How a Portland Personal Injury Firm Went From Page 4 to Position 2
Case inquiries grew from 9 to 47 per month in six months.
Where they started
When this firm came to us, it had been stuck on the fourth page of Google for “personal injury lawyer Portland Maine” for more than a year. Every new client came from referrals or paid ads, nothing organic. In a Portland legal market crowded with established firms and aggressive advertisers, being invisible in organic search meant leaving a steady stream of high-value cases on the table every single month.
The underlying problems were familiar. The firm’s website was a single-page-style brochure with thin content, no dedicated practice-area pages, and almost no backlinks. Google had little to understand and little reason to trust it. The firm also had a sparse Google Business Profile and only a handful of reviews, a serious disadvantage when prospective clients judge attorneys heavily on reputation.
How we approached it
Practice-area keyword mapping
We researched how injured people in the Portland area actually search, by injury type (car accidents, slip-and-fall, workplace injuries, wrongful death) and by intent, and mapped each cluster to a dedicated page.
Rebuild the site around what Google ranks
We restructured the site with individual practice-area and location pages, each answering the real questions a prospective client asks before calling a lawyer.
Earn legitimate authority
We built backlinks through guest posts on real legal and regional publications and citations on trusted directories, every link delivered with a live URL the firm could verify.
Own the local map
We optimized the Google Business Profile and put a steady, ethical review-generation system in place, since reviews drive both rankings and the decision to call.
What we actually did
Over the first month we delivered the keyword strategy, a 30-day roadmap, and the initial technical and on-page work: faster load times, clean structure, schema markup, and rewritten page titles and descriptions. We then built out practice-area pages one cluster at a time, each targeting the specific phrases injured Mainers use.
Authority came next. Each month we placed guest posts on relevant legal and New England regional sites and added citations to the Maine State Bar Association, Avvo, and other directories that matter for attorneys. Everything appeared in a monthly report listing each backlink, its publishing site, and a clickable URL, so the firm never had to take our word for the work.
In parallel, we optimized the Google Business Profile with complete categories, service descriptions, and photos, and rolled out a simple process for the firm to request reviews from satisfied clients.
The numbers that mattered
The firm’s core keyword climbed steadily, off page four within two months, onto page one by month four, and into position 2 by month six. By the end of the engagement, 16 of the 20 target keywords had reached the top ten, and the practice-area pages were ranking for dozens of long-tail searches the firm had never appeared for before.
The business impact was the part that mattered. Monthly case inquiries from organic search grew from 9 to 47, and because these were people actively searching for representation, they converted at a far higher rate than referral or ad traffic. The firm’s Google Business Profile calls and direction requests rose in step.
“We were stuck on page 4 for “personal injury lawyer Portland Maine” for over a year. Six months in, we hit position 2 and our case inquiries went from 9 to 47 per month. The monthly reports show exactly where every link was placed.”
What powered this campaign
Serving this market
This campaign served Portland, Maine. Explore how we work in this market:
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