From around 182 enquiries YTD to 529 across 18 months of phased, focused work.
No rebuild. No rebrand. No six figure project.
Online enquiries nearly tripled
The starting point
A site that looked fine on the surface.
Search rankings were strong. Organic traffic accounted for around two thirds of all sessions. The agency’s quarterly report told a steady, growing story.
Underneath, three problems sat in the same place.
The lead numbers didn’t agree. The agency was reporting 640 leads for the previous full year. Google Analytics, properly read, showed 78 goal completions for the same period. Both were technically true. Neither was useful in a partner meeting. The reason wasn’t dishonesty. It was that nobody had agreed what a lead was.
Engagement was failing under the traffic numbers. Return visitor rate had stalled at 12%. Bounce rates on the two highest traffic content sections were above 85%. Pages per session was down 10% year on year. Session duration was down 16%.
The supporting stack had drifted. A seven year old Drupal site with broken internal links and a mobile Lighthouse score of 43 out of 100. A sub brand site with 15% of pages returning 404 errors. A sign up form that had been a 404 for three months before anyone noticed. Hosting on a £530 a month dedicated server the site no longer needed for its traffic profile.
The marketing team knew most of this. What they didn’t have was the time, the specialist eye or the political backing to do anything about it.
The approach
Five priorities. None of them a rebuild.
1. Audit, then agree
Three weeks of full quantitative, qualitative, technical and SEO audit. Findings landed as a single deck the marketing lead could take into a partner meeting and use without translating.
Then one conversation that mattered more than the rest. With the agency, the switchboard team, the CRM owner and two partners in the room, we agreed a single working definition. A lead is an enquiry that arrives via a tracked digital channel and is logged into the CRM with a named recipient and a follow up status.
This sounds simple. It usually is. The reason it doesn’t get done is that it requires someone outside the agency client relationship to ask the question without an axe to grind.
2. Rebuild the home page
The previous home page tried to serve every practice area at once. A sidebar contact form. A telephone CTA. A grid of services. Three testimonials. A banner that distracted the eye from every conversion path.
The new home page gave a user landing on the site two clear paths within five seconds. Services for individuals on one side. Services for businesses on the other. Wireframe first, content second, development third.
3. Fix what was broken
The sign up form. Once it was actually working and integrated into the CRM, leads from the form started arriving the day the new version went live.
Hosting. After three competitive quotes against the legacy £530 a month dedicated server, the firm moved to a managed alternative that delivered the same performance at a fraction of the cost. The saving paid for a content writer two days a month for a year.
Core Web Vitals across the priority pages. News template rebuilt so older articles stopped dragging the engagement numbers down. About Us, team pages and key service landing pages rewritten and reorganised. Filtering and tagging across the news section sorted out.
4. Track outside the agency report
A year on year tracker maintained outside the agency’s own reporting. A single spreadsheet with monthly numbers against the agreed definition of a lead, broken down by practice area, traffic source and CRM conversion stage.
The marketing lead opened that sheet in every partner meeting from then on. Once she had a number she trusted, that she controlled and that she’d defined herself, every conversation with the agency shifted. She stopped being the recipient of someone else’s report. She became the auditor of it.
5. The dull glue work
Monthly reports the wider business could read. A reporting cadence that survived staff turnover. Documentation that meant the next person in the chair could pick up the thread. None of this is glamorous and all of it compounds.
Where it landed
Twelve months after the priorities went live, the Q2 FY22 marketing report told a different story.
Online enquiries up 190% year on year. Web traffic up 8% year on year, 40% quarter on quarter. Search volumes up 16%. Press coverage up 30%. Share of voice up 319%.
Broken down by practice area, the picture sharpened.
The commercial team alone saw web traffic up 25% year on year and online enquiries up 233% year on year. The private law team grew online enquiries 62% year on year and press coverage 208% year on year.
The hosting saving paid back the consulting fees inside the first year. The sign up form, once it was actually working, became one of the top three conversion points on the site.
The bigger unlock isn’t on the dashboard. It’s that the marketing lead now had a defensible answer when a partner asked “is the website working?” ‚Äî with numbers the agency couldn’t argue with because they came from her own definitions, her own tracker and her own audit.
Real business results
Metric
Year on year change
Online enquiries
+190% (529 YTD)
Commercial team enquiries
+233%
Private law enquiries
+62%
Web traffic
+8% YoY, +40% QoQ
Search volumes
+16% (21,938 YTD)
Private law press coverage
+208%
Share of voice
+319% (8.3%)
Hosting cost
53% to 83% monthly saving
Press coverage
+30% (126 mentions)
What this means if you're reading this
Most law firm websites don’t need rebuilding. Most of them need defining.
Define what a lead is. Define which audiences the site is actually for. Define which pages need to do the heavy lifting. Define what the year on year numbers mean and where they come from. Once those definitions are in place, the technical and creative decisions become straightforward.
The work that produced these results was practical. Wireframes instead of briefs. Hosting reviews instead of platform migrations. Content updates instead of content strategies. A year on year tracker maintained outside the agency’s own reporting, so the marketing lead always had a single sheet she could open in a meeting.
If you’re a marketing lead at a mid size firm and you’ve ever felt like your digital reports don’t match the reality of what’s coming through the door, this case is for you.
About this engagement
Eighteen month engagement. Three phases: audit, strategy, build oversight. Weekly review calls with the in-house marketing lead. Independent of the firm’s incumbent agency. Phased fixed fee work scoped against named deliverables, not a retainer.
For a confidential conversation about a similar engagement at your firm, get in touch.
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