From 65 Calls to 126: How a New Jersey Estate Planning Firm Built a Search Channel That Has Lasted Nearly Five Years
“June (2026) was great. June was our best month ever, so that was really good.”
Engagement: October 2021 to present
Services: Content strategy, service and location page development, multi-location local search, intake tracking
Three numbers
65 to 126
After BSPE (6 mo)
Google Business Profile calls, first five months
5,630
After BSPE (6 mo)
Monthly Google Search clicks at peak, 2025
Best month ever
After BSPE (6 mo)
The firm’s own read on June 2026
Where the Firm Started
The firm had an established practice, a long operating history, and a client base built the traditional way. What it had yet to build was a growth channel that could be measured, repeated, and run independently of paid lead sources.
One of the firm’s attorneys described the starting position as virtually no online presence.
The engagement began in October 2021 with one clean benchmark: 65 calls across four Google Business Profiles in that month. Everything below is measured against that number or dated against the systems that came later.
What We Built
Four connected priorities, sustained across the full engagement.
A measurable foundation first
Before expanding anything, the program connected search visibility to business demand across the website, the Google Business Profiles, and intake activity. Traffic, calls, and prospective new client quality were tracked as separate series, so a ranking change could be evaluated against actual demand rather than against itself.
Coverage of the searches that produce consultations
The program expanded and improved core estate planning, probate, trust, special needs, elder law, and location pages, directed at the pages most likely to produce a consultation.
A multi-location local footprint
Phone demand was tracked across four Google Business Profiles covering Toms River and Ocean County, Monmouth County, Manhattan, and the attorney’s practitioner profile, so it was possible to see which geography was converting visibility into calls.
A line of sight into lead quality
Weekly prospective new client logs captured how each caller found the firm, the service they needed, and whether the matter could be scheduled or referred.
What it produced inside the practice
“June (2026) was great. June was our best month ever, so that was really good.”
On July 14, 2026, roughly two weeks after those figures were recorded, one of the firm’s attorneys opened our call with this:
Same month. Traffic well below the 2023 peak, and the practice at its strongest point in its history by the owner’s own account.
AI Overviews and AI assistants absorb informational search first. The person asking what a revocable trust is now receives an answer without clicking. The person searching for a trust attorney in Ocean County still needs a lawyer, still clicks, and still calls. A site with nearly five years of service and location depth keeps the second group while losing much of the first.
The visible result is a traffic chart that falls and a practice that holds. The session count went down because the browsing went somewhere else. The commercial visibility, the local profiles, and the intake volume from people who have decided to hire someone stayed where the work put them.The prospective new client logs support the same reading. Callers arrived with high intent legal needs across estate planning, trusts, probate, elder law, and special needs planning. They were contacting the firm rather than browsing it.
By April 2022, roughly six months in, internal correspondence shows the firm weighing whether a $1,700 per month paid traffic program was still necessary given the performance of its own organic and local channels.
What the data shows
Local demand, the opening five months. Google Business Profile calls across four profiles.
Month | Profile calls | Change from October |
|---|---|---|
October 2021 | 65 | Benchmark |
November 2021 | 46 | – |
January 2022 | 80 | +23% |
February 2022 | 94 | +45% |
March 2022 | 126 | +94% |
November also recorded 18 website calls, the first month demand was visible across both the profiles and the site. December 2021 data is unavailable and is excluded rather than estimated. Three consecutive months of gain describe a channel coming online rather than a single campaign spike.
Website traffic reached multi-thousand session scale. Google Analytics 4, monthly organic sessions.
Metric | June 2023 | September 2023 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
Organic sessions | 4,730 | 9,244 | +95% |
Search demand reached multi-thousand click scale. Google Search Console, monthly average. | |||
Metric | April to June 2025 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Organic clicks per month | 5,630 | ||
Where the numbers stand now. June 2026. | |||
Metric | June 2026 |
|---|---|
Organic sessions | 2,797 |
Google Search clicks | 1,694 |
That is a large decline from the 2023 and 2025 peaks. The period from late 2024 through 2026 reshaped organic search across every industry that publishes informational content. AI Overviews and AI assistants now answer a large share of the questions that previously sent a click to a website. Firms that built visibility on informational content absorbed that change, and this one did too.
Any agency reporting on this engagement could stop there. What makes the case worth writing is what happened next.
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How to read these numbers
Sourcing and method, stated plainly:
- Call figures come from the firm's own Google Business Profile records. Traffic figures come from the firm's Google Analytics 4 property. Click figures come from the firm's Google Search Console property. Each window is dated above.
