Case Study · Vertical SaaS · Legal Tech
Client identity protected under NDA. This is a composite account of a real engagement. Specifics available under mutual sign-off in a discovery call.
Composite company profile
A Series B vertical SaaS platform serving mid-market and enterprise law firms in North America. The product sits between a matter management system and a client-collaboration workspace, with a defensible niche in litigation practice groups. At engagement kickoff the company was tracking toward roughly $14M ARR with an average contract value between $48,000 and $110,000 depending on firm size and seat count. Headcount was 85, including a five-person marketing team and a shared BDR pod of four.
The problem
The company had raised its Series B on a strong land-and-expand story inside a handful of AmLaw 200 lighthouse accounts, but organic pipeline had gone flat for three consecutive quarters. Paid search costs per demo request had climbed 61 percent year over year as generalist legal tech incumbents bid aggressively on the same head terms. The founder-led sales motion that had carried the seed and Series A rounds was no longer producing enough top-of-funnel to hit the plan the board had underwritten.
Prior efforts had focused on branded thought leadership, a heavy analyst-relations push, and a redesigned website. None of it moved SQLs. The internal marketing team suspected the problem was messaging, but they lacked the analytical bandwidth to prove where the funnel was actually breaking.
What our team diagnosed
Vance oversaw the engagement and our SEO, analytics, and paid teams executed the diagnostic. Three findings shifted the strategy.
First, the company was ranking for its brand and for a small basket of feature-level terms, but it was invisible for the category-defining queries buyers actually used inside law firms: variations on litigation management software, legal matter workspace, and firm-size-specific research queries like case management for 50 attorney firms. Two competitors owned position one for 74 percent of those queries.
Second, GA4 event data showed that visitors from the branded funnel converted to demo at 6.1 percent, but the tiny trickle of non-branded organic traffic converted at 9.4 percent. The buyers arriving on category queries were higher intent, and the company was capturing almost none of them.
Third, the paid program was bidding on the same generalist terms as five other vendors, driving cost per SQL to $2,140. The account structure had no negative keyword hygiene and no segmentation by firm size, so a 12 attorney boutique and a 400 attorney litigation shop were seeing the same landing page.
Strategy MV3 shipped
We proposed a category-position rebuild with three coordinated workstreams. The client engaged our Growth AI retainer at $5,997 a month plus a scoped GEO Audit at kickoff.
The core insight: the company did not need more content. It needed a defensible position on the twelve queries that senior partners and directors of practice management were actually researching, plus a paid program segmented by firm size so that the CFO of a 400 attorney litigation firm and the managing partner of a 25 attorney boutique saw different offers.
Services engaged included SEO strategy, technical SEO, content production, paid search restructure, and revenue operations instrumentation.
Implementation
Over the first eight weeks the team shipped:
- A category pillar page for litigation management software with a 4,200 word buyer guide, comparison matrix against three incumbents, and a firm-size selector that routed visitors to the right proof asset.
- Nine supporting cluster articles covering matter intake, conflict checks, e-billing integration, and practice-group-specific workflows. Each shipped with FAQPage schema, Article schema with proper
datePublished and dateModified, and author bylines from named practitioners.
- A technical SEO cleanup pass that consolidated 61 duplicate URL patterns, corrected Core Web Vitals on 14 templates, and rebuilt the internal linking hierarchy so category pages passed authority to solution pages.
- A rebuilt Google Ads account with five firm-size segments, negative keyword lists scoped to each segment, and dedicated landing pages with a firm-size-aware demo form.
- A rebuilt HubSpot to Salesforce sync so that firm size, practice area, and originating query were captured on every lead and passed to the BDR pod for routing.
Cadence was a weekly working session with the VP Marketing, a biweekly review with the CRO, and a monthly readout to the CEO. Tools in the stack included Ahrefs for keyword research, Semrush for competitive tracking, Screaming Frog for the technical audit, GA4 and BigQuery for attribution, and HubSpot plus Salesforce for the lead motion.
Outcomes
Measured from month zero to month six:
- Qualified pipeline sourced by marketing grew 3.4x, from a run rate of $610,000 per quarter to $2.07M per quarter.
- Non-branded organic sessions grew 217 percent, with the category pillar page ranking in position two for the primary target term inside four months.
- Cost per SQL from paid search fell 47 percent, from $2,140 to $1,134, driven by the firm-size segmentation and negative keyword work.
- Demo-request conversion rate on the highest-intent landing pages lifted from 4.2 percent to 8.9 percent.
- Two AmLaw 100 opportunities entered the pipeline directly from organic within the first ninety days, one of which closed in month seven at $184,000 ACV.
Timeline
Total elapsed time from kickoff to the 3.4x pipeline result was 26 weeks. First measurable ranking movement occurred in week seven. First inbound demo from the new category pillar arrived in week eleven. The paid restructure produced a cost per SQL improvement within the first thirty days.
Composite testimonial
“We had been treating this as a content problem for two years. Their team showed us it was a category-position problem, and they had the analytics discipline to prove where our funnel was actually leaking. The paid restructure alone paid for the engagement inside the first quarter.”
— Priya, VP Marketing
NDA framing
Client identity protected under NDA. Full account details, unredacted metrics, and reference call access are available under mutual sign-off in a discovery call.
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Vance Moore oversees MV3 engagements. Our SEO, analytics, and paid teams execute the day-to-day work. Learn more about the Growth AI retainer or the GEO Audit entry offer.
