For many law firms, SEO is a long game. You publish content, build authority, and slowly climb the rankings. But what happens when that content starts to slip?
That was the challenge one California-based personal injury law firm faced in early 2025.
Despite having hundreds of helpful articles, many had lost visibility, and some even dropped out of Google’s index entirely. Rankings for informational keywords were down, service pages were stagnating, and site performance felt like it was in slow decline.
Rather than invest in another expensive rewrite cycle, the firm’s agency partner, Elevation Lab Consulting, proposed a faster, more scalable approach—using Surfer:
Surfer made it easy to refresh dozens of articles with just a few clicks. No rewrites, no guesswork.
— Victor Perez, Owner, Elevation Labs Consulting
Three months later, the team had refreshed dozens of articles, improved rankings across the board, and secured new visibility in AI search—laying the foundation for a fully automated SEO workflow without needing a strategist to manage it.
Optimizing at scale with Surfer and AI
From January to March 2025, ELC used Surfer’s Content Editor and Auto-Optimize to refresh existing blog content that had originally been written in 2023 and carried over from a previous agency.
The workflow was simple:
- Upload the existing article into a new Content Editor with fresh SERP data
- Use Auto-Optimize to refresh the article based on real-time competitor analysis
- Review and republish
Each update used just one Content Editor credit and one AI credit.
The SOP was so simple, any trained team member could manage updates—no strategist needed.
— Victor Perez, Owner, ELC
No new briefs. No rewrites. No back-and-forth between SEOs and writers. Just fast, targeted updates that brought content back into the game.
Rankings climbed back to the top
Across every blog post updated, rankings went up. Many landed in the top 3, some even claimed the #1 spot.
These weren’t minor shifts—they were movements that directly translated into new clicks and visibility for high-value informational queries.
Examples include:
Uber and Lyft Driver Requirements
Updated February 2025. Climbed to #1 for multiple rideshare terms.
Updated in March 2025. Now ranks top 3 for core queries.
Each update only cost two Surfer credits. Compared to hiring a writer, it’s not even close.
— Victor Perez, Owner, ELC
But it wasn’t just informational rankings that improved. As these blog posts strengthened, they supported high-intent service page queries too—the “money keywords” that regularly bring in local leads.
The Ahrefs Keywords Report below tracks movements since July 2023, across the entire time the account has been managed.
This shows that refreshing content at scale isn’t just about clicks from blog posts. It’s about protecting and strengthening the rankings that drive business outcomes.
Visibility extended into AI platforms
Beyond traditional rankings, the optimized articles began showing up in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT responses—a major visibility boost in the age of generative search.
Here’s an example of their updated “Uber and Lyft Driver Requirements” article showing up for a relevant query.
Thanks to Surfer and Auto-Optimize, our content now reaches people not only through Google rankings but also directly inside AI tools.
— Victor Perez, Owner, ELC
Final thoughts
This case shows that SEO growth doesn’t always require publishing more. Sometimes, the fastest path forward is unlocking the value of what you’ve already built.
With Surfer, those updates become faster, cheaper, and scalable, so you can focus on winning in both search and AI-driven platforms.
And the data backs it up: in a recent study, we found that pages updated with Surfer are twice as likely to hit the top 10 within 30 days.
For this California law firm, the result was renewed visibility, stronger rankings, and new exposure inside AI answers—all at the cost of just two credits per article.
👉 Want to revive your own content and expand visibility into AI search?
Try Surfer and let Auto-Optimize do the heavy lifting.
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