overall | 144 | 138 |
Rankings
Rank tracker, organic desktop. Tracking begins near the end of the prior period.
- At the end of the window: Office C’s market had 30 of 62 tracked terms in the top 5. Office A’s market had 16 of 33.
- Largest gains over the final month, in one market: “injury lawyers” 11 → 2 (110 searches/month), “injury attorneys” 16 → 4, “injury attorney” 10 → 3, “truck accident lawyer” 7 → 3. These are the biggest movers, not every tracked term.
- A statewide check partway through the window: all three local-pack spots for a truck accident search; #1 for burn injury; two of three spots for car accident and injury lawyer; #2 for accident lawyer; #3 for personal injury lawyer. The broadest term is the weakest result. The leading competitor has 327 reviews against the firm’s largest listing at 76 — a likely factor.
What the data exposed
- A catch-all call-tracking campaign carried 117 calls, and only 21% came from the city it was named for. It was excluded from the location figures above.
- 64% of calls (245 of 383) could not be tied to a case type.
- Analytics showed zero AI visits for the period, because the AI traffic channel wasn’t classified as such until after this window ended. That’s a measurement gap, not an absence of AI-referred visitors.
Estimated gross-fee opportunity
A planning model, not revenue. Added calls × assumed close rate × assumed gross fee. Calls are real, tracked calls with spam removed, attributed to case type by the page the caller landed on.
| Case type | Added calls | Close rate (low / base / high) | Gross fee (low / base / high) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Catastrophic injury | 13 | 7% / 10% / 15% | $50,000 / $115,000 / $150,000 |
| Truck accident | 3 | 7% / 10% / 15% | $20,000 / $33,000 / $50,000 |
| Industrial injury | 3 | 6% / 9% / 12% | $20,000 / $42,000 / $55,000 |
| Modeled cases | 1.3 / 1.9 / 2.8 | ||
| Modeled opportunity | about $53,000 / $171,000 / $335,000 | ||
Base fees come from my own research into case settlements. Low and high fees are planning ranges. Close rates are drawn from published, vendor-reported conversion figures, which are directional, not audited.
- Case type is inferred from the landing page, not checked against signed-case records.
- This is an estimate of fee opportunity, not the firm’s revenue. Call it “estimated gross-fee opportunity,” never “revenue generated.”
- Fees are gross, before litigation costs, referral fees, expenses, write-offs, and collection risk.
- Catastrophic and truck fees are skewed: one large case can distort an average.
- A call signed today may not produce a fee for 12 to 36 months or more.
- Samples are small, so treat these as ranges, not forecasts.
- It counts only the gains and does not subtract the declines above.
- SEO is not claimed as the sole cause of every call.
If your traffic is up and your phones aren’t, let’s find out why.
Visibility grew and phones did not. The gap is conversion and tracking — which is where the next quarter’s money goes.
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