SEO case study
From Domain Rating 0 to the top of Edmonton's map pack.
When BV Law came to Bowrand in April 2024, the website had a Domain Rating of 0, two referring domains and almost no organic traffic. Over the course of our SEO program it grew to own Edmonton's local map pack and lead the city's most competitive criminal-defence searches.
The results
2.5
average Google Maps rank across Edmonton (from 8.4)1,300+
monthly organic visitors (from near zero)44
keywords ranking in Google's top 3At a glance
The engagement.
| Engagement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Industry | Legal, criminal defence |
| Market | Edmonton, Alberta |
| Engagement | Ongoing since April 2024 |
| Services | Local SEO, content, links, technical |
The growth system
Four levers, engineered to compound.
No single tactic ranks a brand-new firm against long-established competitors. We built four disciplines to reinforce one another (local visibility, intent-matched content, hard-won authority and a clean technical base) and ran them as one system.
Local SEO
Google Business Profile, citations and the Edmonton map pack.
Learn moreContent marketing
Intent-matched pages for every offence the firm defends.
Learn moreLink building
Quality-first links and digital PR to build domain authority.
Learn moreLaw firm marketing
Legal strategy tuned to how real clients search and decide.
Learn moreApril 2024 · Where we started
Starting conditions.
BV Law approached us with a freshly built website and effectively no search footprint. Here is exactly where the domain stood when we started.
| Factor | Starting point |
|---|---|
| Niche and market | Criminal defence law |
| Target geography | Edmonton, Alberta (and surrounding region) |
| Target language | English |
| Monthly organic traffic | Negligible (≈ 0 sessions) |
| Domain Rating (Ahrefs) | 0 |
| Referring domains | 2 |
| Keywords in top 3 | 6 |
| Average map rank (city grid) | 8.4 (July 2024 baseline) |
| Monthly budget | ≈ $3,500 CAD |
The audit
Main issues discovered.
Our cooperation began with a detailed SEO audit and a long-term strategy. The core problem was simple: in a market dominated by long-established firms, BV Law had no authority, no local presence and no pages built to capture how people actually search for a criminal lawyer.
Authority and backlinks
Domain Rating of 0, with no off-site authority.
- Only 2 referring domains pointing to the site
- No proactive link building or digital PR had ever been done
- Minimal presence in legal directories and local citations
Content and targeting
No dedicated, optimized pages for core practice areas.
- Pages not aligned to local intent (a practice-area “… lawyer” search plus the city name)
- Lawyer bio pages had no search visibility
- Thin coverage of high-intent offence types
Local and maps
An average Google Maps rank of 8.4 across the city grid.
- Ranked 8th–11th in most of the city, outside the 3-pack
- Google Business Profile under-optimized
- Weak visibility beyond the immediate downtown core
Technical and on-page
Title tags and metadata were not built for target keywords.
- Limited internal linking between practice areas and bios
- No structured data to support rich results
- New site with no established crawl and indexation history
Team
Based on the audit, we assigned a dedicated team: an SEO strategist (lead), a legal-content writer, a link-building specialist and a developer for technical and on-page work. We worked alongside BV Law’s lawyers and intake staff so every page reflected how real clients search and what they need to know when they’re facing a charge.
Competitor and market analysis
Criminal-defence search in the city is owned by firms with years of accumulated domain authority. We mapped the firms ranking for the core money terms (criminal defence lawyer, impaired driving lawyer and sexual assault lawyer searches in the local market) and analyzed the gaps in their content depth, local signals and backlink profiles. The opportunity was clear: most competitors relied on thin, generic practice-area pages and a modest local presence. With purpose-built, intent-matched pages and a stronger map-pack footprint, a newcomer could win.
Prioritized action plan
With a focused budget of about $3,500 a month, we ranked every task by expected impact. Local visibility (Google Business Profile and the map pack) and intent-matched practice-area pages came first, because they convert the highest for legal searches. Authority building (links, digital PR and citations) ran in parallel to lift the entire domain from its Domain Rating of 0.
Local SEO and Google Business Profile
Local intent is everything for a law firm: people search “criminal lawyer near me” the moment they’re in trouble. We rebuilt and optimized the Google Business Profile, cleaned up and expanded local citations, aligned NAP data across directories and tuned the on-site local signals. We tracked progress with a geo-grid scan across the entire metro area, not just a single point.
- Before. On 10 July 2024 the average map rank was 8.4. The grid was almost entirely orange and red (ranks 8–11).
- After. On 2 June 2026 the average map rank was 2.5: a near-solid green grid of #1–#3 placements across the city.
Practice-area content build-out
We built and optimized a dedicated, intent-matched page for each core offence the firm defends, mirroring the language people actually search:
- Sexual offence lawyers
- Impaired driving and immediate roadside sanctions
- Drug offences
- Traffic violations and ticket defence
- Fraud and workplace investigations
Each page was written to match local search intent, structured for featured snippets and internally linked to the relevant lawyer bios. These pages went from non-existent to ranking on page one, several of them at #1.
Authority and link building
Starting from a Domain Rating of 0 and just two referring domains, we ran a steady, quality-first link-building and digital PR program: relevant legal and local placements, directory and citation cleanup, and earned mentions. Over the engagement the profile grew to 65 referring domains and 138 live backlinks, lifting Domain Rating from 0 to 6. That is the foundation that let every practice-area page rank.
Technical and on-page SEO
In parallel we aligned title tags and meta descriptions to target keywords, added structured data and built a clean internal-linking structure connecting practice-area pages, lawyer bios and case summaries. Because the site was new, we made sure crawling and indexation were solid from day one, so every new page could earn rankings quickly.
The map pack, before and after
Measurable results
Proven results.
Across our partnership, which began in April 2024 and continues today, BV Law went from an invisible domain to one of Edmonton's most visible criminal-defence firms in both the map pack and organic search. By June 2026 it led the local map pack, and its rankings and traffic were still climbing.
Three shifts that changed the firm's pipeline.
Leading the map pack: 8.4 → 2.5
The firm's average Google Maps rank improved from 8.4 (July 2024) to 2.5 (June 2026). A grid that was almost entirely orange and red became a near-solid grid of
From near zero to 1,300+ organic visitors a month
Organic traffic climbed from effectively zero to roughly 1,300 monthly visitors (Ahrefs). Google Search Console recorded 8,230 clicks and 1.38M impressions over the trailing 16 months, with weekly clicks roughly tripling over the period.
Authority built from scratch: DR 0 → 6
Domain Rating rose from 0 to 6 and referring domains from 2 to 65, with 135 new backlinks earned, turning a brand-new domain into one with a foundation strong enough to outrank far older firms on key terms.
Keyword wins
#1
for its most valuable sexual-assault-lawyer search, up from#1–2
for the entire local traffic-lawyer cluster, including traffic ticket searches#7
for its most competitive criminal-defence search (keyword difficulty 51), up fromTop 10
new rankings across offence types, including impaired driving, drug possession, fraud and speeding-ticket lawyers#1
for the firm's own lawyer-name searches, capturing branded demand in full275
organic keywords ranking in total, 231 of them in Google's top 10, including 44 in the top 3-
Google Search Console: 8.35K total clicks and 1.4M total impressions over the trailing 16 months, trending up throughout.
We had quite bad luck with our previous marketing company and found Bowrand after some transition pains. Unlike the previous company, Bowrand is responsive, gives clear instructions and information on how to improve my business's page authority, and provides SEO services that are easy to understand (no mean feat).
Case studies
More from the BV Law partnership
Numbers from real engagements. Client names shared with permission.
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