SEO
Website Organization Best Practices For Law Firms
Reaching the top of the law firm search results can be intimidating. Focusing on site architecture is an essential step toward creating a top-ranked search presence.
Virtually every aspect of search optimization, from content to user experience, depends on a site architecture that makes it easy for site visitors to find what they’re looking for and is flexible enough to accommodate adding more topics should the need arise.
Accomplishing this requires a deep consideration of site navigation to make the important sections of the site one click to two clicks away from the homepage.
Website architecture is a part of what’s known as the internal linking structure and can also include how information is organized, which means the content.
Google’s John Mueller emphasized that internal linking is important.
“…internal linking is super critical for SEO.
…it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.”
Mueller also said that internal linking is an opportunity to tell Google which pages are important, thereby indicating what the site should rank for.
“You can decide to make things important where you earn the most money or you can make things important where you’re the strongest competitor or maybe you’re the weakest competitor.”
This article will introduce three fundamental elements of site architecture that can contribute to higher search performance.
Website Architecture: Page Organization And Links
Let’s take a few moments first to discuss website architecture and why the user experience (UX) segment is important for getting ranked.
The Importance Of Website Architecture To SEO
You already know that SEO content and your website structure should be constructed for people over search engines.
However, it just so happens that what is good for users is also good for Google.
So, all the most important aspects of an expertly crafted site architecture will contribute to a better user experience and make the site easy to understand for Google.
A well-organized website will be easy for users to get around.
From the homepage, they will be able to access a host of other resources that are located just a few clicks away.
And that point is important.
You don’t want to bury important webpages multiple clicks away from the homepage or not have anything on the homepage that links to them at all.
Google’s web crawler will have a hard time finding those pages, and the pages will likely not rank very well (and probably no one will ever actually see them).
Another benefit of well-organized website architecture is that the internal linking spreads PageRank around the website.
If your local service pages all link up one level to your main service page for bankruptcy, business, or whatever kind of law you practice, you are telling Google that that primary service page is important, optimized, and worth ranking highly.
So, now you know why you need to put the time into organizing a straightforward and tidy website architecture.
Aspects Of Effective Law Firm Website Architectures
It’s important for any business in any industry, but now, let’s look at how law firm websites should structure themselves for maximum organic results.
Main Navigation
Your website’s main navigation must be concise and clear in its layout since that is what potential clients will use to get around your site to see your services.
You must organize the navigation in a logical, top-down way. A “Services” or “Practice Areas” tab should drop down to a menu showing organized columns of your legal specialties.
Any kind of “About Us” or “Our Firm” tab can break down into a few sections that perhaps provide a history of the firm or state your organization’s mission.
Law firms are known as service-based organizations.
Instead of hundreds of product pages with little descriptions, your website should ideally feature:
- A homepage.
- As many main service pages as necessary to describe what your firm does.
- An informational content section.
- A contact page.
- An “About Us” section where you profile your attorneys and profess your firm’s values and mission statement.
Those are the essential elements of a quality law firm website, but how do you structure them on the site itself and link among them?
URL Naming Conventions And Structure
I have reviewed the importance of getting your main navigation and internal links correct.
Next is an overview of the importance of creating a simple but informative URL structure for the pages on your website.
It is vital to get this right because you aim to tell human users and search engines alike what your pages are about through the structure of your pages’ URLs.
The general advice on creating URLs is to remove excess words and include some keywords to be as descriptive as possible in the least amount of words.
Your URLs should reveal what will be found on that page.
Keep it simple.
Look at these examples:
For a blog post, make the URL a simpler version of the actual title.
So, your post entitled “10 Great Ways To Succeed In Business On A Budget” might be:
While you’re at it, be sure to add canonical tags to your URLs on the back end.
That way, if there’s a chance a page could be picked up using multiple terms, Google knows where to direct people.
Information Architecture: Content Organization
Create A Descriptive And Helpful Homepage
The homepage needs to do many things, such as inspire trust, make it easy to contact the business, plus serve as an effective entrance to the rest of the website.
How is this accomplished?
Focusing on what will help users the most is the best approach to creating the best home page.
There are four communication goals:
- Communicate what the general topic of the law practice is (i.e. of the entire site)
- Describe what the top major topics of the business are
- Make it easy to reach all the major specific sections of the website
- Use keywords that users would use
General Topic of the Law Practice
Businesses are said to be organized by verticals. A vertical market is simply what kind of business it is serving.
