Law Firm Website Completely Switching Marketing Focus - How to Best Handle

[peteboyd]

Hi Moz Community,

Thanks in advance for the help! We have a law firm client interested in fully switching their SEO marketing from Criminal Defense to Personal Injury. Our client no longer wants any business for Criminal Defense cases.

Background Info: The website for the last 10 years has focused on Criminal Defense (and ranks well). Over the last couple of years we have introduced Personal Injury content on the website and achieved some decent rankings as well.

In order to make the website less relevant for Criminal Defense, it had crossed our minds to de-index these specific Criminal Defense pages but still leave them present on the website.

Question:  Would you recommend de-indexing all of the pages at once or done in a gradual manner?

Our concern it that doing it all at once could affect the overall domain's authority more sharply and harm rankings for any other keywords not involving Criminal Defense.

[donsilvernail]

I would not deindex anything. The search rankings are the bread and butter. The question is how do you leverage current traffic and use it to boost personal injury.

I would start by curating new content that  aligns with the criminal justice content. Then take the criminal justice content and redirect it to your new content.

If you deindex, traffic will drop considerably and it will be like starting from scratch. If you redirect you may be able to pass link juice to your new pages while rankings start to increase for personal injury.

[EGOL]

If the rankings of the criminal defense pages have direct links then those links are helpful to any query that any page of the site competes for.  So, I would not delete them.

There are law firms with strong websites that rule the SERPs for everything in their town.   Their office takes any call that comes in, accepts the cases in practice areas where they have interest and expertise, and refers the rest to other firms for a referral fee.

[peteboyd]

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[peteboyd]

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