How an Indianapolis Law Firm Doubled Its Organic Search Presence in Under Four Months

The Challenge

When the firm engaged Raeva Media in mid-March, its website was working against it. A SEMrush site audit found 58 technical errors and more than 7,200 total issues — the kind of crawl and quality problems that quietly cap how many pages Google will index and rank.

On the visibility side, the firm was effectively invisible in its own city. Local visibility in the Indianapolis market sat at just 6.45%, and the site ranked for only 690 keywords, with a thin 14 in the coveted top-three positions. It was a solid practice with a digital presence that wasn’t pulling its weight — leaving new-client demand on the table for competitors to capture.

The Strategy

Raeva Media built the engagement around one idea: an organic foundation that compounds. Four workstreams ran in parallel.

• Fix the foundation first. We cleared the technical debt holding the site back — resolving errors, cutting warnings, and cleaning up the crawl so Google could reach and rank more of the site.
• Publish with intent. A steady content cadence (one blog per day) targeted the questions and terms real prospective clients search, expanding the firm’s footprint across the funnel rather than chasing a handful of head terms.
• Own the local market. Dedicated local SEO work targeted Indianapolis-specific searches — the queries most tightly correlated with local lead flow.
• Get cited by AI. As search shifts toward AI-generated answers, we tracked and worked to increase how often AI systems mention and cite the firm as a source.

The Results

Google Search Console (last three months vs. the prior three):

Metric	Before	After	Change
Total impressions	209K	535K	+156%
Total clicks	2.87K	4.62K	+61%
Average position	12.9	9.3	+3.6
Average CTR	1.4%	0.9%	see note

A note on CTR, in plain English: click-through rate dipped from 1.4% to 0.9% — not because performance dropped, but because the site now surfaces for far more searches, many of them new, top-of-funnel terms that naturally sit lower on the page. The healthy signal is that impressions and clicks both grew while average position improved. More reach, more clicks, better rankings.

Organic rankings (SEMrush, Mar 12 → Jul 1) nearly doubled, with the biggest gains in the competitive positions that actually drive clicks:

Google position	Mar 12	Jul 1	Change
Top 3	14	24	+10
4–10	49	135	+86
11–20	58	286	+228
21–50	193	455	+262
51–100	343	345	+2
AI Overviews	7	55	+48
Total keywords	690	1,350	≈2×

A July 2 domain snapshot showed an estimated 1.5K monthly organic visits and ~$3.5K in equivalent traffic value — of which 1.3K visits were non-branded, meaning people finding the firm without searching its name. That’s pure new-client demand.

Local visibility in Indianapolis climbed from 6.45% on April 1 to 22.84% by July 3 — more than a 3× increase, and the metric that most closely mirrors local lead flow, with 159 keywords now in the local top 20.

Technical site health (SEMrush Site Audit, mobile):

Audit metric	Mar 16	Jul 2	Change
Site health score	80	92	+12
Total errors	58	3	−55
Total warnings	6,143	800	−5,343
Total issues	7,240	1,627	−5,613
Pages crawled	144	199	+55

AI / LLM visibility (Mar → May 2026) moved in the same direction: mentions up 40% (10 → 14), citations roughly doubling (40 → 81), and cited pages up 50% (24 → 36). A portion of the May uplift reflects 10 new regional databases added to the calculation. The firm is increasingly the source AI answers point to.

Why It Matters

This is a compounding asset, not a rented one. Every improvement — cleaner site, more ranked keywords, stronger local presence — keeps working month after month, delivering qualified leads without paying per click. In under four months the firm’s organic visibility roughly doubled and its local presence more than tripled, building the kind of foundation paid channels can later amplify.

What’s Next

• Layer paid search on top of the organic base to accelerate signed cases while SEO keeps compounding.
• Deepen local dominance across Indianapolis-area search terms.
• Sustain the content and AI-visibility engine so rankings and citations keep climbing.