So the first goal of the homepage is to communicate what vertical market the law firm serves.
In the legal profession, typical verticals can be:
- Bankruptcy law.
- Corporate law.
- Criminal defense.
- Estate planning.
- Family law.
- Etc.
A law firm that is focused on family law can use that as the description for the topic of the entire site. Because most law firms serve a geographic region, that information is also used as part of the general description, the overall topic of the website.
So if the website is a family law attorney based in Springfield, Massachusetts, then the home page of that site should communicate that information from the title tag of that webpage what that vertical market is.
Family Law Attorneys - Springfield MA - Example Law Firm
The job of the homepage is to rank for that general term. It’s the job of the inner pages to rank for the more specific areas like child custody, divorce, pre-marital agreements, etc.
Describe Major Topics of the Business
The second goal is to describe the different areas that the business serves, for example:
For example, suppose the website is about personal injury in City A.
But now, it must also describe very briefly (and even link to) the specialties within that personal injury vertical.
Examples of Specialties Within the Personal Injury Vertical
- Motorcycle injury.
- Medical malpractice.
- Car accidents.
- Brain injury, etc.
Link to Major Sections of Site From Homepage
Third, it’s super important to link to as many of the inner sections of the site that correspond to the specialties within the legal vertical that the law firm serves.
This can be done from the top of the page navigation menu. And it can also be accomplished from somewhere within the body of the homepage.
Keywords
Top takeaways about keywords and the homepage:
- Always use the words that your potential clients tend to use.
- Organize the webpage according to the most popular reasons why clients tend to call. If most calls are about slip and fall, list that as the first practice area. If the next most popular reason for calling is a brain injury, then make that the second section. This makes it easy for most site visitors to find what they’re looking for.
- Use images that contribute to communicating your message (this breaks up the page and makes it easy to scan).
- If possible, A/B test using user experience analytics like Microsoft Clarity to identify pain points that site visitors might encounter. An example of a pain point can be if site visitors are “rage-clicking” certain links or areas where they expect to find links.
More reading on keyword research:
Client Reviews
Next, remember that you are a service-based company that must rely on customer reviews to gain traction in your geographic area.
You should devote a block of your homepage to displaying five-star customer reviews with brief blurbs praising the legal services you provided.
Those reviews will help to generate trust among new visitors to your site.
Homepage Internal Links
Related to the main navigation is the internal linking you do in your homepage content.
You already know that homepages should not be loaded with written content, but small blocks can briefly describe your service areas and link to them using keywords.
That internal link structure is vital. Everyone knows homepages are important; Google does, too.
The pages you link to from there are going to be easily crawlable. They will also be easy for actual human users to get to.
Color Scheme
Colors matter on a website.
The use of colors can affect the choices that site visitors make.
- Visually contrasting colors are best for call-to-action elements.
- Blue conveys trustworthiness and authority.
- Always check if the color choice has sufficient contrast for color-blind site visitors.
Law firm websites looking to convey auras of professionalism should avoid bold, vibrant colors in favor of lighter schemes.
Create Above-The-Fold Content
Website architecture is generally considered internal linking, but I include information organization into the site’s architecture as well.
Above the fold is a way of saying in the main block of visible content.
With a law firm website, you don’t want to get too fancy or obtuse with presenting your content.
Users come to your site for help with their legal troubles, and those people are probably worried and hoping they can trust you to help them.
Reward their effort in visiting your site by making it clear that you are there for them.
Do this by presenting your most important content in the first block of content that is visible to site visitors.
Don’t make users dig around to find the information they need, like that service page explaining how you have helped thousands of people declare bankruptcy or that blog post showcasing your knowledge of recent tax-resolution cases.
Depending on how your homepage is organized, present some links to those service pages, a contact form, or some reviews to establish trust right away.
Sticky content is a good idea, as well.
Videos, forms, and surveys get people to stick around your homepage longer than they otherwise might, so don’t rule out those elements.
Whatever you feel is most important to your firm, make it one of the first things users see upon arriving on your homepage.
Essential information presented above the fold is necessary for well-made website architecture.
Final Thoughts
A law firm that performs quality work on behalf of clients needs to be able to reach every site visitor and convert them into a client.
