Client results / Case study no. 01

Half the county walks in the door. The rest arrive through search.

How an elder law firm with four locations doubled the industry seminar benchmark, then built a brand new practice area that now ranks first in Google and gets named by AI assistants.

Practice areas

Estate Planning, Elder Law, Probate, Exploitation

Region

Southeast United States

Partnership since

April 2020

Results window

Aug 2025 to Jul 2026

Two front doors, feeding each other on purpose.

1,221

Workshop registrations

166

Consultations booked

$707K

Revenue generated

-26%

Cost per acquisition

What they hired us for

Educational workshop marketing

Paid social acquisition, registration landing pages, venue testing across five markets, and automated text and email confirmation sequences wired directly into the firm's case management system.

Advanced SEO, plus answer engine optimization

Technical audits, content silo architecture, county-level location pages, monthly authority content, article and FAQ schema, author bios, and optimization for AI assistants alongside traditional search.

Website hosting, maintenance, and buildout

Ongoing site management plus new practice area pages, a client care program section, and a password-protected client portal built to spec.

YouTube channel management

Channel setup and optimization, eighty short and long-form videos produced in the first ten months, and an in-office studio workflow.

Email marketing

Four to five newsletters every month with custom event promotion built in.

Managed social

About sixty posts a month across three platforms, with custom creative for firm milestones and events.

Review generation and Google Business Profile management

Independent programs for all four office locations, plus profile posts, Q and A, and response management.

Where they started

The seminar program worked, but it was expensive and inconsistent. Cost per registered household was running $68.44. Venues were chosen by availability rather than performance, and attendance swung between 23 and 89 percent with no clear reason why.

Online, the picture was worse. Three of the firm's four offices were nearly invisible, carrying ten Google reviews between them. And the practice area the firm most wanted to grow, elder exploitation and financial abuse, had no content, no rankings, and no pipeline behind it at all.

What we changed

01

Killed the venues that did not work

We tested five markets and were willing to lose. Three venues were cut outright after failing to perform, including one inland test that came in at $143 per registered household against a program average of $50. The budget moved to the rooms that earned it.

02

Took the sales pressure out of the room

The firm moved away from a harder closing approach and rebuilt the evaluation form into a longer, more diagnostic five-question version. Show rates climbed through the back half of the year, finishing at 62 and 69 percent at the two most recent events.

03

Built an entire practice area out of content

Elder exploitation went from nothing to a full content silo: location pages, monthly authority articles, schema markup, profile Q and A, and a video library. The firm now holds the top position for the core terms across its region.

04

Optimized for the answer, not just the ranking

As search moved toward AI-generated answers, we started optimizing for citation rather than clicks alone. The firm now carries a perfect visibility score across the assistants we track, and gets named when people ask them about elder care law in the state.

05

Wired the seminars into the case management system

Registrants flow through a custom webhook into the firm's case management platform, tagged by event, so attendance and conversion can actually be traced back to the room they came from rather than guessed at.

06

Built reputation per location, not per firm

Each office got its own review program rather than pooling everything into the flagship. The three satellite offices grew their combined review count by 130 percent, which is what makes a satellite office rank at all.

Twelve months of workshops

MarketEventsRegisteredAd spendCost / household
South county hub7404$17,664$43.72
Martin County7312$17,148$54.96
Flagship office6276$14,456$52.38
North market4213$10,048$47.17
Inland test, discontinued116$2,290$143.12
Total251,221$61,605$50.45

What it produced

Twenty-five events across five markets drew 1,221 registered households. Household attendance ran at 54 percent against an industry benchmark of 30, which means 664 households sat in a room and heard the firm present.

The firm's own case management data shows that 14 percent of seminar attendees have historically become clients. Applied to this year's attendance, that is 94 new matters and, at a blended estate planning and elder law case value, $707,000 in case value against $61,605 in advertising. Call it $653 to originate a matter.

Household attendance vs industry benchmark

30%54%

Getting people to register is the commodity. Getting them to actually show up is where seminar programs quietly fail. This one runs at nearly double the benchmark, and the two most recent events came in at 62 and 69 percent.

A room only pays once. A ranking pays every month.

The second front door

A practice area built from nothing

Two years ago the firm had no content, no rankings, and no case flow in elder exploitation. Today it holds the first result in its region for the terms families type when they suspect a parent is being taken advantage of. Average position moved from beyond 30 to 3.2 and has held there since.

The website works like a fifth location

About 600 people a year now reach out through the site on their own, 424 by form and another 179 by live chat. None needed a venue, a deposit, or a Saturday morning, and none carried a cost per lead.

The traffic compounds

Visits from search are up 73 percent year over year, and the actions that actually matter, the calls and the form fills, are up 120 percent. Unlike a paid campaign, none of that resets to zero at the start of the month.

The assistants name them

The firm is returned by name in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot across the tracked topic set, and three quarters of those mentions are favorable.

Methodology and attribution

Figures cover the twelve months ending July 2026, drawn from monthly campaign reporting, the firm's case management system, and analytics platforms. Client identity withheld by agreement. Full attribution available on request.

What would this look like in your markets?

The numbers in this brief came from a program that gets reviewed, adjusted, and rebuilt every month. If you want to see what that same system would look like against your practice areas, your geography, and your case values, that is a conversation worth having.

Let’s run your numbers

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