A platform-page rebuild and a BOFU content wave took a vertical legal SaaS to +63% organic sessions and a record month for organic-influenced demos.

The foundation was there: real automation, a real CRM, real lead-qualification tooling. But the site wasn't built to claim it in search. Headers didn't match the keywords they were supposed to own, years of legacy content needed consolidating, and bottom-of-funnel coverage was thin relative to a category that was actively searching comparison and "best of" queries the site simply didn't answer.

The clearest symptom was on the core platform pages. Across most of them, the target BOFU keyword wasn't represented in a header at all. The H1 on the legal CRM hub, for example, was a generic benefit phrase (A complete legal CRM system in a single, organized place), with the term the page actually needed to rank for nowhere in the heading structure. That pattern repeated across the platform set: real keyword demand the page was never built to claim.

Three workstreams, in order: clean up what was dragging the site down, rebuild the pages that mattered most, then fill the bottom-of-funnel gaps the audit surfaced.

Consolidation first. Ninety pages (old TOFU posts, overlapping practice-area content, cannibalizing duplicates) got redirected or sunsetted. The point wasn't subtraction for its own sake; it was concentrating link equity onto the pages built to carry it.

Then the platform-page rebuild. Twenty-nine core pages had their URLs and headers reworked. I mapped each page to a target BOFU keyword first, then rebuilt the heading structure around it: the keyword became the H1, with the existing benefit phrase demoted to an H2 underneath it, so the page finally carried a keyword signal. The legal CRM hub above, for example, had its target keyword in neither the H1 nor the H2. I made Legal CRM the H1 and moved A complete legal CRM system in a single, organized place down to the H2 beneath it. I piloted the format on a handful of pages before rolling it out further, so there was a read on the result before committing the rest of the page library to the rewrite. Nearly every target BOFU keyword added to an H1 reached the top 10. Separately, across the platform set, 65 pages recovered indexation within five weeks; that recovery is not attributed to the header work.

Then the BOFU wave. Twenty-four blog posts, new and refreshed, targeting the comparison and "best of" queries the consolidation audit showed the site wasn't covering. Three of them now rank #1 for their primary keyword.

Schema (SoftwareApplication, Review, FAQ) went out sitewide alongside the rebuild, and the homepage itself got rebuilt in the same window. None of this shipped as an isolated test: consolidation, the platform rebuild, schema, the homepage, and the BOFU content wave all landed in the same several-month stretch, and that combination, not any single lever, is most of why the numbers below moved the way they did.

Partway through this engagement, the client brought Directive on for paid media too: a $150K engagement, a different service line entirely. The CMO attributed the decision directly to how the organic side was run, the results and the partnership both, enough to walk away from a 3-year incumbent agency to do it.

The account started below the SEO minimum. At its renewal in August 2026, a year after it began, it had grown from $99K to $351K in annual value across channels, before counting project work. That growth came from the relationship as much as the results.

The first month produced no content. It produced the map the content was built from.

1. Who actually buys. Closed-won deals segmented by firm size and buyer title: firms with 1 to 49 employees made up 67% of booked revenue, and managing partners and owners closed at around 40% while junior titles sat near 10%. The keyword map leaned toward small-firm, owner-level searches.
2. Where the traffic went. About 10% of pages drove 98% of organic traffic, and 77% of pages earned zero clicks. Competitors ranked their product pages for the money terms while the client's core pages drew under 5% of traffic. That is what justified consolidating 90 pages before writing anything new.
3. The size of the prize. The priority money keywords added up to about 133,000 searches a year at an average position near 20, worth roughly 7,700 more high-intent clicks a year at positions 3 to 10.
4. Quick wins first. Make the small eyebrow line on each core page the H1 carrying the target keyword, keeping the creative headline; add FAQs to the top blogs from real search questions; put "trusted by" numbers on the core pages; fix mobile load time, which was 4.4 seconds to first paint on key pages against a 2.4-second benchmark.

From there the work ran on a two-week rhythm: influenced demos first, branded and non-branded traffic split apart, a fixed bottom-of-funnel filter, and money terms with their AI Overview status, with next steps split between what we owed and what the client owed.

The homepage taught the clearest lesson. Adding the category term to the homepage H1 was followed by that term jumping 72 positions in a month, and removing the claim later showed up on the core page within weeks. The next phase leans on the client's own data: a customer survey written backward from the statistics it needs to produce, with every answer sliceable by practice area and firm size, feeding a benchmark report, a stats page, and the practice-type pages. It is in progress, so it carries no result yet. Influenced organic demos held at 64 in August and 65 in September 2026.