SIMONT BRAUN
Rebuilding the website of an international business law firm without costing it a single Google position, and looking after it ever since.
Business law
Brussels, Belgium
Website, search optimisation, maintenance
February 2022
THE STARTING POINT
Nobody picks a business law firm from a website. But that is where they check. Before the first meeting, a general counsel, a banker or a fellow lawyer opens the page, looks for the practice area that concerns them, the partner who handles it, the language the work will be done in. What they see has to live up to the reputation that brought them there.
Simont Braun is a Brussels business law firm that works well beyond Belgium. Forty-six lawyers, dozens of practice areas and sectors, and above all years of published legal analysis: close to five thousand pages in all, each one existing in French, in Dutch and in English. This is not a showcase site, it is an open body of documentation.
The firm told us at the first meeting: whatever happens, do not lose the search rankings already earned. Hundreds of analyses ranking well on precise legal searches, quoted within the profession, indexed for years. Run the redesign without care and all that work drops out of the results in a matter of weeks.
THE REDESIGN
Five decisions, held from start to finish.
Four doors rather than a menu
About, Practices, Sectors, Lawyers. The navigation sits along the bottom of the screen in four full-height columns: you do not open a menu, you walk straight in through what you came for. A client is looking for a practice area, a candidate is looking for faces, a journalist is looking for the firm. Each one has their own door.
Three languages, not three half-sites
French, Dutch, English. In a Brussels firm that works across borders, language is not a courtesy, it decides whether the file comes to you. The three versions are carried together, down to the latest analysis published.
Five thousand pages taken one by one
In a firm of this size the real subject is volume: sorting, moving and checking thousands of pages without mislaying one, without a duplicate and without a dead link. That is the invisible half of a redesign, and it is the half that decides whether the rankings hold.
Internal linking that ties it all together
Every analysis points back to the people who wrote it, to the practice area and to the sector it belongs to; every lawyer points to their practice areas and their writing. That linking serves two readers at once: the one moving from a claimed skill to its proof, and Google, which finally understands what the firm is an authority on.
Restraint as a signature
Deep green, a classic typeface, nothing flashy. A business law firm does not need to shout: it needs to be taken seriously within three seconds.
46
lawyers presented, each one tied to their practice areas and their writing
3
languages carried together, from the menu to the latest analysis published
5 000
pages in the sitemap, including 1,752 legal analyses
17
countries where the site appears in search results
SEARCH RANKINGS, BEFORE AND AFTER
The brief was defensive to begin with: lose nothing. It was held, then beaten. Over the last twelve months the site draws around 520 visits a month from search engines, against around 350 in the year before we arrived, with peaks close to 800 early in the year. Nearly 50 % more. These are Ahrefs estimates, and they only cover search: they count neither the people who type the firm's name directly, nor those who arrive from an email or from a colleague's link.
The firm's rankings and awards, Chambers Europe first among them, are not an image pasted at the bottom of a page: each one is tied to the lawyers and the practice area it rewards. That is what legal departments look at before choosing, and it is also what Google leans on to judge how serious a firm is.
The site now appears in the search results of seventeen countries. For a firm whose clients are weighing up Brussels, Paris, London and Amsterdam, that is the only figure that really counts.
WHAT STARTS ON LAUNCH DAY
The redesign is day one. The rest is what nobody puts in their portfolio: technical and security updates, additions as the firm needs them, new sections, corrections, watching the search rankings. We have been looking after Simont Braun since February 2022, and today's site is already no longer the one that went live.
The best proof is not a screenshot: it is that the firm still publishes, every week, in all three languages. A neglected law firm website is spotted immediately, and it loses files.
WHAT WE TAKE FROM IT
A law firm website is not judged on delivery day. It is judged four years later: when it is still up to date, still fast, still looks like the firm, when the search rankings have gone up instead of down, and when it has never forced anyone to call the agency in a panic.
A PROJECT LIKE THIS?
Fifteen minutes is enough to know whether we are the right people.