An employment-law firm was famous for one case and invisible for everything else. Its search traffic was news traffic: people following a celebrity lawsuit, not workers looking for a lawyer. In six weeks, a rebuilt site and a verified content program flipped that. The number one page on the firm's site is now an article we shipped seventeen days earlier, and the articles as a group out-pull the famous case 2.5 to 1 on Google impressions. Here is the work, with the numbers and the caveats.
The client
Delshad Legal is a plaintiff-side employment law firm in Los Angeles: wrongful termination, severance, harassment, retaliation, wage theft. Founder Jonathan Delshad represents workers against employers, and the firm's best-known matter — Dixon v. Tyler Perry — put it in national headlines.
The problem
Headlines are not clients. The firm's search presence was almost entirely its famous case: the lawsuit pages drew tens of thousands of impressions from people following the story, while the searches that actually produce clients — "what disqualifies you from unemployment in California," "how much severance is normal," "can I sue my employer for emotional distress" — went to legal directories and bigger firms. The site itself was a legacy WordPress build with the rankings to match: the homepage sat around position 18 on its own core queries.
The strategy
Three moves, in order.
Rebuild the foundation. We moved the firm onto our stack with a clean article and practice-area architecture, migrated the URLs, and cleaned up the structure the old build left behind.
Ship verified answers to the questions clients ask. Legal content has a bar most agency content does not: a wrong claim is not embarrassing, it is dangerous. Every article runs through a verification pass where each legal claim is checked against the statute, the case, or the agency source before publish. On that foundation we shipped a battery of articles in July and August targeting real client questions: unemployment disqualification, final-paycheck law, wage theft, settlement averages, arbitration agreements, emotional distress claims, workplace retaliation.
Point it at AI search. The same questions are now asked to ChatGPT and Google's AI answers, so the pages are structured for engines to lift clean answers, and we track 66 buyer prompts in Peec AI to measure when the firm starts being the cited answer.
The results
Six weeks in, the content beats the headlines
First seventeen days of August 2026, Google Search Console, as each group's share of the two combined:
| Page group | Share of clicks | Share of impressions |
|---|---|---|
| Articles we shipped | 73% | 72% |
| Celebrity-case pages | 27% | 28% |
The articles answering client questions now out-pull the famous lawsuit 2.5 to 1 on impressions and 2.6 to 1 on clicks. That is the flip that matters: news traffic reads and leaves. People searching "what disqualifies you from unemployment" have a problem the firm solves.
The number one page on the site is seventeen days old
The unemployment-disqualification guide went live at the start of August. Seventeen days later it had drawn more impressions than any other page on the site, the Tyler Perry pages included, at position 5.6. Around it, roughly 25 article pages drew impressions in the same window, most ranking between positions 4 and 14 within weeks of shipping.
The site-wide numbers moved with it
Clicks for the last full quarter are up 53.8% against the quarter before. July was the firm's best month on record for both clicks and impressions. The rebuilt homepage went from position 18.1 to 7.6 on its queries, and its click-through rate rose from 5.0% to 7.1%. Of the keywords the site ranks for, 16 of 32 sit in Google's top three.
AI search: early, and honestly so
The AI side is where this program is heading, not where it started. Today, when AI engines cite Delshad Legal they place it at an average position of 1.4. But they do not cite it often yet, and on the broadest prompt in the category, "best employment lawyers in Los Angeles," the engines still answer with larger firms. That is the same starting line every wedge client of ours has faced. The verified article base now shipping is the raw material AI answers get built from, and the 66-prompt scoreboard will tell us, publicly, whether it works. We will update this page either way.
What made this different
Two disciplines. The first is verification: legal content that survives a claims check against primary sources is rare, and it is exactly what both Google and AI engines reward in a field where being wrong has consequences. The second is honesty about what counts: we separated the news demand from the client demand in every report, because a traffic chart inflated by a celebrity lawsuit would flatter us and mislead the client. The numbers above exclude the famous case on purpose. The growth is the part the firm keeps.
Engagement: site rebuild plus verified SEO and AEO content program, 2026.
