A site halved overnight, rebuilt as the category leader.
How we rebuilt Burke Mead Lawyers' organic presence after the Family Law closure cut the site in half, and grew traffic 1,817% in the process.
Where Burke Mead Lawyers was when we walked in.
Burke Mead Lawyers came to Firewire after years of inconsistent SEO performance, and growing frustration with agencies that delivered audits but never moved the line. Their site carried 700+ blog posts that had accumulated over the years; most were thin, off-topic, or competing with the pages that actually mattered for the firm's bottom line.
Then, in January 2024, the firm closed its Family Law department. Overnight, a significant portion of the website's content was removed. Traffic and rankings dropped sharply, and the site was effectively cut in half. Rather than just patch the gap, Burke Mead used the moment to rebuild around what they did best: personal injury and compensation.
- 700+ thin, outdated or off-topic blog posts diluting the site's topical authority
- Pages ranking for pop-culture queries that had nothing to do with legal services
- Prior agencies producing audits without ever implementing the recommendations
- Weak alignment between the firm's core practice areas and the site's content
- Technical SEO foundations (schema, metadata, internal linking) left unattended
- Family Law content closure (Jan 2024) wiped out a large slice of the site mid-engagement
"We engaged Firewire to overhaul our SEO. They have incredible knowledge and understanding of SEO and have increased our organic traffic by 680%. Their work is high quality and produces results."
Three moves that turned the closure into category authority.
- 01
Pruned aggressively before adding anything
700 posts → 80 high-quality assets.
We started with a rigorous content audit. More than 700 pages were reduced to roughly 80: keep, consolidate, or remove. The pages that survived were the ones with real legal authority and clear search intent. Everything else was hurting the site's topical clarity, so it had to go.
- 02
Rebuilt around personal injury authority
One firm, two practice areas, real depth.
We restructured the entire content foundation around the firm's two strongest categories: personal injury and compensation law. Each page was rewritten with stronger search-intent targeting, deeper subject-matter expertise, and supporting content that reinforced the firm's authority in NSW.
- 03
Turned the Family Law closure into an upgrade
Half the site, double the focus.
When Family Law was removed in January 2024, instead of patching, we reframed the site around what was left. The narrower focus actually improved category authority (Google rewards specialist sites) and within twelve months, personal injury rankings hit record highs even with half the content footprint.
- Comprehensive content audit (700+ pages) Mo 1
- Aggressive content pruning to ~80 assets Mo 1–3
- Technical SEO rebuild (schema, metadata) Mo 2–4
- Personal injury page rebuilds Mo 3–6
- Internal linking + architecture overhaul Mo 4–6
- Family Law closure recovery plan Jan 2024
- Personal injury authority programme Ongoing
The full picture, by the numbers.
Quarterly organic sessions. Pre-Firewire baseline in grey; engagement begins November 2021. The dip in mid-2022 is the 700-page content prune; the dip in mid-2024 is the Family Law department closure.
How the rebuild actually happened.
Three phases of work, each one setting up the next. The Family Law closure mid-engagement turned the programme from a recovery into a strategic rebuild.
Content audit + prune Cutting 700 pages down to 80
The first move was the hardest: deciding what to keep. A decade of legal blogging had left the site with 700+ posts, many of them written for keywords that had nothing to do with the firm's practice. We tagged every page against three questions: does it serve a real legal query, does it carry topical authority, and does it match the firm's current practice areas?
- Keep: pages with strong legal authority and clear search intent (~80)
- Consolidate: thin variants of the same topic merged into single authoritative pages
- Remove: off-topic, outdated, or pop-culture content with no commercial relevance
- 301-redirect all removed URLs to the closest surviving page to preserve link equity
The aggressive prune was counterintuitive. Most agencies would have added content instead of cutting it. But you can't be the authority on personal injury law when 87% of your indexed pages are about other things. The cut was the foundation that everything else compounded against.
Personal injury rebuild Rebuilding the practice-area content from scratch
With the site cleaned up, we restructured the surviving content around the firm's two strongest practice areas: personal injury and compensation law. Each page was rewritten for depth, expertise, and search intent.
- Pillar pages for each major personal injury sub-category (workplace, motor vehicle, medical negligence, public liability)
- Supporting content that answered the actual questions clients asked in consultations
- Schema markup (LegalService, FAQPage, Person) added to support rich results
- Internal linking restructured into a hub-and-spoke pattern around the pillar pages
This is where the 2,078% growth in top-3 rankings came from. The firm wasn't ranking for more keywords. It was ranking for the right ones, and ranking them higher. Personal injury terms that previously sat on page two moved into positions 1–3 within months.
Family Law closure Turning a content loss into a category win
In January 2024, the firm made the strategic decision to close its Family Law department. Overnight, a significant slice of the site's content was removed. Rankings dropped. Traffic dipped. Most agencies would have gone into damage control.
- Removed Family Law content via planned 301-redirects to relevant survivor pages
- Reframed the firm's site architecture around personal injury as the singular focus
- Re-pointed internal authority signals to compensation pages that now carried the lift
- Doubled down on personal injury content velocity to fill the topical gap quickly
Within twelve months, the firm wasn't just back to where it had been. It had surpassed it. Personal injury rankings hit record highs by Q1 2025. The closure, counterintuitively, became the moment Burke Mead became the dominant specialist personal injury voice in NSW.
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