The Challenge
Venner Shipley is a leading European intellectual property firm specialising in patents and trademarks, but its online presence was not reflecting the strength of its market position. Low organic traffic was limiting the firm’s ability to attract new clients through search. An upcoming website migration added risk on top of that: without a clear SEO strategy, the move threatened to erode the rankings the firm had already earned and compound an already difficult traffic situation.
Our Approach
Terrier ran three interlocking workstreams, treating content, structure and migration as parts of one organic growth strategy rather than a single tactic.
- On-site content SEO optimisation — aligning existing pages with the search intent of prospective clients looking for patent and trademark expertise
- Structural SEO improvements — resolving the technical and architectural factors limiting how search engines could crawl, index and rank the firm’s pages
- Website migration oversight — managing the transition to the new site so accumulated rankings were preserved and traffic loss avoided
This delivered short-term quick wins and long-term structural gains in parallel, so the migration became a proof point for the SEO foundations rather than a threat to them.
The Results
Venner Shipley’s organic visibility increased 48% year on year, alongside a 37% increase in organic traffic and a 58% increase in non-brand organic traffic — evidence that the growth came from reaching new searchers, not just existing brand demand. The website migration was completed with minimal disruption to existing traffic, in a professional services market where a single mishandled migration can erase years of accumulated rankings.