The best way to accomplish that is to organize the information on the website in a manner that makes it easy for site visitors to quickly scan the homepage and find the exact topic.
That makes it easy for search engines to identify what the entire site is about and, consequently, may begin ranking the inner pages for the more granular search queries.
Identifying the best user experience for site navigation will always make it easier for the site to achieve maximum search performance.
More Resources:
Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock
SEO
7 Strategies to Lower Cost-Per-Lead
SEO for personal injury law firms is notorious for how expensive and competitive it can be. Even with paid ads, it’s common for every click from the ad to your website to cost hundreds of dollars:
When spending this kind of money per click, the cost of gaining new cases can quickly skyrocket. Since SEO focuses on improving your visibility in the unpaid areas of search engines, you can cut costs and get more leads if you’re savvy enough.
Here are the strategies I’ve used to help new and boutique injury and accident law firms compete with the big guns for a fraction of the cost.
Recommendation
Unlike many other local service businesses, personal injury law firms need to work harder to earn trust and credibility online.
This applies to earning trust from humans and search engines alike. Google has a 170-page document called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. This document contains two frameworks law firms can use to help Google and website visitors trust them more.
The first is “your money or your life,” or YMYL. Google uses this term to describe topics that may present a high risk of harm to searchers. Generally, any health, finances, safety, or welfare information falls into this category. Legal information is also a YMYL topic since acting on the wrong information could cause serious damage or harm to searchers.
The second framework is EEAT, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
This framework applies more broadly to all industries and is about sharing genuine information written by experts and authorities for a given topic. Both YMYL and EEAT consider the extent to which content is accurate, honest, safe, and reliable, with the ultimate goal of delivering trustworthy information.
Here are the things I implement for my personal injury clients as a priority to improve the trustworthiness of their online presence:
- Prominently display star ratings from third-party platforms, like Google or FaceBook reviews.
- Show your accreditations, certifications, awards, and the stats on cases you’ve won.
- If government-issued ratings or licenses apply to your practice areas, show those too.
- Add contact information like your phone number and address in the footer of every page.
- Share details of every member of your firm, highlighting their expertise and cases they’ve won.
- Add links to your professional profiles online, including social media and law-related listings.
- Include photos of your team and offices, results, case studies, and success stories.
Generally speaking, your Google Business listing can account for over 50% of the leads you get from search engines. That’s because it can display prominently in the maps pack, like so: 
Without a Google Business listing, your firm will not show up here or within Google Maps since it is managed completely separately from your website. Think of your Google listing like a social profile, but optimize it like a website. Make sure you create one of these for each location where you have an on-the-ground presence, ideally an established office.
Take the time to fill out all the details it asks for, especially:
- Your firm’s name, address, and phone number
- Your services with a description of each
- Images of your premises, inside and outside the office
And anything else you see in these sections: 
Also, make it a regular habit to ask your clients for reviews.
Reviews are crucial for law firms. They are the number one deciding factor when someone is ready to choose a law firm to work with. While you can send automated text messages with a link to your Google profile, you’ll likely have a higher success rate if you ask clients in person while they’re in your office or by calling them.
I’ve also seen success when adding a request for a review on thank you pages.
For instance, if you ever send an electronic contract or invoice out to clients, once they’ve signed or paid, you can send them to a thank you page that also asks for a review. Here’s my favorite example of this from a local accountant. You can emulate this concept for your own website too:
Recommendation
The most common way that people search for legal services is by searching for things like “personal injury lawyer near me” or “car accident lawyer new york”.
For instance, take a look at the monthly search volume on these “near me” keywords for an injury and accident lawyer:
People also commonly search at a state, city, and even suburb level for many legal services, especially if it’s an area of law that differs based on someone’s location. To optimize your website architecture for location keywords like these, it’s best practice to create dedicated pages for each location and then add sub-pages for each of your practice areas in that location.
For example, here’s what that would look like:
The corresponding URL structure would look like this:
- /new-york
- /new-york/car-accident-lawyer
- /new-york/personal-injury-lawyer
- /new-york/work-injury-lawyer
Pro Tip:
Check out my guide on franchise SEO for local and national growth strategies if you have many offices nationwide.
A topic hub is a way to organize and link between related articles on a website. It’s sometimes referred to as a topic cluster because it groups together pages that are related to the same subject matter.
