Objectives & Approach
A People First Strategy For a Client First Law Firm
Stewart Guss built his practice on the principle of Client First. It is an ideal that to this day appears in the footer of every email from his firm. In a competitive Houston market, where lawyer billboards dot the interstates, Guss was an early adopter of digital marketing. For years, digital positioned his firm to outperform competitors. His website’s domain authority score still outpaces 99% of law firms.
Despite this, the firm’s website had started slipping in search results due to quantity-over-quality SEO practices that Google’s algorithms flagged. The decline in search visibility had put the firm in a tough spot.
The engagement with Studio 3 was a reset, both creatively and in the SEO approach. Just before hiring Studio 3, the firm had completed a rebranding. While other law firms identified themselves with belligerence and fighting insurance companies, Stewart aligned his firm with trust and empathy for his clients, as reflected in the name Trust Guss.
Starting with a massive 1,170-page website that needed a lot of work, the Trust Guss and Studio 3 collaboration kicked off.
Killing Frankenstein
The attorneyguss.com website topped Houston car-accident searches for years, then began slipping. Analysis showed that adding web pages for other cities and a surfeit of blog posts created keyword cannibalization and compromised user-experience. In other words, the website became a Frankenstein. Studio 3’s Chief Strategy Officer led the page-by-page analysis and restructuring of the UI/UX to get the site back on track.
Visualizing Trust
Many consider Houston to be the birthplace of personal injury legal advertising, notorious for over-the-top TV ads, billboards, and the first of many lawyers calling themselves a “hammer”. Paralleling the Client-First values of Stewart Guss’ firm, Studio 3 Chief Creative Officer conceived a strategy based on trust and compassion that positioned the firm’s clients as the heroes.
Quality > Quantity SEO Practices
The attorneyguss.com site wasn’t short on content: more than 1,000 pages, with some pages exceeding 3,000 words of copy. Studio 3 refocused the SEO strategy on quality over quantity: consolidating duplicative pages, pruning underperforming pages, tightening internal links, and clarifying intent. The focus was a people-first user experience and clear signals to search and AI engines.
