What boosted a UK law firm's traffic and 6,900+ conversions?
About the Author
His name is Shiva Charan, and he has 10 years of experience in Google AdWords, Seo, and digital marketing. He wrote this article based on his own experience at his former job and how he turned it around to get more organic Google traffic.
Industry: Legal Services
Market: United Kingdom
Services: Technical SEO, Google Ads, Google Analytics and performance optimisation
The Background
The client was a UK law firm that covered a few different practice areas. Family law, divorce, medical negligence, plus a handful of other legal services.
Here's the thing with law firms, though. More traffic on its own doesn't really help them. A person searching for legal help usually has one very specific problem, and they mean business.
So the search plan had two jobs to do. Build organic visibility on the legal searches that mattered, the kind that keeps paying off for years, and catch the people who were ready to hire someone right now through paid search.
I looked after both halves of that: SEO for the slow, steady growth, and Google Ads for the demand that was already out there.
The Challenge
Legal is a brutal space in search marketing. Keywords around divorce, family disputes and medical negligence get very competitive, and if a campaign's set up loosely you can burn through a lot of money with little to show for it.
SEO isn't any easier here. Publishing content alone gets you nowhere much. This site needed stronger technical foundations, more visibility across the queries people were actually typing in, and someone watching performance all the time.
That's why I never treated SEO and PPC as two separate channels. To me they were two parts of one search acquisition strategy.
What we set out to do
- Get the firm showing up in more organic searches
- More qualified visitors landing on the key legal service pages
- Clicks and impressions from Google Search, both going up
- Conversions coming in through Google Ads
- Less money wasted on paid search
- A lower cost per conversion as time went on
- Google Analytics tracking we could actually trust
- A clear read on which channels were driving the growth
Part 1: Building Organic Growth That Lasts
Technical SEO came first
Before chasing rankings hard, I wanted to be sure Google could crawl the site properly, make sense of it and judge it fairly. And this wasn't a one-off audit I ran and filed away. Technical SEO stayed part of the work the whole way through.
The things I kept going back to:
- Crawlability and indexation
- Any technical issues on the site
- How fast pages performed
- Internal linking
- Overall search visibility
- Which organic landing pages were pulling their weight
- Search queries, and the ranking opportunities hiding in them
- Click-through rates
- How visitors behaved once they arrived
Rankings were never the only goal. What I was really after was a sturdier technical base, one that would slowly widen the number of relevant searches the firm turned up for.
The organic growth
As the SEO work built on itself, Google started giving the site a lot more visibility.
Daily organic clicks showed it most clearly. They went from around 400 a day to about 800, so roughly double the search traffic over that stretch.
Across the last 16 months of the reporting period, the site picked up:
- 236,000 organic clicks
- 20 million search impressions
The bigger win for me, though, wasn't one isolated spike. It was watching clicks and impressions keep climbing over the long haul. Temporary visibility was never the point. We wanted a search presence that would keep bringing people who needed legal help to the firm's website, day in and day out.
Part 2: Turning Search Demand Into Conversions With Google Ads
SEO was the long game. Google Ads did a different job: it let the firm show up the moment a potential client went looking for a specific legal service. I ran Search campaigns across the firm's practice areas and kept working on the quality of the traffic coming in.
I wasn't too fussed about raw click numbers. The question I kept coming back to was how to get the right searches onto the right legal service pages without letting acquisition costs creep up.
So I was always digging into:
- Search terms
- What intent sat behind each keyword
- Negative keywords
- How each campaign was doing
- Conversion behaviour
- Cost per conversion
- Which ads worked and which didn't
- Whether the landing page actually matched the search
- Performance by location and audience
Bit by bit, those tweaks pushed traffic volume up and made acquisition more efficient at the same time.
Google Ads performance
Between June 2020 and June 2023, the account recorded:
- £73,045+ in Google Ads spend
- 6,905+ tracked conversions
- 10.37% overall conversion rate
- £10.62 average cost per conversion
The conversions covered things like contact form submissions, phone calls, PDF downloads and a few other actions we'd set up. That gave us a far clearer picture of what someone did after clicking an ad, so we weren't judging the campaigns on traffic alone.
Making paid search more efficient
Cost efficiency was one of my biggest focus areas. Sure, throwing more budget at the account would've brought in more conversions. I'd rather improve the campaigns using real search and conversion data.
Year on year, cost per conversion fell from £10.22 to £9.38. That's roughly an 8% improvement.
In a vertical as competitive and high-intent as legal services, cutting acquisition costs while the conversions kept coming in was a meaningful result.
Paid traffic grew a lot too
The campaigns got bigger as well as leaner. In FY 2022-23 they brought in roughly 27,500 more paid clicks than the earlier reporting periods had.
Squeezing a little extra efficiency out of an existing campaign is one thing. Here, paid search had grown into a much larger source of website traffic in its own right.
Looking Beyond Google Ads
One thing I really didn't want was to judge each channel in a bubble. Through Google Analytics I tracked how people found the site and what they did once they got there, across organic search, paid search, direct traffic and referral traffic.
Over time, visits went up across all of these major channels.
That wider view mattered. Making an SEO report look nicer or pumping up the click count inside Google Ads was never the real aim. The aim was to raise the firm's overall digital visibility and give potential clients more chances to find the business and get in touch.
The Results
Daily organic clicks rose from about 400 to 800. Over the final 16-month reporting period, Google Search delivered around 236K clicks and 20M impressions.
Organic search
Daily organic clicks rose from about 400 to 800. Over the final 16-month reporting period, Google Search delivered around 236K clicks and 20M impressions.
Google Ads
More than 6,905 tracked conversions came from roughly £73K in ad spend, with the overall conversion rate holding at 10.37%.
Efficiency
Year on year, cost per conversion improved from £10.22 down to £9.38.
Paid traffic
In FY 2022-23, paid clicks went up by roughly 27,500 compared with earlier reporting periods.
What Made the Difference
Honestly, no single SEO trick or Google Ads setting did this. It came from improving lots of pieces of the acquisition system, constantly.
The technical SEO gave everything a foundation to stand on. On top of that, organic optimisation widened how often the firm showed up in search, while Google Ads caught high-intent searchers straight away. Tightening up search terms and keywords cut the paid traffic we were wasting money on. And Google Analytics tied all of it back to what users actually did and whether they converted.
So rather than chase one metric at a time, I worked on the whole journey:
- Search visibility
- relevant click
- website visit
- user action
- conversion
That's what turned search into a much stronger acquisition channel for the firm.
Key Takeaway
This project backed up something I already believed about search marketing. SEO and PPC work best when they support each other instead of competing.
SEO gave the law firm visibility that lasts, and took it from roughly 400 to 800 organic clicks a day. Google Ads picked up the urgent, high-intent searches and drove 6,900+ tracked conversions, getting more efficient as it went.
With accurate analytics and constant optimisation behind both, search ended up doing a lot more than sending traffic. For this business, it became a dependable way to win new clients.
