Starting condition
The inherited site was still falling.
An AI-scaled publishing strategy had previously produced substantial informational visibility, but the inherited content estate had become fragile during the 2023 to 2024 decline. Total estimated monthly organic traffic had previously reached about 5 to 6K. By February 2025, it had fallen to roughly 1.1K and was still declining. Only about 150 of that estimated traffic came from searches classified as commercial.
This was an existing site with history and some useful rankings, not a greenfield rebuild. Indiscriminate changes to categories, slugs, and URLs would have sacrificed what remained. Each inherited URL was judged separately: retain it, rewrite it, consolidate it, or remove it.
Intervention record
The first decision was what not to keep.
The inherited AI-heavy posts were classified for removal, consolidation, rewriting, or retention; roughly 85 to 90% were removed.
Useful history and URLs were preserved. Surviving pages were upgraded, generic AI imagery was removed where present, and references and external studies were made more coherent.
The surviving pages needed a route to the matter.
Informational-to-commercial internal paths were rebuilt, and service presentation was revised around material prospect concerns that the existing site did not answer clearly.
The positioning work addressed fears prospective immigration clients may not voice directly, including whether contacting a lawyer could itself create risk. The pages needed to answer those concerns before asking for an enquiry.
Limited outreach to relevant local and niche publications followed later and was not the main focus of the engagement.
Commercial outcome
Commercial search traffic grew roughly tenfold. The calculated rate moved ~0.83% → ~0.91%.
The commercial series was calculated by classifying the searches receiving traffic in Ahrefs, then summing their estimated traffic. It increased from about 150 to 1,500 monthly. The firm attributed roughly 1 to 2 actual signed clients a month to organic search at the start and roughly 12 to 15 at the later level.
Firm-attributed level: roughly 1 to 2 signed clients a month.
Firm-attributed level: roughly 12 to 15 signed clients a month.
After the target was reached, the relationship moved to maintenance and on-call support.
Evidence boundary
What this case establishes, and what it does not.
Figures are approximate. Total and commercial traffic use Ahrefs estimates; the commercial subset was calculated from searches classified as commercial. Signed-client counts are the firm's attribution of actual signed clients, not form submissions or Analytics goals. The firm's identity, city and state, exact keywords, and identifying analytics artifacts remain withheld.
The work and outcomes occurred during the same engagement, but the case does not assign every movement to pruning alone or imply that whole-company revenue rose in proportion to organic traffic. Estimated traffic reached about 6.6K during summer and settled near 6.2K by November 2025.
Return to attorney SEO case studies, or review how the work maps to immigration attorney SEO.