2010 – 2014 · Web Design, SEO, Graphic Design
I came onto this account in 2010 to handle web maintenance. SEO was just becoming a real line item for law firms — most of them still treated their websites as brochures. I took the opening and built the practice’s SEO dimension from the ground up alongside the work itself.
For the first two years, we owned the money terms. Los Angeles divorce lawyer. Child custody. Child support. Spousal support. Domestic violence. First page across the board, top three on the core set — against firms with far deeper pockets and full agency retainers behind them. The wins came from page content, on-page structure, technical cleanup, and link acquisition — the unglamorous foundation, executed consistently.
Over four years, the firm cycled through three identities — the Law Offices of Michael Kelly, then Kelly, Fernandez & Karney, then Fernandez & Karney — while the domain remained the same. CFLI.com carried every rebrand without surrendering its equity. Today, it operates as Fernandez Law Group and still holds a dominant position in one of the most contested legal markets in the country, on the same domain, on the foundations I laid.
And that’s the key point. The tactics that worked in 2011 are dead. Google’s Panda and Penguin killed a generation of search engine optimization strategies and techniques, and AI search is doing it again right now. Staying effective through fifteen years of that isn’t luck — it’s skill. Over the years, I’ve tracked these shifts closely and adjusted as they developed — before they hardened into industry consensus, and well before they became panics. That’s how I still work. Staying on top of these shifts is second nature to me at this point. Every client and project I take on benefits from that.