If you run a small firm or your marketing budget is tight, I recommend focusing on a single area of law and turning your website into a topical hub. You can do this by publishing different types of content, such as how-to guides, answering common questions, and creating landing pages for each of your services.
For example, if you currently offer services for immigration law, criminal defense, and personal injury compensation, each appeals to very different audience segments. They’re also very competitive when it comes to marketing, so focusing your efforts on one of these is ideal to make your budget go further.
Most areas of law are naturally suited to building out topic clusters. Every practice area tends to follow a similar pattern in how people search at different stages in their journey.
- Top-of-funnel: When people are very early in their journey, and unaware of what type of lawyer they need, they ask a lot of high-level questions like “what is a car accident attorney”.
- Mid-funnel: When people are in the middle of their journey, they tend to ask more nuanced questions or look for more detailed information, like “average settlement for neck injury”.
- Bottom-of-funnel: When people are ready to hire an attorney, they search for the practice area + “attorney” or “lawyer”. Sometimes they include a location but nothing else. For example, “personal injury lawyer”.
This pattern applies to most areas of law. To apply it to your website, enter your main practice area and a few variations into Keywords Explorer:
Make sure to include a few different variations like how I’ve added different ways people search for lawyers (lawyer, attorney, solicitor) and also for other related terms (compensation, personal injury, settlement).
If you check the Matching terms report, you’ll generally get a big list that you’ll need to filter to make it more manageable when turning it into a content plan.
For example, there are 164,636 different keyword variations of how people search for personal injury lawyers. These generate over 2.4 million searches per month in the US.
You can make the list more manageable by removing keywords with no search volume. Just set the minimum volume to 1:
You can also use the include filter to only see keywords containing your location for your location landing pages:
There are also a number of distinct sub-themes relevant to your area of law. To isolate these, you can use the Cluster by Terms side panel. For instance, looking at our list of injury-related keywords, you can easily spot specific body parts that emerge as sub-themes:
Other sub-themes include:
- How the accident happened (at work, in a car)
- How much compensation someone can get (compensation, average, settlement)
- How severe the injury was (traumatic)
Each of these sub-themes can be turned into a cluster. Here’s what it might look like for the topic of neck injuries:
People tend to ask a lot of questions related to most areas of law. As you go through the exercise of planning out your topic clusters, you should also consider building out a knowledge hub where people can more easily navigate your FAQs and find the answers they’re looking for.
Use the knowledge base exclusively for question-related content. You can find the most popular questions people ask after an accident or injury in the Matching terms > Questions tab:
You can also easily see clusters of keywords for the top-of-funnel and mid-funnel questions people ask by checking the Clusters by Parent Topic report. It groups these keywords into similar themes and each group can likely be covered in a single article.
Here’s an example of how Smith’s Lawyers has created a knowledge base with a search feature and broad categories to allow people to find answers to all their questions more easily.
The easier you make it for people to find answers on your website, the less inclined they are to go back to Google and potentially visit a competitor’s website instead. It also increases their interaction time with your brand, giving you a higher chance of being front-of-mind when they are ready to speak to a lawyer about their case.
Some areas of law lend themselves to certain types of interactive content. An obvious example is a compensation calculator for injury and accident claims. Doing a very quick search, there are over 1,500 keywords on this topic searched over 44,000 times a month in the US.
The best part is how insanely low the competition is on these keywords:
Keyword difficulty is graded on a 100-point scale, so single-digit figures mean there’s virtually no competition to contend with. It’s not all that hard to create a calculator either.
There are many low-cost, no-code tools on the market, like Outgrow, that allow you to create a simple calculator in no time. Other types of interactive content you could consider are:
- Quiz-style questionnaires: great for helping people decide if they need a lawyer for their case.
- Chatbots: to answer people’s questions in real-time.
- Assessments: to pre-qualify leads before they book a meeting with you.
- Calendar or countdown clock: to help people keep track of imminent deadlines.
Backlinks are like the internet’s version of citations. They are typically dark blue, underlined text that connects you to a different page on the internet. In SEO, links play a very important role for a few different reasons:
- Links are how search engines discover new content. Your content may not be discovered if you have no links pointing to it.
- Links are like votes in a popularity contest. The more you have from authoritative websites in your industry, the more they elevate your brand.
- Links also help search engines understand what different websites are about. Getting links from other law-related websites will help build relevancy to your brand.