- The “best month ever” description is the firm attorney’s own characterization of June 2026, given on a recorded call on July 14, 2026, and quoted as she said it. She did not specify which measure she was describing, and this document does not assign one.
- The traffic figures and the firm's June performance are two separate evidence tracks covering the same month, reported side by side. Search is one channel inside a working practice, and this document does not claim sole credit.
- The mechanism described above, informational search declining while commercial search holds, is offered as the explanation that best fits the pattern. A query level breakdown separating informational from commercial performance would confirm it directly.
- Search clicks, profile calls, and website sessions are three separate measures and are reported separately throughout.
- A continuous export covering the full engagement is no longer available from the legacy analytics configuration. The figures here are the complete, verified windows that survive.
- The June to September 2023 session comparison is a four month window inside a nearly five year engagement. It shows the scale the site reached rather than a growth rate for the engagement.
- The April 2022 note on paid traffic reflects internal correspondence showing the question under consideration. The firm's decision on that program sits with the firm.
- Every market, practice area, and starting position behaves differently, and results vary accordingly.
A lot of attorneys already did
The work continues
Nearly five years in, the question has changed. The first year proved that search could become a measurable call channel. The middle years were about scale. The current phase is about a search environment where the traffic chart and the business have started telling different stories, and where the firms holding up are the ones with real depth for AI systems to draw on.
If your traffic no longer looks the way it did in 2023, the number that matters is what happened to your calendar. Let’s talk about what your market looks like now.
Prepared by BSPE Legal Marketing. Metrics current as of July 2026. Published with the client’s permission.
Learn More
Helpful marketing resources
Explore official guidance on search visibility, local rankings and paid advertising.
- Google explains how useful content, clear site structure and crawlable links help search engines understand a website. Google SEO Starter Guide.
- Google recommends helpful content created for people and clear information about who created it. Creating helpful reliable people first content.
- Google describes relevance, distance and prominence as the main factors in local ranking. Google local ranking guidance.
- Google says established SEO practices apply to AI features; special AI markup is not required. AI features and your website.
- Google defines search impressions, clicks and position; those measurements describe search activity rather than signed cases. Search Console impressions position and clicks.
Frequently asked questions
What services were covered in this estate planning engagement?
The content covered estate planning, probate, trusts, special needs and elder law, alongside service and location pages.
Was the strategy limited to adding new content?
No. Existing material was expanded and improved as part of the engagement.
Why were location pages included?
Location pages supported the firm’s service coverage across its markets.
Was local search managed for multiple locations?
Yes. The case study describes multi location local search work rather than a single location campaign.
Were Google Business Profiles part of the work?
Yes. The case study discusses multiple Google Business Profiles alongside the website strategy.
How was prospective client quality considered?
Weekly prospective new client logs helped keep intake quality in view instead of relying only on website activity.
How did AI search enter the discussion?
The case study considers AI Overviews and AI assistants in its discussion of informational discovery.
Does a change in website traffic describe the entire business outcome?
No. Website traffic, profile calls and prospective client logs describe different parts of the client journey.
What does the case study establish about results?
It documents the work and reported business observations, while the explanation involving AI and informational traffic remains a hypothesis.
Marketing terms and pricing
Month-to-month marketing services with 30 days cancellation notice. No setup fee. No cancellation fee. Pricing is provided by custom quote.
Reviewed for accuracy by Viktoria Altman.
BSPE services documented in this case study: Law Firm SEO, Content Marketing, Google Business Profile.
This case study describes work and observations from October 2021 to July 2026. Individual measurements retain their stated windows.
Contact BSPE Legal Marketing
BSPE Legal Marketing headquarters: 2128 Ocean Ave Apt 3i, Brooklyn, NY 11229.
About Viktoria Altman
Viktoria Altman is the founder and CEO of BSPE Legal Marketing, a digital marketing agency for law firms. A former paralegal and serial entrepreneur, she develops strategies covering search engine optimization, Google Business Profile, paid search, content and AI search visibility. She wrote Small Law Firm Digital Marketing in 2026, a practical guide to marketing strategy, evaluating agencies and avoiding costly mistakes. She hosts The Law Firm Accelerator and publishes the BSPE Legal Marketing Podcast, available on Spotify. Her speaking experience includes the New York City Bar Association, law school audiences and SEO conferences. She attended Baruch College from 1997 to 2002, speaks English and Russian, and is a member of WebProfessionals.org, the Internet Marketing Association and the American Marketing Association.
Read Viktoria’s biography. The Law Firm Accelerator. BSPE Legal Marketing Podcast on Spotify. Listen to her Fretzin interview. See her SEO Vibes Summit appearance.