Ontario Family Law Firm, multi-office
The law firm that stopped buying every click
The situation
Referrals still bring most clients, but research now starts online and the paid search auction has been getting more expensive since 2019. A seven-year client needed a steadier flow of inquiries that did not depend on one channel.
What we did
- A page for every office and a page for every practice area, so the site matched how people search.
- Call and form tracking on every channel, so each was judged on inquiries rather than clicks.
- In December 2025 the program was expanded with work aimed at AI search visibility: extractable answers at the top of pages, structured data that matches the visible text, and consistent entity descriptions off-site.
What moved
Top-3 rankings went from 14 in October 2025 to 66 in April 2026 and 131 in October 2026. Keywords cited inside Google AI Overviews went from 2 to 33 to 37 over the same dates, and the share of AI Overview answers that cite the firm rose from 2.9% to 7.5% between February and October 2026. Estimated organic traffic rose 82%, from 820 to 1,491 a month, with the value of that traffic up 3.4x. By the firm’s own call tracking, organic leads were up 89% in the first half of 2026 versus the previous six months.
What we would do differently
Baseline the AI citations before the December expansion rather than after, and start the entity work a year earlier.
A page for every office and every practice area, then the entity work.
Source: Semrush, Canadian database, monthly, as of October 15, 2026, Google only. Estimated visits are estimates. Leads come from client call tracking and Search Console. [Screenshots of the real AI answers naming this client go here.]
Written by Michael Landry, Founder and Head of AEO.