Case Study
How a Law Firm Recovered from Core Updates
How we helped a law firm recover from Google’s core updates by rebuilding its site structure and consolidating its content
Result
+200% Organic Traffic Increase
Approach
Content Pruning and Consolidation
Industry
Legal Consulting
About the Client
Our client is a mid-size personal injury law firm in a Southern state. A small team of attorneys handles the caseload, focused almost exclusively on traffic accidents and workplace injuries.
The firm built its name over a decade through word-of-mouth referrals and community trust. It worked one case at a time, for people who had gone through a wreck or a workplace injury. As the firm grew, more new client inquiries came through the website. Organic search became one of its most reliable channels for turning searchers into signed cases.
What We Found
For years, the firm’s website performed well above what its small in-house marketing team would suggest. Organic traffic fed a steady share of new case inquiries.
That started to soften near the end of 2023, which is marked by a quiet, month-over-month dip. It kept sliding through 2024, the same year Google rolled out its core updates.
A full technical and content audit showed a site that had grown for years without anyone stopping to check whether that growth still made sense.
A Content Library Built only on Sheer Volume
Over the years, the in-house team published a large volume of blog posts and location pages. Each seemed reasonable alone, but none followed a bigger plan. Similar topics ended up split across several thin pages instead of one strong resource per practice area.
Content that Drifted from the Practice Areas
Posting frequently worked for a while, so the team kept it up and published whatever kept new pages flowing. Over time, more of that content touched general legal or local-interest topics with little connection to traffic accidents or workplace injury. Relevance around the core practice areas thinned out.
Redirects Handled without a Clear Plan
Pages retired or renamed over the years were redirected ad hoc by the marketing team, with no documentation and little attention to where those redirects ultimately pointed. Chains and loops built up and wasted crawl budget.
Internal Linking that Grew without a Structure
Links between pages were added case by case, whenever it seemed helpful, rather than following any real hierarchy. Practice area pages were rarely reinforced by their own supporting content, so authority wasn’t flowing where it needed to.
Our Approach
Recovering from a core update isn’t about chasing the next algorithm tweak. It comes down to fixing the structural issues that made the site vulnerable in the first place. We treated this engagement as a foundation rebuild, not a quick patch, and worked through the site systematically before a single new page went up.
01
Content Pruning and Consolidation
We started by mapping every page against the firm’s actual practice areas. Content got grouped by topic and not by publish date. Pages covering the same ground from different angles were merged into a single and more complete resource. Useful details scattered across the thin versions got pulled into that one page instead of staying diluted.
Anything written to fill out the site rather than serve a real search intent was cut. The goal wasn’t a smaller site for its own sake. It was one strong page per practice area, doing the job that several weak ones used to attempt.
Content Pruning and Consolidation
For content that didn’t deserve a second life, we used 410 responses rather than quietly deleting pages or leaving them to 404. A 410 tells search engines a page is intentionally and permanently gone.
That matters after a core update because it signals confidence about what belongs on the site going forward. This step ran alongside the consolidation work. Nothing got removed without checking first whether its content had a home elsewhere.
02
03
Redirect Cleanup
Because redirects had been added ad hoc over time, we traced the existing map end to end. Redirects that pointed to other redirects, or looped back on themselves, got rebuilt to go directly to their final destination.
We also reviewed where each redirect actually made sense given the new content structure, rather than assuming old destinations were still right. The result is a shorter and cleaner map. Search engines could reach real content faster and burn lesser crawl budget on unnecessary hops.
Internal Linking Rebuild
With the content structure settled, we rebuilt how pages connected to each other around the firm’s core practice areas. Practice area pages became hubs. Supporting content linked clearly back to them, and cross-links went in only where topics genuinely overlapped. This gave search engines a much clearer sense of which pages mattered most, and helped route authority toward them.
04
The Results
+200%
organic traffic vs. the months right after the core update.
By March 2025, the firm’s organic traffic had climbed 200% compared to the months right after the core update hit. That growth didn’t come from new content chasing rankings.
It came from clearing out what was holding the site back and giving Google a cleaner site to crawl. This is still a partial recovery. Ranking and traffic are still climbing back toward pre-update levels. The foundation is in place.
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