Client: Tim Chelpaty Law Offices, medical malpractice and personal injury attorney serving Las Cruces, Alamogordo, and the surrounding region.
Services: SEO strategy, website optimization, local search visibility across multiple markets
The Snapshot
- Visitors arriving from Google search grew 125% year over year
- New visitors from search grew 126% year over year
- New client inquiries grew 23% year over year
- Search rankings improved 41% on average
- The number of people seeing the site in search results grew by 95%
The Project In Tim’s Own Words
Meet The Client
Tim Chelpaty is a medical malpractice attorney in Las Cruces and serves clients in Alamogordo, Silver City, and Deming.
Medical malpractice is one of the most competitive and expensive categories in legal marketing, dominated nationally by large lead-generation companies with paid advertising budgets that a firm this size can’t match, dollar for dollar.
The opportunity was to win through organic search instead by ranking for the real medical malpractice questions people search for and building genuine local visibility in the communities the firm serves.
The Challenge
- In a crowded, expensive market where the biggest legal search terms are dominated by national ad spend, the firm couldn’t compete directly.
- A multi-market footprint that needed careful, honest handling. The firm has real offices in Las Cruces and Alamogordo, but also serves Silver City and Deming without a physical presence there.
- A website that needed a full cleanup before any new strategy could take hold.
The Approach
A full site audit was performed safely before going live.
Every change was reviewed on a staging version of the site first, so nothing risked disrupting the firm’s existing lead flow.
A tiered local strategy.
The two markets with physical offices, Las Cruces and Alamogordo, received full local SEO treatment: dedicated location pages and localized content built to compete for local search terms.
Silver City and Deming, where the firm serves clients but has no office, were targeted through general content rather than local pages, which the firm couldn’t substantiate.
Content built around real client questions.
Rather than competing head-on for the most expensive “attorney near me” terms, pages were built to answer the specific legal questions injured people actually search for, such as New Mexico’s damages caps and statutes of limitations.
This became one of the most effective ways to gain visibility in a niche where the most competitive terms are hardest to win.
Ongoing site build-out to keep new pages consistent with the site’s design as the strategy expanded.
The Results
Search traffic grew 125%
Comparing the same period year over year, visitors arriving from Google search grew 125%, and new visitors from search grew 126%.
Even after accounting for every traffic source on the site, total visitors were up 139%, and new visitors were up 141%, with search driving the majority of that growth.
Search is now the site’s largest source of traffic, outpacing all other channels combined.
Rankings and visibility climbed steadily
Search rankings improved by 41% on average over the course of the engagement, with pages moving from the back of Google’s results to the front page.
At the same time, the number of people seeing the site in search results grew 95%, nearly doubling.
The Alamogordo location page, built specifically for that market, now ranks on the first page of Google for its key search terms, validating the tiered local strategy.
Meanwhile, the page answering questions about New Mexico’s malpractice damages caps became the site’s top-performing page overall, ahead of even the homepage, showing the strength of a content-first approach in a market where the obvious keywords are hardest to win.
New client inquiries grew in step
Contact form submissions from prospective clients grew 23% year over year, closely tracking growth in search traffic.
Since the firm began tracking how new clients find them, Google has consistently been the top-cited source, named by a majority of respondents every year.
The Takeaway
In a legal niche where paid advertising is dominated by budgets a local firm can’t match, organic and local search did the heavy lifting.
Search traffic grew 125%, rankings improved 41%, and new client inquiries grew right alongside it, all while keeping the firm’s local presence claims honest across markets with and without a physical office.
Metrics based on Google Analytics and Google Search data, comparing the same time period year over year.
