Case Study: Paton & Mayr Lawyers and Partners
How a Spanish law firm pivoted to serve international property investors — and started ranking across the US, UK, and Europe.
The Firm
Founded in 2013, Paton & Mayr Lawyers and Partners is a Spain-based law firm that built its reputation advising international clients on taxation, real estate law, and immigration. For more than a decade, the firm operated a trilingual website in Spanish, English, and French, serving a mix of local and international clients — primarily through referrals.
The Challenge
In 2025, legislative changes in Spain forced a sharp repositioning. The firm's traditional service mix was no longer viable in its previous form, and the team made a strategic decision: focus exclusively on helping international investors buy property in Spain, managing the full journey from investment planning through property purchase and post-purchase compliance.
The problem was that their website reflected none of this.
- The site was still positioned around the old, broader service mix
- Content existed in three languages, splitting authority and confusing search engines
- Most of the existing pages were thin, outdated, or no longer aligned with the new positioning
- Nearly all existing traffic was branded and Spain-based — referred clients searching for the firm by name, not prospects discovering them through search
- There was no visibility in the markets where their new ideal clients actually lived: the US and the UK
To execute the pivot, the firm needed a website that could attract international property investors — primarily Americans and Britons — who had no prior relationship with the firm and were searching online for help navigating Spanish property law.
Our Approach
1. Discovery and strategic foundation
We started with an in-depth interview with the Paton & Mayr team to understand:
- The specific services they now offered under the new positioning
- Their ideal customer profile — who the international property investor actually was, their concerns, their decision process, and the questions they asked
- The competitive landscape in English-language Spanish property law
- Keyword research focused on the US and UK markets
- Competitor benchmarking against other firms targeting international property investors in Spain
2. Strategic decision: English-only
One of the most consequential decisions from the discovery phase was to consolidate the site to English only.
The firm's new ideal clients — Americans and Britons investing in Spanish property — searched exclusively in English. The Spanish and French versions of the site had been built for older client segments that no longer fit the repositioning. Maintaining them was splitting the site's authority, confusing search engines about the site's primary audience, and producing content that wasn't reaching the new target market.
We retired the Spanish and French sites and focused all SEO authority on a single, focused English-language site aligned to the firm's new positioning.
3. Content cleanup
The existing site had years of accumulated content that no longer matched the new focus — old service pages, outdated blog posts, thin pages built around keywords that no longer mattered. We removed or consolidated everything that wasn't serving the new positioning, leaving a cleaner foundation for Google and AI tools to understand what the firm now did.
4. Content strategy built around the property investor journey
With the foundation cleared, we built out a content strategy organized around the real questions international investors ask — and the locations within Spain where they were actually looking to buy.
Location-specific service pages. We planned and produced landing pages for each region where Paton & Mayr's clients were buying property — covering the firm's services tailored to the specific legal, tax, and process considerations of each location.
Client case studies. Real stories of international clients the firm had guided through the investment and purchase process, serving as both trust signals for prospects and high-intent content for search.
Helpful content across the investor journey. Comprehensive content covering every stage of buying property in Spain as an international investor:
- Pre-purchase planning and investment considerations
- Navigating the Spanish property purchase process
- Taxation for international property owners
- Post-purchase compliance, ongoing tax obligations, and residency considerations
- Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
Each piece was written to answer real prospect questions, structured for both traditional SEO and AI search extraction, and connected through clear internal linking into the firm's core service pages.
The Results
The repositioning fundamentally changed the firm's traffic profile.
Before: - Mostly branded traffic (people searching for "Paton & Mayr" directly) - Almost entirely from Spain - Limited discovery by new, unreferred prospects
After: - Steady organic traffic from the United States and United Kingdom — the firm's new target markets - Growing traffic from other European countries where international investors in Spanish property originate - Meaningful traffic on both informational queries (prospects researching the process of buying property in Spain) and transactional queries (prospects actively looking for a lawyer to guide them through it) - A website that now reflects and supports the firm's current positioning, rather than its old one
The firm is no longer dependent on referrals and branded search. It now has a consistent, compounding channel bringing in new international prospects — the exact audience its repositioning was built to serve.
What Made This Work
Three decisions drove the outcome:
1. We didn't just optimize the old site — we repositioned it. The firm's pivot required a different website, not a tweaked one. Optimizing content that was aligned to the old positioning would have produced modest SEO gains but no strategic movement.
2. We made hard tradeoffs early. Retiring the Spanish and French versions of the site was a difficult call. Done reactively, most agencies would have kept them "just in case." The decision to consolidate all authority to English paid off in how quickly the site started ranking in the US and UK.
3. We built content around the real buyer journey, not around keyword lists. The content strategy wasn't a spreadsheet of search terms. It was mapped to the actual questions and decisions an international property investor faces — which is why it attracts prospects at every stage of the process, not just the ones ready to convert immediately.
Why We Worked With Paton & Mayr
Paton & Mayr is the kind of firm Gotham SEO was built to serve: a specialized practice with real expertise, a defined ideal client, and a genuine need for senior SEO strategy to match a strategic pivot. The engagement demonstrated what happens when technical SEO, content strategy, and positioning work together — not as separate line items, but as a single coordinated program.
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