Case Study · Legal, Medical Malpractice (Atlanta, GA)
Davis Adams: From Search Invisibility to #1 in the Local Pack
278x Non-branded click growth vs. kickoff baseline (90 days ending June 2026)
Davis Adams is a boutique two-attorney medical malpractice firm in Atlanta that was nearly invisible in Google when the engagement began in September 2024: three out of every four clicks in the baseline search export came from people typing the firm's own name. Twenty-one months of technical rebuilding, a medical malpractice content engine, and sustained local search work changed that. By the 90 days ending June 2026, non-branded clicks had multiplied to hundreds of times the kickoff baseline, and the firm held the #1 Local Pack position for its primary local money keyword.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
Davis Adams is exactly the kind of firm searchers are looking for: two attorneys who handle only medical malpractice, with a documented results sheet topped by two ten million dollar recoveries. Google barely knew the firm existed. In the October 2024 baseline export, 75% of the site's few clicks were branded searches for the firm or its attorneys. The homepage averaged position 43.7 across 535 queries, and the firm's primary local money keyword sat on page 2.
The technical audit explained why. The site carried 184 not-indexed pages, 108 links missing anchor text, AMP pages that hurt conversion, review schema misapplied across the whole site, orphan pages, and a pile of 404s that still had backlinks pointing at them.
The competitive picture was harder still. The dominant incumbent in Atlanta medical malpractice holds roughly 16,000 backlinks on a domain that has been online since the 1990s, with a landmark Georgia Supreme Court case generating fresh citations every year. The strategy was honest about that from the first document: no promises of outranking a decades-old domain organically on any specific timeframe. Instead, the plan targeted the battlegrounds a boutique firm could actually win: the Local Pack, long-tail case-type queries, and the emerging layer of AI-generated answers.
The Work
What Was Done
Technical and mobile rebuild
The first months of the engagement rebuilt the mobile experience with a sticky navigation and click-to-call, removed the AMP pages, cleaned up the misapplied review schema, consolidated duplicate statute-of-limitations pages, and later closed out Core Web Vitals and accessibility improvements.
Reclaiming lost authority
An audit surfaced 247 backlinked URLs returning 404 errors. Each one was mapped to the right destination and redirected, so authority the firm had already earned stopped leaking away.
A content engine built for medical malpractice
A full content audit covered 43 case-type URLs and remapped 37 blog categories, followed by keyword-to-page mapping across the whole site. From that foundation, production scaled to roughly 38 case-type pages, around 30 Georgia location pages, and monthly blog batches. The firm's 59 documented case results were restructured into a repeatable case-results content format designed to perform in both classic search and AI answers.
Author entity and internal linking
The attorney author page was brought back into the index with Person schema, and an internal link map pointed 76 target keywords at the pages meant to rank for them.
Local search
Google Business Profile optimization, a structured review acquisition program, and citation cleanup across the major legal directories, including Justia, FindLaw, and Martindale-Hubbell.
Measurement ahead of the market
Multi-city position tracking on a 36-keyword set, a competitor gap analysis spanning 26 domains, and AI search visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini, before most firms had a name for that channel.
The Payoff
Results
All growth is shown relative to the client's kickoff baseline, with time windows as labeled. Baseline figures come from the Google Search Console export pulled at kickoff in October 2024; the after window is the 90 days ending early June 2026. Exact traffic figures and keywords are confidential to the client; verified data available on request.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Non-branded organic clicks | Kickoff baseline export (Oct 2024), 75% of all clicks branded | Roughly 278x the baseline (90 days ending June 2026) |
| Organic impressions | Kickoff baseline export (Oct 2024) | Roughly 30x the baseline (90 days ending June 2026) |
| Pages earning impressions | 59 | 131 |
| Impression-weighted average position | 40.9 | 12.3 |
| Primary local money keyword | Page 2, position 10 (Sept 2024) | #1 Local Pack (May 2026) |
| Keywords in Google's top 10 (SEMrush) | n/a | 619 of 1,960 tracked (May 2026) |
The local and AI layers grew alongside the rankings. SEMrush counted 125 Local Pack placements in May 2026, including #1 for both of the firm's primary local money queries. The Google Business Profile review and optimization program drove sustained growth in profile activity from August 2025 through January 2026. Performance data available on request. And as of January 2026 the site had earned 15 AI mentions with 143 pages cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. The engagement is ongoing.
Tools used: Google Search Console, SEMrush, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, WordPress, WP Rocket, WP All Import, Internal Link Juicer
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