Think of link building as a scaled-down version of PR. It’s often easier and cheaper to implement. However, it is very time-intensive in most cases. If you’re doing your own SEO, hats off to you!
However, I’d recommend you consider partnering with an agency that specializes in law firm SEO and can handle link building for you. Typically, agencies like these will have existing relationships with law-related websites where they can feature your brand, which will be completely hands-off for you.
For instance, Webris has a database of thousands of legal websites on which they have been able to feature their clients. If you don’t have an existing database to work with and you’re doing SEO yourself, here are some alternative tactics to consider.
Expert quotes
Many journalists and writers benefit from quoting subject-matter experts in their content. You could be such an expert, and every time someone quotes you, ask for a link back to your website. Check out platforms like Muck Rack or SourceBottle, where reporters post callouts for specific experts they’re looking to get quotes from or feature in their articles.
Guest posting
If you like writing content, you can alternatively create content for other people’s websites and include links back to your site. This approach is more time intensive. To make the effort worth it, reach out to websites with an established audience so you get some additional brand exposure too.
Updating outdated content
If you’re checking out other people’s legal content and you ever notice a mistake or outdated information, you could reach out and offer to help them correct it in exchange for a link to your website.
Naturally, you’ll need to recommend updates for sections of content that relate to your practice areas for this to work and for the link to make sense in the context of the content.
Final thoughts
SEO for personal injury lawyers is one of the most competitive niches. High advertising costs and high competition levels make it difficult for new or small firms to compete against industry giants.
As a new or emerging firm, you can take a more nimble approach and outrank the big firms for low competition keywords they haven’t optimized their websites for. It’s all about doing thorough research to uncover these opportunities in your practice area.
Want to know more? Reach out on LinkedIn.
SEO
Google Ads To Phase Out Enhanced CPC Bidding Strategy
Google has announced plans to discontinue its Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
This change, set to roll out in stages over the coming months, marks the end of an era for one of Google’s earliest smart bidding options.
Dates & Changes
Starting October 2024, new search and display ad campaigns will no longer be able to select Enhanced CPC as a bidding strategy.
However, existing eCPC campaigns will continue to function normally until March 2025.
From March 2025, all remaining search and display ad campaigns using Enhanced CPC will be automatically migrated to manual CPC bidding.
Advertisers who prefer not to change their campaigns before this date will see their bidding strategy default to manual CPC.
Impact On Display Campaigns
No immediate action is required for advertisers running display campaigns with the Maximize Clicks strategy and Enhanced CPC enabled.
These campaigns will automatically transition to the Maximize Clicks bidding strategy in March 2025.
Rationale Behind The Change
Google introduced Enhanced CPC over a decade ago as its first Smart Bidding strategy. The company has since developed more advanced machine learning-driven bidding options, such as Maximize Conversions with an optional target CPA and Maximize Conversion Value with an optional target ROAS.
In an email to affected advertisers, Google stated:
“These strategies have the potential to deliver comparable or superior outcomes. As we transition to these improved strategies, search and display ads campaigns will phase out Enhanced CPC.”
What This Means for Advertisers
This update signals Google’s continued push towards more sophisticated, AI-driven bidding strategies.
In the coming months, advertisers currently relying on Enhanced CPC will need to evaluate their options and potentially adapt their campaign management approaches.
While the change may require some initial adjustments, it also allows advertisers to explore and leverage Google’s more advanced bidding strategies, potentially improving campaign performance and efficiency.
FAQ
What change is Google implementing for Enhanced CPC bidding?
Google will discontinue the Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
- New search and display ad campaigns can’t select eCPC starting October 2024.
- Existing campaigns will function with eCPC until March 2025.
- From March 2025, remaining eCPC campaigns will switch to manual CPC bidding.
How will this update impact existing campaigns using Enhanced CPC?
Campaigns using Enhanced CPC will continue as usual until March 2025. After that:
- Search and display ad campaigns employing eCPC will automatically migrate to manual CPC bidding.
- Display campaigns with Maximize Clicks and eCPC enabled will transition to the Maximize Clicks strategy in March 2025.
What are the recommended alternatives to Enhanced CPC?
Google suggests using its more advanced, AI-driven bidding strategies:
- Maximize Conversions – Can include an optional target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
- Maximize Conversion Value – Can include an optional target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
These strategies are expected to deliver comparable or superior outcomes compared to Enhanced CPC.
