Rebuilding organic search after a Google core update
A litigation firm in India had lost most of its organic search traffic after a core update, with no way to see which practice areas were hit. Here is how instrumentation and a cluster-by-cluster rebuild returned the numbers.
The starting point
Following a Google core update, the firm’s organic search traffic had fallen for six consecutive months – from a peak of 18,950 monthly clicks to a floor of 2,925, a decline of 71%. No rank measurement was in place, so it was not possible to see which practice areas had been affected, or why. Appellate, arbitration, writ and revenue-tribunal work ranked only through general informational articles, with no dedicated service pages, no structured data, and around 20 service URLs fragmented across competing variants.
What we did
We began by instrumenting roughly 487 keywords across the firm’s 37 practice areas, so movement could be attributed to a specific cluster rather than read only at site level. We then rebuilt each cluster beneath that measurement:
- URL canonicalisation, to consolidate the fragmented service variants
- service schema across around 25 pages
- practice-specific FAQ depth
- local profile categories mapped to tribunal and appellate work
The same method – classify every ranking page and query to a practice area, isolate the cluster, and rebuild from its trough – was applied to the corporate and criminal clusters.
Commercial litigation and dispute resolution
- Organic clicks: +183% from the Month 4 floor
- Click-through rate: 0.92% to 1.56%
- Quarter on quarter: 2,693 to 3,650 clicks
- 7,530 organic clicks across eight months
Monthly clicks to litigation pages rose from 1,290 to 1,556 over eight months, a 21% increase, during a period when the site’s overall organic search fell 10%. It was the only practice area to grow in absolute terms while the site as a whole declined.
Corporate and commercial
- Organic clicks: +125% from the Month 6 floor (71 to 160)
- Search impressions: +112%, first quarter to last
- Click-through rate: +19% across the period
- 257 pages ranking in the cluster, up from 205 at the floor
Corporate search impressions more than doubled across the eight months while clicks lagged behind – a measured gap between demand and delivery that identified the commercial service-page build as the highest-value remaining work, with the first inflection visible in the final two months.
Criminal defence and bail
- Organic clicks: +235% from the Month 4 floor (185 to 620)
- Click-through rate: 0.84% to 1.67%
- 124 pages ranking in the cluster, up from 81 at the floor
- 2,915 organic clicks across eight months
Monthly clicks returned to their Month 1 level by Month 8, while the site overall remained 10% below it. The near-doubling of click-through rate meant the cluster was converting the same search impressions into almost twice the traffic by the end of the period.
How we measured
- Google Search Console page-level data across an eight-month period (Month 1 to Month 8), read-only via API.
- Page-level classification covers the full click volume. Query-level data is withheld by Search Console below a privacy threshold (roughly 26% of clicks) and is not used for any headline figure.
- Trough-to-current comparisons state the trough month; quarter comparisons are Month 1 to Month 3 against Month 6 to Month 8.
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