Moving a litigation firm’s local search position
How a full-service litigation firm in India moved from ranking in the local top three for fewer than two search terms in three, to nine in ten – measured on a fixed keyword set across the tracked period.
The starting point
Across a fixed set of 94 local search terms, the firm ranked in the local top three for 63% of them and appeared at all for 79% – meaning roughly one term in five returned no listing for the firm anywhere in the local results. Average best position, where the firm did appear, was 2.8. Position was measured but not acted on: scans ran irregularly, with no fixed cadence and no practice-area structure to direct where effort should go.
What we did
Across the engagement we built the firm’s local presence on four fronts:
- New service pages – a dedicated page for each practice area, rather than relying on general articles.
- Google Business Profile build-out – services and products added and structured to match the practice areas.
- Regular content posting to the profile.
- Review generation – building genuine client reviews across the period.
Local position was tracked throughout on the fixed 94-keyword cohort, so every movement could be read against the work.
Where it reached
- Share of terms ranking in the local top three rose from 63% to 90% – 85 of 94 terms, up from 59.
- Average position, where the firm appeared, improved from 2.8 to 1.7.
- The share of terms returning any local listing rose from 79% to 98%.
The gain was not a steady climb. Top-three share held broadly steady for an extended stretch, then stepped up in a single month, to 91%, and stayed there. That single-month move coincided with the Google Business Profile services and products going live – a structural change to the profile of the kind that tends to move local rankings in one refresh rather than gradually.
How we measured
- First-party local rank tracker, 107 scan campaigns across the tracked period, with data present in every month.
- The keyword cohort is constant at 94 terms throughout, so no part of the movement is explained by the tracked set changing.
- Start and end are three-month windows, not single months, so neither endpoint over- or under-states the position.
- Position data covers the tracked period only; the keyword set was later rebuilt, and the two are not compared.
The takeaway
Local visibility is won by measuring it properly and then structuring the profile and pages around the way clients actually search. Here, the largest single step came from the Google Business Profile build – a reminder that for a local practice, the profile is often the highest-leverage asset of all.
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