What should advertisers do in preparation for this change?
Advertisers need to evaluate their current reliance on Enhanced CPC and explore alternatives:
- Assess how newer AI-driven bidding strategies can be integrated into their campaigns.
- Consider transitioning some campaigns earlier to adapt to the new strategies gradually.
- Leverage tools and resources provided by Google to maximize performance and efficiency.
This proactive approach will help manage changes smoothly and explore potential performance improvements.
Featured Image: Vladimka production/Shutterstock
SEO
The 25 Biggest Traffic Losers in SaaS
We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024…
…and those that work the worst.
In this article, we’re looking at the companies that lost the greatest amount of estimated organic traffic, year over year.
- We analyzed 1,600 SaaS companies and used the Ahrefs API to pull estimated monthly organic traffic data for August 2023 and August 2024.
- Companies were ranked by estimated monthly organic traffic loss as a percentage of their starting traffic.
- We’ve filtered out traffic loss caused by website migrations and URL redirects and set a minimum starting traffic threshold of 10,000 monthly organic pageviews.
This is a list of the SaaS companies that had the greatest estimated monthly organic traffic loss from August 2023 to August 2024.
Sidenote.
Our organic traffic metrics are estimates, and not necessarily reflective of the company’s actual traffic (only they know that). Traffic loss is not always bad, and there are plenty of reasons why companies may choose to delete pages and sacrifice keyword rankings.
| Rank | Company | Change | Monthly Organic Traffic 2023 | Monthly Organic Traffic 2024 | Traffic Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Causal | -99.52% | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 |
| 2 | Contently | -97.16% | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 |
| 3 | Datanyze | -95.46% | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 |
| 4 | BetterCloud | -94.14% | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 |
| 5 | Ricotta Trivia | -91.46% | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 |
| 6 | Colourbox | -85.43% | 67,883 | 9,888 | -57,995 |
| 7 | Tabnine | -84.32% | 160,328 | 25,142 | -135,186 |
| 8 | AppFollow | -83.72% | 35,329 | 5,753 | -29,576 |
| 9 | Serverless | -80.61% | 37,896 | 7,348 | -30,548 |
| 10 | UserGuiding | -80.50% | 115,067 | 22,435 | -92,632 |
| 11 | Hopin | -79.25% | 19,581 | 4,064 | -15,517 |
| 12 | Writer | -78.32% | 2,460,359 | 533,288 | -1,927,071 |
| 13 | NeverBounce by ZoomInfo | -77.91% | 552,780 | 122,082 | -430,698 |
| 14 | ZoomInfo | -76.11% | 5,192,624 | 1,240,481 | -3,952,143 |
| 15 | Sakari | -73.76% | 27,084 | 7,106 | -19,978 |
| 16 | Frase | -71.39% | 83,569 | 23,907 | -59,662 |
| 17 | LiveAgent | -70.03% | 322,613 | 96,700 | -225,913 |
| 18 | Scoro | -70.01% | 51,701 | 15,505 | -36,196 |
| 19 | accessiBe | -69.45% | 111,877 | 34,177 | -77,700 |
| 20 | Olist | -67.51% | 204,298 | 66,386 | -137,912 |
| 21 | Hevo Data | -66.96% | 235,427 | 77,781 | -157,646 |
| 22 | TextGears | -66.68% | 19,679 | 6,558 | -13,121 |
| 23 | Unbabel | -66.40% | 45,987 | 15,450 | -30,537 |
| 24 | Courier | -66.03% | 35,300 | 11,992 | -23,308 |
| 25 | G2 | -65.74% | 4,397,226 | 1,506,545 | -2,890,681 |
For each of the top five companies, I ran a five-minute analysis using Ahrefs Site Explorer to understand what may have caused their traffic decline.
