Steindle Williams Legal.

SW Legal is an Auckland-based law firm with specialist expertise across criminal law, defamation, commercial disputes, and more. In 2025, they wanted their online presence to better reflect the calibre of their team and make it easier for high-intent clients to actually find them via search.

The challenge.

SW Legal didn’t just need “a bit of SEO”. They needed a strategic partner to untangle technical issues, build a search foundation, and connect that to real-world queries potential clients were already using.

When we first stepped in, the site was being held back by multiple factors:

• Low website authority and limited trust in the eyes of search engines

• Slow page speed and poor Core Web Vitals scores, especially on mobile

• Incomplete or misconfigured tracking in Google Analytics and Google Search Console

• No sitemap properly detected and indexation gaps across key pages

• A large number of keywords being “seen” by search engines but not actually ranking, and no clear strategy around which terms to prioritise

• Highly competitive practice areas in Auckland where other firms were already investing heavily in SEO and paid search.

In short, the brand and expertise were strong, but the site wasn’t set up to be found, trusted, or chosen by the right people.

The solution.

Project Seven embedded as SW Legal’s SEO and strategy partner, with an initial focus on building a clean technical foundation and a clear keyword roadmap before layering on anything more complex.

Our role centred on:

• Diagnosing and briefing technical SEO issues so devs could implement fixes

• Establishing accurate tracking and baseline reporting

• Mapping and prioritising high-intent, legally significant keywords

• Improving on-page SEO and internal linking to support those keywords

• Providing content mentoring so the internal team could create and update pages with SEO in mind

This approach meant we could show movement quickly while still setting SW Legal up for sustainable long-term growth.

Technical and SEO foundation.

• Ran a comprehensive technical SEO audit and produced a dev-ready brief to address crawl issues, missing sitemap, site speed problems, and overall technical health

• Configured and refined Google Search Console and Google Analytics so that organic performance, indexing, and user behaviour could be tracked accurately

• Improved Core Web Vitals and page speed, bringing key metrics (such as largest contentful paint and time to interactive) down from “very poor” multi‑second load times to under 2 seconds on priority pages​

• Established a keyword strategy and initial content plan aligned with SW Legal’s key practice areas, including brand terms (e.g. “SWL lawyers”, “SW Legal services”) and high-value legal queries in criminal, defamation, and commercial law​

• Provided content support and mentoring rather than full copywriting, guiding the team on how to structure, optimise, and interlink content to lift relevance and authority over time

On-page optimisation and early authority.

• Implemented UX and on-site SEO improvements across priority pages, including metadata optimisation, headings, and internal linking to better signal topic authority to search engines

• Continued keyword refinement based on early performance data, focusing on “industry-critical” terms where SW Legal could realistically compete and grow (e.g. defamation queries, criminal law in Auckland, partner names, and core service lines)​

• Initiated a backlink profile review to understand existing link equity, identify any risk areas, and shape a starter strategy for future authority-building outreach

• Maintained regular reporting and strategic check-ins so the SW Legal team could see what was changing, where new opportunities were emerging, and how SEO work connected back to business priorities.

The results.

Within the first three months, SW Legal saw meaningful gains that would typically be expected later in an SEO programme.​

We helped them:

• Lift daily organic impressions from 3 in August to 119 by November, with daily clicks increasing from 0.16 to 9 over the same period​

• Grow monthly organic clicks from 5 (August) to 236 (September), 299 (October), and 264 (November), reflecting a major uplift in real visitors from search​

• Improve average ranking position from 31 in August to 20 in November, indicating stronger competitiveness across targeted queries​

• Move from 644 detected keywords to 781 organically ranked keywords, now including multiple high-value legal terms that previously weren’t ranking at all​

• Increase domain authority from 15 to 21 in a short timeframe, while significantly improving site speed from 7+ seconds to under 2 seconds on key pages​

SW Legal is now firmly on the radar for the kinds of queries that matter most to their practice, with several keywords already sitting in or approaching the top 20 and trending upward. As we move deeper into Phase 3, this foundation sets them up to invest confidently in content, backlinks, and broader campaigns, knowing the underlying SEO engine is already working in their favour.