The questions that separate work from a story
You are being pitched by people whose product is persuasion, which is an awkward starting position for evaluating them. The way through it is to ask questions where a good answer is uncomfortable and a bad answer is easy, and then to notice which one you get. Here are the six that work.
What this covers
- 03 Ask what they will not promise
- 04 Ask to see a report before you sign
- 05 Check whether they know the bar rules exist
- 06 Read a case study properly
- 07 Agree the metrics before month one
- 08 The terms of the deal itself
Written by an agency, which you should factor in. The mitigation is that every test below is one you can apply to us, and two of them are ones we would rather you did.
Ask what they will not promise
This is the single most informative question available, because the honest answer costs the agency something and the dishonest answer costs nothing. Ask which of the terms you care about they think are not worth pursuing in the first year.
A good answer names specific terms and explains why: difficulty, who currently holds the position, how much authority separates you from them. It will be an uncomfortable conversation and it will make the proposal look smaller than a competitor's.
A bad answer is that all of them are achievable with the right strategy. In a market where the head terms carry difficulty scores three to five times higher than any trade vertical, that sentence is either ignorance or a decision not to tell you.
Follow it with: do you guarantee rankings? The only defensible answer is no. Anyone who says yes has told you how they will treat every subsequent claim, and the guarantee itself is usually written to be unfalsifiable when you read it.
Ask to see a report before you sign
A redacted real report from an existing client, not a template and not a screenshot of a dashboard. What you are looking for is whether the deliverables can be verified by you, without their help, in a few minutes.
Links should be listed as URLs you can open. Content should be listed as pages you can read. Technical work should be described specifically enough that you could check whether it happened. If the report is a set of graphs and a summary of work performed, the reporting is the product.
This is a request agencies find awkward, and the awkwardness is the signal. An agency confident in what it delivers has nothing to lose by showing you the shape of it.
Check whether they know the bar rules exist
Most agencies working with law firms do not know that lawyer advertising is regulated at all, which is a remarkable thing to be able to say about a sector but is consistently true.
Ask what their process is for content review before publication. The answer you want is that everything goes to the firm for sign off and nothing is published without it, because requirements vary by state, change over time, and your firm is the party accountable.
Ask specifically about testimonials and past results, which are the two areas where the rules bite hardest. An agency that has never encountered the fact that testimonials are restricted in some states is an agency that will cheerfully publish some on your behalf.
You are not looking for legal expertise here. A marketing agency should not be giving ethics advice and you should be wary of one that offers to. You are looking for awareness that the constraint exists and a process that respects it.
Read a case study properly
A percentage on its own is close to meaningless. Traffic rose three hundred percent from what base, over what period, on which terms, and did any of it become a signed matter? A case study that answers none of those is a headline rather than evidence.
What a good one contains is a mechanism. Which terms moved, what was changed to move them, how long it took, and what did not work. The presence of something that did not work is a strong positive signal, because real programs have those and marketing copy does not.
Check the attribution too. Case studies frequently describe an agency's results in an unrelated industry and let you infer they apply to yours. That is not dishonest if it is stated, and it is worth confirming which it is.
Agree the metrics before month one
Agree in writing what will be measured and when it is fair to judge it. Doing this before you start removes the most common source of a bad ending, which is that the agency and the firm were measuring different things for nine months.
- 01
The outcome metric
Consultations from organic search. This is the only number that connects to the business, and it requires your intake team to ask and record where people came from, which is a change on your side rather than theirs.
- 02
The leading metrics
Positions on the specific terms you both agreed, plus indexation and local visibility. These move first and tell you whether the outcome metric is likely to follow.
- 03
The diagnostic metrics
Traffic, impressions, click-through. Useful for understanding what is happening, useless as a definition of success, and the ones a weak report will lead with.
- 04
The review point
Month six, agreed in advance. Earlier than that and you are judging the timescale rather than the work. Later and you have spent a year finding out.
The terms of the deal itself
Four things in the contract matter more than the price. Whether you can leave, who owns what is produced, what happens to assets if you go, and whether there is a setup fee that makes leaving expensive by design.
A twelve-month term in this industry exists to protect the agency from the consequences of underperforming, and it is worth saying plainly that the standard justification, that SEO takes time, is an argument for patience rather than for a lock-in. A firm that is happy with the work does not need a contract to stay.
Ownership is the one most often missed. Ask directly whether the content, the site and the assets built on your behalf remain yours if you leave. On proprietary platforms the answer is frequently no, and firms discover this at exactly the moment it is most expensive.
Our own terms, since every test here should be applied to us: month to month, no contract, setup fee waived on every plan, and everything produced is yours permanently. That is not offered as a virtue. It is offered because it is the only arrangement in which the reporting has to stay honest.
Questions
What criteria should we use to evaluate an SEO agency for a law firm?
Five that separate real work from a marketing story: what they refuse to promise, whether their reporting is verifiable, whether they know bar advertising rules exist, whether their case studies name a mechanism, and whether the contract lets you leave. Everything else is preference.
What SEO agency success metrics actually matter for law firms?
Consultations from organic search, then positions on the specific terms you agreed, then indexation and technical health. Traffic and impressions are diagnostic rather than outcomes, and any report leading with them is choosing the number that is easiest to move.
Should we ask for a law firm SEO case study?
Yes, and read it for mechanism rather than for the percentage. A case study that says traffic rose 300 percent tells you nothing. One that says which terms moved, what was changed, and how long it took tells you whether they understand their own work.
How much should we expect to pay?
The market runs from under a hundred dollars a month to five figures, and price correlates weakly with outcome. What price does reliably buy is volume: more keywords, more placements, more content. It does not buy a better sequence, and the sequence is what usually decides the result.
Is a legal-specialist agency better than a generalist?
Only if the specialism is real. The genuine legal-specific knowledge is bar advertising constraints, the directory dynamic, and how much harder the head terms are here. An agency that knows those three things is specialist enough; one that only has legal clients is not necessarily.
What is the biggest warning sign?
A guarantee. Rankings cannot be guaranteed by anyone, and an agency willing to promise one has told you something important about how it will handle every other claim it makes to you over the following year.
The other guides
- 01 How to audit a law firm website What to check, in order, and which findings actually move rankings.
- 02 A law firm SEO strategy that holds up Sequencing the work so early wins fund the terms that take longer.
- 03 What law firm SEO costs What the market charges, what changes the number, and what to refuse.
A free analysis of what your firm can win
Five questions about your practice areas, your firm size and where you are losing to the directories. You get back the terms we would target first, with difficulty and volume attached, and an honest read on how long each one takes. No obligation and no call required.