Case Study: Clio’s Ranking Fix
Resolving a Systemic Google Glitch
Clio is the #1 legal software used globally. After four years of being stuck on page 2, we got Google to fix a hidden algorithm issue that was blocking Clio’s rankings, and they rose to page 1 within days.
Challenge
Clio is the industry leader in legal practice management software. After migrating from goclio.com to clio.com in November 2016, their site became stuck at position 11 (top of page 2) for virtually all non-branded keywords. Despite being the clear market leader with excellent reviews and strong brand recognition, they couldn’t break onto the first page of the Google search results. The issue had persisted for nearly four years when they engaged us.
Our goal was to diagnose why Clio couldn’t rank on page 1 for non-branded keywords and resolve the issue so they could achieve the organic visibility their market leadership deserved.
Strategy
We systematically tested and ruled out five theories over nearly a year:
- Expected rankings: Ruled out via Quality Raters’ Guidelines review showing strong E-A-T,
- Migration issues: Ruled out as migration was clean with no content changes.
- Technical issues: Ruled out via multiple technical audits,
- Google guidelines violations: Ruled out as no manual actions existed.
- Domain-level issue: This was our conclusion. Marie Haynes, a renowned Google algorithm expert, was engaged to conduct a comprehensive 24-page analysis, further validating our work and lending significant credibility to our findings. She was equally stumped.
The key evidence: Clio ranked #2 in Bing for the same keywords, proving content quality wasn’t the issue. We discovered other domains with the identical “position 11” pattern, suggesting a systemic Google issue with legacy domain classification. With conventional approaches exhausted, Intrepid reached out directly to the search team at Google with comprehensive documentation
Results
Time to resolution: 11 days from initial Google contact to rankings recovery
Position improvement: Rankings jumped from position 40–60 (page 4-6) to position ~20 (page 2), with many keywords reaching page 1.
Impressions: 62M+ total impressions were recorded post-fix.
Timeline: September 16, 2020 (first contact with John Mueller) to September 27, 2020 (client confirmed recovery)
The analysis revealed that other domains exhibited the identical “position 11 ceiling” pattern, suggesting this was a systemic Google issue with legacy domain classification—not an isolated Clio problem.
"Getting the attention of someone at Google was truly the achievement, Jeremy! Thanks for making those reach-outs; the persistence clearly paid off"
~ Jack Newton ~
Clio CEO
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