A vertical SaaS for law firms: legal CRM, client intake, and AI-assisted intake automation. Account Strategist (SEO + content). Three things changed in the same window: a content consolidation audit, a platform-page URL and header rebuild, and a wave of BOFU-led blog content.
152,688 over 6 months, vs. the prior 6.
29% of all influenced demos, the largest single channel.
506 → 556, net new. Top-3 rankings up 61% over the same window.
Ended a 3-year incumbent relationship to bring Directive on instead.
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. The legal CRM hub, for
example, split its heading into a keyword-only eyebrow tagged as an H2 (LEGAL CONTACT MANAGEMENT) and a longer benefit phrase tagged as an H3 underneath it (A complete legal CRM system in a single, organized place). That pattern repeats across the platform set: the topical keyword and the
buyer outcome live in two separate elements, each one underpowered on its own.
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 H1/H2 headers reworked. The fix for the legal-CRM heading pattern above:
merge the eyebrow and the H3 into a single H2 that carries the keyword and the buyer outcome:
Legal Contact Management in One Organized System instead of two
separate, weaker elements. Same pattern applied across the rest of the platform
set: Pipeline Management Tools became Legal Pipeline Management That Keeps Qualified Leads Moving. I piloted the format on a handful of pages, including the ones flagged
"crawled but not indexed" in GSC, before rolling it out further, so there was a
read on whether it actually moved indexation before committing the rest of the
page library to the rewrite.
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, less for rich-result eligibility this time
and more so AI surfaces have a clean, structured read on what the platform actually
does.
Partway through this engagement, the client ended a 3-year relationship with their incumbent paid media agency and brought Directive on instead: 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.
The three #1-ranking listicles did the heavy lifting on this read, but by April and May they'd already started slipping. Information Gain doesn't reward coverage forever: a well-structured comparison page is a strong opening move, not a permanent moat. The next phase has to be original research: an intake benchmark, proprietary survey data, something a competitor can't lift from a public source. Listicles bought the account time to build that. They don't compound on their own.