Disclosure, once
Chuck Kraus is a client of Clarion Studio, and this description of the engagement is published with his permission. He is never billed for this work. The fee framework circulated early in the relationship was pricing for him to quote to his clients, never a charge to him, and that was retracted in writing before this piece was drafted. Nothing here characterizes his legal practice, his results, or his cases; it describes what the site was, what it is, and what the difference is worth using the market’s own pricing of the attention involved, not Clarion’s estimate of it. Every structural fact below is checkable the way any build on the work page is: view source, read the schema, follow a link and see where it goes.
The practice
Chuck Kraus practices corporate and M&A law, cross-border governance between Texas and Alberta, and fractional general counsel work, out of Granbury, Texas, as a partner at Scale LLP. The five practice areas he handles directly — M&A, fractional GC, governance, cross-border, Texas business law — sit alongside five more that Scale’s broader network handles by referral, litigation, real estate, employment, IP, and fintech among them, all through one relationship and one phone number.
The site launched on its current architecture in mid-June 2026. What follows compares its state as first built, in late May, to its state today, roughly a hundred days later.
What kraus.law was
The May build was not a bad site. It shipped with real schema, an Organization and a Person entity for Chuck, geo-tagged service areas, an AI-crawler-friendly robots.txt, a working sitemap.xml and llms.txt, on 75 pages, including 31 insight essays, 16 podcast-episode transcripts, and the first three of what are now four legal-data trackers. Most builds this firm competes with don’t have that much right on day one.
What it didn’t have was structure sized to its own ambition. The glossary, 256 statute-cited entries, already written and already accurate, lived on a single 2-megabyte page with every entry hidden behind a click. The navigation was one flat, eleven-item dropdown with no distinction between the five practice areas Chuck handles directly and the five referral practices, and no path at all to the Business Court tracker that is the site’s sharpest differentiator. The tracker itself held 47 opinions and no per-judge pages: the Eighth Division content that exists today as its own authority cluster was, in May, a paragraph inside a single insight essay.
The measured traffic over the following three months shows what that structure cost. Search Console, May 16 to August 13: 5 clicks and 710 impressions, site-wide, average position 18.2. Thirty-nine search terms ranked anywhere, five of them in the top ten, for an estimated 27 visits a month. The glossary, the single largest body of expert content on the site, drew 525 of those impressions at position 15.4 and converted zero of them into a click. A search engine could see the page existed. It couldn’t see what was on it.
What was built
The glossary was split into 297 individually addressable term pages, the hub rebuilt as a real A-to-Z index instead of a container for hidden text. One body of copy per term, in exactly one place, so a search engine has something specific to point at instead of one undifferentiated file.
The Business Court tracker grew from 47 tracked opinions to 73, each addition cross-checked directly against the court’s own published opinions list rather than a secondary source, with per-row stable anchors so a specific opinion can be linked and cited on its own. It was joined by three more maintained trackers: redomestications (18 companies now, up from 17), SB 29 governance adopters, and a fourth added since May, the Fifteenth Court of Appeals docket. Two dedicated judge-profile pages and a standalone Eighth Division page joined them too, none of it existing as its own page in May.
Twelve concept-authority pages were built where one insight essay used to stand alone: cease-and-desist letters, demand letters, breach of contract, non-compete law, buy-sell agreements, shareholder disputes, breach of fiduciary duty, and LLC operating agreements on the direct-practice side, plus four referral-capture pages (employment law basics, trademark first steps, commercial lease review, business litigation timelines) that route a visitor to the right Scale colleague while keeping the relationship Chuck’s. Every one of the eight direct-practice pages is statute- and case-verified against a live Texas citation, not drafted from general knowledge.
A five-tool valuation and exit-planning cluster was built where none existed: a business-value estimator and an exit-readiness scorecard as the lead conversion devices, backed by three explainer pages on what drives a valuation and how it differs from a certified appraisal. Two dedicated local pages, Granbury as the anchor and Fort Worth for the owner-transaction audience, were built and kept narrow on purpose after an early draft of four more was cut for not earning its own existence.
