Evidence
Case studies, reported the way we would want them reported to us.
A ranking screenshot taken from a flattering location proves nothing. What follows is profile performance data over a defined window, what we changed, what the client did, and the parts that did not go to plan.
Case study · Legal
A criminal defence attorney in San Diego
Criminal defence in a major US metro is close to the hardest local search environment there is. Competing firms have decade-old profiles, hundreds of reviews, and budgets that dwarf what a single practitioner can spend. The client is a distinguished San Diego criminal defence attorney whose reputation in court was substantially ahead of his visibility on the map. A common and expensive gap.
Below is Google Business Profile performance for the three-month window from February to April 2026, read directly from the client’s own profile.
The shape of the curve matters more than the totals
The opening weeks of the window are the slowest part of the curve. February shows minimal interaction: the profile was live but effectively invisible. Movement builds through March and is clearest by April. That lag is the honest picture of local SEO: category and profile work lands first, prominence built on reviews and citations compounds behind it, and the visible payoff arrives in weeks six through twelve of the roadmap rather than week two.
Direction requests are the figure we watch most closely in a practice like this. A direction request is somebody deciding to physically go to your office. Going from a near-standing start to 166 over the three-month window is a change in who is being shown the profile, not a change in how the same audience behaved.
What we actually changed
- Primary category and services. The single strongest relevance field on a profile, and the first thing corrected. Practice-area services were populated using Google’s predefined entries rather than free text.
- Service area and hours accuracy. Being open at the time of search is now rated among the top five Local Pack factors, and legal searches skew toward evenings and weekends when somebody has just been arrested or charged.
- Baseline geo-grid scan, then recurring scans. Coverage was measured across the metro before anything was touched, so every later claim could be checked against it.
- NAP and citation cleanup across legal directories, where attorney listings are unusually prone to old addresses and tracking numbers.
- Review cadence and responses. The client committed to asking, consistently, and to responding to everything that arrived.
- Schema and entity clarity in the final weeks, so assistants could verify the practice, its location and its practice areas.
What we would flag if we were on the other side of this
Calls did not rise smoothly. There was a real dip in the middle of the window before April’s jump to 18, which we did not predict and which took a cycle to diagnose. Three months is also a short window, and it spans a seasonal pattern that legal practices genuinely experience, so some portion of the movement is not attributable to us. We are showing profile interaction data because that is what we can evidence; we are not claiming a revenue figure we did not measure.
Over three months, a San Diego criminal defence practice went from a profile generating almost no measurable interaction to one producing 81 interactions, 50 direction requests and 18 calls in its strongest month. The mechanism was unglamorous: correct categories and services, accurate hours, clean citations, steady authentic reviews, and enough patience to let the opening weeks look like nothing was happening.
Why we report profile interactions rather than rankings
A ranking number is a poor proxy for a business outcome, and in local search it is barely even a number. It changes with the searcher's location, so any single figure is a measurement taken from one arbitrary point. Profile interactions, direction requests and calls are things that actually happened. Somebody chose to act.
Direction requests in particular are hard to argue with. A direction request is a person deciding to physically travel to a business. It is not a impression, not a click, and not something an agency can manufacture. Going from a near-standing start to 166 over three months in a metro of that size is a change in who is being shown the profile.
What we cannot show you is revenue, because we did not measure it and we are not going to estimate it. If a case study on any agency's site quotes a revenue figure, ask how it was attributed. The answer is usually that it was not.
What produced it
Nothing exotic. The same 12-point checklist we publish free, run properly, in the order set out in the 12-week roadmap, against a dated baseline. The factors behind each step are sourced on the 2026 ranking factors page, and the reason there is no ranking promise attached to any of it is explained in why we do not guarantee rankings. Legal practices in particular should read the law firm playbook, which covers the advertising constraints this campaign worked within.
How every case study here is reported
- A defined window with real start and end dates, not a cherry-picked span.
- What changed month by month, in the order it happened.
- Business outcome: calls, direction requests, interactions, not just positions.
- What did not work, and what we changed when we found out.
- The client’s own contribution, because review flow and photo supply materially change the result and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
- What we cannot attribute, including seasonality and anything we did not measure.
Next step
Ask to see a live dashboard
On the assessment call we can walk a current client's heat map history with you, with their permission.
Or call 778-200-8661 · One client per industry, per area · No guaranteed rankings