A Django-based platform built in-house for a personal injury and employment law firm: a programmatic blog, an accident-report tool built on public crash data, and a childcare-safety lookup tool, backed by the technical SEO that took it from page 2 of search to page 1.
This was designed and built in-house, not a freelance client project: a full Django platform for a personal injury and employment law firm, standing in for their whole web presence. The firm name is left out here out of respect for that in-house relationship.
This was built agentically, with Claude Code as the primary tool, not autocomplete on the side. I steered it through auditing several public data APIs before settling on CHP and CA DSS, and drove every design and presentation decision, while it handled a lot of the implementation legwork. It is the workflow I actually use now: less typing every line myself, more directing, evaluating, and deciding what ships, with the design and strategy calls still squarely mine.
The site had been live for years but was barely showing up in search: competing against far more established firms for generic, high-competition keywords, with no real presence for the long-tail, hyper-local searches that actually convert for personal injury cases.
On the technical side, indexation was a mess: pages Google should have been ranking weren't indexed at all, canonical tags were inconsistent, and there was no real internal linking strategy connecting related content.
The accident-report tool doubles as a programmatic local SEO system. Instead of one generic service-area page, every crash and dangerous-road page is a genuinely unique answer to a real local search, generated from CHP collision data rather than a templated city-name swap. Programmatic done well is not thin content at scale; it is a real answer to a real local search, generated efficiently.
This is the same groundwork my technical SEO audits and implementation packages are built around: find what is holding the site back, fix it, then scale what works.
Backlink strategy through local institutional partnerships: the kind of citations that build genuine, durable local authority rather than manufactured link volume.
Over the first four months, average search position moved from page 2 (16.8) to page 1 (10.6) and click-through rate more than doubled, from 2.3% to 5.6%.
The click growth kept compounding from there. Monthly organic clicks on the accident-report tool:
We'll nearly 10x organic clicks by the end of this month from when we started.
AI Overview impressions have grown just as fast, from a peak of 237 in May to 1,500 in a single day this month.
This was in-house work, done as part of a full-time role, not a standalone freelance engagement. The firm name and exact figures are kept general out of respect for that.
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