Case study · Fotis Law Firm
SEO for a Dubai Law Firm
Fotis Law Firm came to us in 2018 because they were not being found on Google. We rebuilt their website around keyword research rather than adding SEO to a site that was already built, gave each area of practice its own page, fixed the technical problems holding the site back, and ran their Google Ads. They went from having no real visibility in search to appearing on the first page for the searches their clients were actually typing. We are not publishing the numbers on this page, and further down we explain why.
Who they were
Fotis International Law Firm, also known as Fotislaw, was a full-service practice in Dubai working across criminal, corporate, commercial and family matters.
George SK, one of the partners, looked after the marketing side of the firm and was our point of contact for the whole engagement. Almost everything on this page came out of conversations with him.
What we found when they came to us
The firm had a website. It was not built to be found.
The content had not been written with any search intent behind it. Images and video were not optimised. The site was slow, it did not work properly on a phone, and the navigation made it hard to get to the pages that mattered. None of the technical groundwork had been done, and nothing had been done off the site either.
Local search had been ignored completely, which for a law firm in Dubai is the part that matters most. The Google Business Profile was not set up properly.
They were also spending on Google Ads, and the spend was going to keywords that had little to do with the work they wanted.
None of this was unusual. It is what most professional services websites look like before anyone has looked at them properly. The site had been built to describe the firm rather than to be found by someone with a problem.
What we did
We did the keyword research first, and then built the site around it. That order matters and it is the thing most often done backwards. When the research comes after the design, you end up trying to fit the words people search for into a structure that was never meant to hold them.
We gave each area of practice its own page. Someone looking for help with a criminal matter and someone looking for help with a divorce are not the same person, they are not searching the same words, and they should not be landing on the same page. The firm worked across several distinct areas and each one needed to stand on its own.
We fixed the technical side. Speed, mobile, the things that stop a page being crawled properly.
We made the site easier to act on. Phone numbers, contact forms and a clear next step where people actually reach them, rather than buried at the bottom.
We set up the Google Business Profile properly, with accurate details and real photographs, and kept it current.
We rewrote the content so it read like a firm explaining what it does, and we put their client reviews where people could see them.
And we took over the Google Ads, and pointed the spend at the work they wanted rather than the work the account had drifted towards.
What changed
They became findable. Over the engagement the firm moved from effectively no presence in organic search to ranking on the first page for the terms that brought in the kind of work they wanted, across each of their practice areas.
The Google Ads stopped spending on searches that were never going to convert.
What we noticed, and what we have seen since with other professional services clients, is that the practice-area pages did the heavy lifting. The broad, obvious search term is the hardest one to win and the slowest to move. The specific pages, built for a specific problem in a specific place, started ranking much sooner and brought in better enquiries.
Why there are no numbers on this page
We used to publish our clients’ figures. A law firm left us over it.
They were not wrong to be annoyed. Lawyers are trained in confidentiality, and a firm’s search performance tells its competitors a good deal about where its work comes from. We had their permission in the loose sense that nobody had said no, and that is not the same as consent.
So we do not publish a legal client’s numbers now unless they have actively said yes, and most of them do not. Fotis asked us to keep the working detail off this page and we have.
It makes our case studies less impressive than the ones you will find elsewhere. We think that is the right trade. If an agency is showing you another law firm’s results, ask yourself what they will be showing about yours.
What we would do differently
Blog content. A great deal of it was published quickly, before anyone had checked whether the firm was already covering the same ground on another page. Cleaning that up later took far longer than getting it right at the start would have. We now check before publishing rather than after.
Client testimonial
“Techpullers have been taking care of all our firm's IT and SEO works for a couple of months now. Our firm's management is very glad with their professionalism and deliverables. They have a hard working team and I can happily say that I would recommend them to others.”
George SK, Partner, Fotis Law Firm — Google Review