International SEO generates a 30-fold increase in traffic, with 2,600 lawyers ranking #1

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP is one of the largest and most prestigious international law firms in the world, headquartered in London. Tracing its roots back to the 18th century, it is also among the world's oldest.

The challenge

After some consultancy, we uncovered that the Freshfields website wasn’t performing in search as well as it could, often struggling to rank the right content in the right languages and the right regions.

The solution

The decision had already been made to redesign and rebuild the site, upgrading EPiServer versions in the process. Our recommended course of action was agreed:

Audit the old site

We wanted to understand fully what was working and what wasn’t – not just from a technical point of view, but also what news and knowledge hub content was performing best.

Design an SEO strategy

Most converting organic traffic would be from referrals seeking out lawyers by name. Therefore, the lawyer profile pages had to rank first.

Internationalise the new site

This would see us consolidating several TLDs, country folders and country subdomains into something more manageable. Freshfields operates in 5 territories and 27 languages, so the original set up had around 405 versions of each page.

Minimise the risk of losing rankings

We needed to build a complex redirect map that consolidated past versions of the site in order to concentrate PageRank. The aim was to increase rankings following the launch, not lose or just maintain them.

Audit the new site

Finally, we needed to check for common and bespoke issues before launch.