Possible explanations include Google penalties, programmatic SEO, and AI content.
| Causal | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 | -99.52% |
| Organic pages | 5,868 | 547 | -5,321 | -90.68% |
| Organic keywords | 222,777 | 4,023 | -218,754 | -98.19% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 8,969 | 26 | -8943 | -99.71% |
Causal is a finance platform for startups. They lost an estimated 99.52% of their organic traffic as a result of a Google manual penalty:
This story might sound familiar. Causal became internet-famous for an “SEO heist” that saw them clone a competitor’s sitemap and use generative AI to publish 1,800 low-quality articles like this:
Google caught wind and promptly issued a manual penalty. Causal lost hundreds of rankings and hundreds of thousands of pageviews, virtually overnight:
As the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar shows, the offending blog posts are now 301 redirected to the company’s (now much better, much more human-looking) blog homepage:
| Contently | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 | -97.16% |
| Organic pages | 32,752 | 1,121 | -31,631 | -96.58% |
| Organic keywords | 94,706 | 12,000 | -82,706 | -87.33% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 1,874 | 68 | -1,806 | -96.37% |
Contently is a content marketing platform. They lost 97% of their estimated organic traffic by removing thousands of user-generated pages.
Almost all of the website’s traffic loss seems to stem from deindexing the subdomains used to host their members’ writing portfolios:
A quick Google search for “contently writer portfolios” suggests that the company made the deliberate decision to deindex all writer portfolios by default, and only relist them once they’ve been manually vetted and approved:
We can see that these portfolio subdomains are now 302 redirected back to Contently’s homepage:
And looking at the keyword rankings Contently lost in the process, it’s easy to guess why this change was necessary. It looks like the free portfolio subdomains were being abused to promote CBD gummies and pirated movies:
| Datanyze | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 | -95.46% |
| Organic pages | 1,168,889 | 377,142 | -791,747 | -67.74% |
| Organic keywords | 2,565,527 | 712,270 | -1,853,257 | -72.24% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 7,475 | 177 | -7,298 | -97.63% |
Datanyze provides contact data for sales prospecting. They lost 96% of their estimated organic traffic, possibly as a result of programmatic content that Google has since deemed too low quality to rank.
Looking at the Site Structure report in Ahrefs, we can see over 80% of the website’s organic traffic loss is isolated to the /companies and /people subfolders:
Looking at some of the pages in these subfolders, it looks like Datanyze built thousands of programmatic landing pages to help promote the people and companies the company offers data for:
As a result, the majority of Datanyze’s dropped keyword rankings are names of people and companies:
Many of these pages still return 200 HTTP status codes, and a Google site search still shows hundreds of indexed pages:
In this case, not all of the programmatic pages have been deleted—instead, it’s possible that Google has decided to rerank these pages into much lower positions and drop them from most SERPs.
| BetterCloud | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 | -94.14% |
| Organic pages | 1,643 | 504 | -1,139 | -69.32% |
| Organic keywords | 107,817 | 5,806 | -102,011 | -94.61% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 1,550 | 32 | -1,518 | -97.94% |
Bettercloud is a SaaS spend management platform. They lost 94% of their estimated organic traffic around the time of Google’s November Core Update:
Looking at the Top Pages report for BetterCloud, most of the traffic loss can be traced back to a now-deleted /academy subfolder:
The pages in the subfolder are now deleted, but by using Ahrefs’ Page Inspect feature, it’s possible to look at a snapshot of some of the pages’ HTML content.
This short, extremely generic article on “How to Delete an Unwanted Page in Google Docs” looks a lot like basic AI-generated content:
This is the type of content that Google has been keen to demote from the SERPs.
Given the timing of the website’s traffic drop (a small decline after the October core update, and a precipitous decline after the November core update), it’s possible that Google demoted the site after an AI content generation experiment.
| Ricotta Trivia | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 | -91.46% |
| Organic pages | 218 | 231 | 13 | 5.96% |
| Organic keywords | 83,988 | 37,640 | -46,348 | -55.18% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 3,124 | 275 | -2,849 | -91.20% |
Ricotta Trivia is a Slack add-on that offers icebreakers and team-building games. They lost an estimated 91% of their monthly organic traffic, possibly because of thin content and poor on-page experience on their blog.
Looking at the Site Structure report, 99.7% of the company’s traffic loss is isolated to the /blog subfolder:
Digging into the Organic keywords report, we can see that the website has lost hundreds of first-page rankings for high-volume keywords like get to know you questions, funny team names, and question of the day:
While these keywords seem strongly related to the company’s core business, the article content itself seems very thin—and the page is covered with intrusive advertising banners and pop-ups (a common hypothesis for why some sites were negatively impacted by recent Google updates):
The site seems to show a small recovery on the back of the August 2024 core update—so there may be hope yet.
Final thoughts
All of the data for this article comes from Ahrefs. Want to research your competitors in the same way? Check out Site Explorer.
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