Underneath all of it, the navigation was rebuilt from a single content model generating both the desktop menu and the mobile drawer, replacing the flat eleven-item dropdown with five labeled groups: About, What I Do, Texas Business Court, Resources, Contact. Sixty-three pages that had no link pointing to them from anywhere in the old navigation (all four trackers, both judge profiles, the Performance Report, the Annual Review, fourteen practical guides, five valuation tools) are now one click from every page on the site.
What’s measured, what’s projected
The honest shape of this case study has two different kinds of number in it, and they shouldn’t be blurred together.
Measured: the May page count and structure (75 pages, one glossary file, one flat dropdown, 47 tracked opinions), the current page count and structure (388 pages, 297 glossary pages, four trackers at 73/18/current counts, a rebuilt navigation reaching all of them), and the three-month traffic baseline above (5 clicks, 710 impressions, 39 ranked terms). All of it is checkable today: view source, read the schema, count the pages yourself.
Projected: what that structural work does to the traffic numbers. The growth plan behind this build set an explicit ninety-day target — 39 ranked terms to 150 or more, 5 top-ten positions to 30 or more, reviews from 3 to 25 — against the May 16–August 13 baseline. Those are targets, not results. The infrastructure that would move them (the glossary split, the tracker expansion, the concept pages, the navigation rebuild) has been built and verified across the period this piece covers; the next Search Console pull is what will show whether it moved the numbers it was built to move, and that comparison belongs in a follow-up, not in this piece, once there’s a real post-rebuild window to measure.
One comparison point, offered as context rather than a promise: Hendershot Cowart, a boutique Texas business-law firm with a comparable practice mix, draws an estimated 31,000 organic visits a month across 4,486 ranked terms, largely from concept pages structured the same way the twelve built here are — their cease-and-desist page alone is estimated at roughly 4,350 visits a month against a 22,200-search-a-month query. That is a different firm, a different domain age, and a different starting point; it is not a forecast for kraus.law. It is evidence that the pattern this build follows is one that works at scale for a firm doing the same kind of law.
What this is worth
A guaranteed number here would be the fastest way to lose credibility with a lawyer, so this section doesn’t offer one. What it offers instead is the market’s own pricing of the attention this infrastructure now competes for — numbers set by advertisers bidding real money for the same searches, not by Clarion.
| Search cluster | Volume/mo | Market price signal |
|---|---|---|
| Fractional general counsel (+ Texas, cost, services) | 480–700 combined | $24–$190 CPC |
| How to sell a business in Texas (+ related questions) | 300–600 cluster | $52 CPC on the head term |
| Business attorney Granbury TX (+ siblings) | 320 | $13 CPC, local pack in play |
| Texas Business Court (jurisdiction, rules, local rules) | 300+ cluster, growing | No CPC data available; almost no organic competition on these terms, which is the different kind of opening the trackers were built for |
Cost-per-click is what a competing advertiser is willing to pay to put one paid link in front of one searcher with that specific question. It is a real, third-party, continuously-priced signal of what that attention is worth — not a guess, and not Clarion’s number to inflate or shade. Everything this rebuild did was aimed at winning that same attention organically, permanently, without paying per click for it.
Turning that attention into billable hours takes two more steps this site doesn’t control: how many of those searchers become a consultation, and how many consultations become an engagement. Both depend on Chuck — his response time, his fit with the matter, his own close rate on a first call — not on the infrastructure that got the searcher to the page. The honest version of this case study names that dependency instead of skipping past it with an invented figure. What the rebuild changed is the ceiling: a site that converts zero of 525 glossary impressions into a click has no consultations to close, regardless of what Chuck does next. A site built to be found, read, and cited removes that ceiling. What happens above it is his.
What replicates
None of this is law-specific. The same pattern applies to any expert practice: split content trapped behind an interaction a search engine won’t perform, give the most differentiated material its own addressable pages instead of a paragraph inside something else, rebuild the navigation from one source so nothing goes dark again, and measure what actually changed against what was actually true before. It fits any expert practice whose website looks complete but hasn’t been structured for how it’s actually found.
What replicates is the method, not the number. A different practice, a different domain age, and a different starting baseline will produce a different-shaped result. What Kraus Law brought was the raw material this method needs: real, cited, verifiable expertise that was already there in May, just not yet built to be found.