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How BuckStone Reversed North & Company LLP’s SEO Decline and Increased Ranking Keywords 60% in 90 Days
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Figures are drawn from Semrush and Google Search Console over the reporting periods shown. They reflect keyword rankings, impressions and clicks — not leads, cases or revenue, which we did not measure. Search rankings fluctuate and are not guaranteed.
Client Overview
North & Company LLP is a multi-location law firm with several practice areas and multiple attorneys.
Through 2025, the firm’s organic visibility was sliding. It had lost roughly 16.9% of its ranking keywords over the year, and nothing about the trend suggested it would correct on its own.
The Challenge
By the start of 2026 the firm didn’t need routine SEO maintenance. It needed the decline reversed.
A year of erosion had left fewer pages ranking, thinner non-branded exposure, and individual attorney profiles that were nearly invisible in search. Automatically generated archive pages were diluting the site’s relevance, and the pages that should have carried the most authority — core practice-area and location pages — weren’t getting it.
The brief was specific: rebuild the search foundation, strengthen the firm’s service and attorney entities, and turn the trend line back up — without gimmicks, and without waiting a year to see whether it worked.
The Strategy
There was no single lever. The turnaround came from a coordinated set of changes across content, technical SEO, local SEO and structured data.
Content and on-page
- Optimized the firm’s core service and practice-area pages so each one clearly targeted its intended searches.
- Rewrote title tags and meta descriptions across priority pages to sharpen relevance and improve click-through.
- Added strategic internal links to concentrate authority on the pages that matter most.
Technical SEO and site structure
- Cleaned up the index by removing thin, automatically generated taxonomy archives that were competing with real pages.
- Consolidated that relevance back into the firm’s primary practice-area pages.
- Resolved technical issues that were holding pages back from ranking.
Local SEO
- Cleaned up location and local landing pages across the firm’s markets.
- Optimized the Google Business Profile presence tied to the firm’s offices.
Structured data
- Implemented LegalService structured data to describe the firm’s services to search engines.
- Added Person schema to individual attorney profiles, strengthening each attorney as a distinct entity.
Throughout, we monitored rankings, Search Console and on-site conversion behavior so the plan could adapt to what the data actually showed.
The Results
The firm began the engagement ranking for 337 keywords. Over the next three monthly reports that number climbed steadily — 372, then 412, then 538. That’s a 59.6% increase (which we round to about 60%) in roughly 90 days, reversing a decline that had been running for a year.
From decline to recovery
The shift is clearest with the two Semrush trend views one above the other. For most of 2024 and 2025 the line pointed down. Starting in early 2026, it turns and climbs. (On a narrow screen, swipe the charts sideways to see the full range.)
Two separate Semrush views at different zoom levels, shown one above the other — not a single stitched timeline.
Growth where it matters
More keywords only matter if they land where people actually click. They did. Measured year over year:
- Page 1 rankings: +109.8% — more than double the previous year’s Page 1 footprint.
- Positions 4–10: +240.9% — the biggest gains came in the part of Page 1 with the most room to rise.
- Top 3 rankings: +28.5% — growth at the very top, where competition is hardest.
Reaching new prospects, not just brand searches
A healthy recovery brings in people who don’t already know the firm. This one did: eight of the ten fastest-growing queries were non-branded — searches like “civil law attorney” and “tax lawyer” rather than the firm’s own name.
One caveat on the percentages below: several look enormous because they grew from a very small base (a query going from 7 impressions to 499, for instance). The meaningful signal isn’t the headline percentage — it’s that the firm started surfacing for high-intent, non-branded searches it wasn’t reaching before.
More clicks from nearly the same demand
Between the May and June reporting periods, organic clicks rose from 1.28K to 1.49K — up 16.99% — while impressions were essentially flat (down about 2.1%). The firm earned more clicks from roughly the same search demand, which is exactly what a 19.5% month-over-month improvement in click-through rate looks like in practice: better titles, better relevance, better positions.
Building Attorney Authority with Entity SEO
The turnaround wasn’t only sitewide. One of the clearest single-page wins came from an individual attorney’s profile after we added Person schema — structured data that tells Google exactly who the attorney is, what they do, and how they relate to the firm.
Over a 28-day comparison, that one profile’s Search Console numbers moved sharply:
Clicks rose from 5 to 20 (+300%) and impressions from 249 to 361 (+44.98%).
Two things to be precise about. First, that +300% applies to a single attorney profile, not the whole website — it’s a small-number result (5 clicks to 20), and we report it as a page-level entity-SEO win, not a sitewide metric. Second, we describe it as growth following the implementation of Person schema, alongside the firm’s other improvements — not as proof that schema alone caused it.
How the Pieces Fit Together
No single change turned this around, and it’s worth being clear about why it worked.
- Content made the firm’s most important pages unambiguously about the right searches.
- Technical SEO removed the thin, auto-generated pages competing with those real pages, and consolidated their relevance.
- Local SEO tightened the location pages and Google Business Profile presence across the firm’s markets.
- Structured data — LegalService and Person schema — helped Google read the firm’s services and its attorneys as distinct, credible entities.
Each pulls a different lever. Together they compound: cleaner structure lets good content rank, strong entities make that content more trustworthy, and local signals put it in front of the right people. That’s why the recovery showed up across the board — total keywords, Page 1 positions, non-branded queries, clicks and individual profiles — instead of in one isolated number. It’s the same coordinated approach behind our SEO work for law firms.
A year of decline, reversed in about 90 days. Ranking keywords up roughly 60%, Page 1 rankings up about 110% year over year, and new non-branded visibility pulling in prospects who didn’t already know the firm. These figures reflect the growth documented during this period — rankings move, and we’re not presenting 538 keywords as a permanent ceiling. What they do show is a clear, coordinated turnaround where routine maintenance would not have been enough.
Is Your Firm’s Search Visibility Sliding?
If your organic rankings have been drifting down, the fix is rarely one thing — it’s content, technical SEO, local signals and structured data working together. That’s the work BuckStone does. Let’s find what’s holding your visibility back.
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