What a Live SEO Audit Taught Me About Ranking a Personal Injury Firm

By Ethan Van De Hey, Marketing Director at MacGillis Wiemer, LLC

When you run marketing for a personal injury firm, you learn quickly that “just get us to the top of Google” is easier said than done. Milwaukee is a crowded market, every competitor is bidding on the same handful of keywords, and the person searching for us just got hurt and needs help now. So when Dennis Yu and I sat down to run a live SEO audit of our website, I didn’t want a scorecard — I wanted to understand why the pages that should rank weren’t ranking, and what we could actually do about it.

The E-E-A-T scorecard we used to grade the firm’s website, and the grade each signal earned at the audit.

Introduction

What I got was better than a checklist. Watching someone pull up our own homepage and walk through it the way Google sees it changed how I think about our site. Below is what came out of that audit: the framework we used to judge the site, the specific gaps we found, what it took to fix them, and where we landed. I’m writing this partly so our own team remembers the reasoning, and partly because every local service business — not just law firms — makes the same mistakes we did.

The audit followed the same repeatable process the team runs on every client site. If you want to see the method applied across other industries, there’s a full inventory of published audits — plumbing, roofing, HVAC, power washing, concrete coatings — each one graded the same way this one was.

Where This Audit Came From

This article is repurposed from a recorded audit session where we screen-shared the firm’s website and went through it page by page. If you’re on our team, the recording lives in Basecamp under “Cloud Recording — Audit of MacGillis Wiemer SEO.” If you’re reading this externally, the walkthrough below captures the substance of what we covered.

The Framework: Google E-E-A-T

The whole audit hangs on one framework Google itself uses to judge whether a site deserves to rank for sensitive topics — and personal injury law is about as sensitive as it gets. It’s called E-E-A-T:

• Experience — Have you actually done the thing? For us, that’s real cases, real outcomes, real clients.
• Expertise — Do you demonstrate deep knowledge? Attorney bios, Wisconsin-specific legal guides, and detailed practice-area content.
• Authoritativeness — Does the wider world recognize you? Being cited, featured, reviewed, and linked to by reputable sources.
• Trustworthiness — Can a hurt person feel safe here? Clear contact info, transparent credentials, genuine testimonials, and a secure site.

Google treats legal, medical, and financial sites as “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) pages, and it holds them to a higher standard. That’s the lens we used to grade every part of our website. The question was never “does this page look nice” — it was “does this page prove Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness to a stranger who’s scared and searching?”

What the Audit Found

Here’s what we saw when we went through the site against the E-E-A-T framework. I’m keeping this honest, because the gaps are the whole point.

Experience — thin. The homepage led with positioning (“Experienced Trial Lawyers. Personal Approach.”) but a searcher couldn’t quickly find proof. Case results and client stories weren’t surfaced where they mattered, so we were asserting experience instead of showing it.

Expertise — underused. We had attorneys with real depth, but almost none of that knowledge was published. There was no library of Wisconsin personal-injury guides, no “what to do after a car accident” content, nothing answering the questions people actually type into Google. Expertise that lives only in the attorneys’ heads doesn’t rank.

Authoritativeness — invisible. The firm sponsors community events and does real work in Milwaukee, but that authority-building wasn’t being documented online where Google could see it. Off-site signals — features, mentions, links — were the weakest area.

Trustworthiness — decent foundation, incomplete signals. We had the right conversion messaging (“free consultations,” “24/7 support,” “no fee unless we win”), but testimonials and clear NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency needed reinforcement to fully earn trust.

Effort and Cost to Fix

None of the fixes were expensive in dollars — they were expensive in discipline. Here’s the honest breakdown of what each one actually takes:

The lesson: SEO for a law firm isn’t a line item you pay once. It’s a habit you fund continuously. The firms that win are the ones that treat content like a recurring operating cost, not a project.

Compliance Scorecard

Here’s how the site scores against the E-E-A-T framework after the audit and the work that followed.

Before-and-after grades for each E-E-A-T signal, scored by our team against the audit findings.

The site today reflects real progress: the navigation now leads with Attorneys, Practice Areas, Case Results, Locations, Testimonials, and a Blog — exactly the E-E-A-T proof points the audit said were missing. The remaining yellow rows are all about consistency, which is the work that never really ends.

Meta-Article: How We Repurposed This Audit

This blog post itself is an example of the content habit the audit called for. One recorded audit becomes an article, which can then be sliced into short clips, a checklist, and social posts. That’s the Content Factory in action:

How one recorded audit session turns into an article, a checklist, and a month of social posts.

Here’s how this specific post was made, so anyone on our team can repeat it:

1. We recorded the live SEO audit as a Zoom session and saved it to Basecamp.
2. Rather than let a two-hour recording sit unused, we repurposed it into this long-form article.
3. We graded the findings against the E-E-A-T framework, pulled a live look at the current site for before/after context, and captured a homepage screenshot for visual proof.
4. We wrote it in first person, in my voice as Marketing Director, and stripped out anything that sounded generic or AI-written.
5. It gets published with tags for discoverability and a single primary category to preserve link juice.

skill.md — Repeatable Process

The repeatable skill definition our team follows to turn any recorded audit into a published article.

Related reading: 4 things I learned about SEO from the same engagement · How we audit local business websites · Why we build an SEO tree