The $40,000 lesson

Marcus had already tried to fix it

Marcus, a personal injury attorney, had signed a long contract with a legal marketing company. Over about a year, he paid roughly forty thousand dollars. My story tells how we came to work together. Here is how you can use that experience when reviewing your own agency.

Names and identifying details have been changed.

Start with the promise

The company had promised Marcus the #1 spot on Google. When you need the phone to ring, that’s an easy promise to want to believe.

Google’s guidance on choosing an SEO provider explains how to assess ranking promises. Bring the conversation back to work the agency can commit to doing.

Ask: “Which searches will you work on, and which pages will you change?” You can read those pages. You can judge whether they describe work you want. Named searches and pages give you specific work to examine.

Open a page that matters

Your service pages and your Google Business Profile, the listing for your firm, are places to start. You can look at each with your agency instead of trying to judge the whole SEO program at once.

Open a page for a service you want more calls about. A page is indexed when Google has stored it so it can appear in search results.

Google’s URL Inspection tool shows whether a page is stored for search and lets you test whether Google can open it. If there’s a fault, keep the page on screen while the agency explains what needs fixing. Keep the discussion on that page until you understand the problem.

Next, read the categories on your Business Profile. Do they describe the work you do? Google’s Business Profile guidelines say to use the fewest categories needed to describe your core business. You know your practice. Use that knowledge to check that the categories fit your services.

Connect rankings to the work you want

Marcus’s reports were full of rankings for searches that had little to do with the cases he wanted. A ranking is the place a page holds in search results. The useful rankings are for searches tied to the cases you want.

You know which injuries you handle and which towns you serve. Those are the tests for the searches in your report. Match each search in the report to those services and places. Then you can judge progress toward the work you want.

Then turn to the calls and forms. An inquiry means someone contacted your firm; a signed case means they hired you. Keep those counts separate. The agency can report calls without guessing how many callers became clients.

The source of a call matters too. Your report needs to show where the inquiry came from, with data in an account you can open yourself. An unknown source belongs in the report as unknown. Keeping that clear helps you judge which work is bringing people to you.

Visit a site in the link report

Marcus also got links from sites no client would ever visit. A link here means another website points its readers to yours. If your report lists a total, look at the sites behind that number.

The page linking to you tells you more than the total alone. Its subject, its readers and the reason it mentions your firm all matter. Your agency needs to explain why it chose that site and how it earned the link. Review the sites alongside the total so you can see how they support the plan.

Find out who else gets the same program

The company selling Marcus its program was selling the same package to firms he competed against. They were going after the same work.

A direct competitor is a firm in your practice area and service area. Before you sign, get a written answer to this: “Do you work for another firm in our practice area and service area?” Get an answer about your specific practice and area.

The policy also needs to cover the next firm that wants to join. Ask how that policy applies to future clients as well. Settle that point while you are choosing who to hire.

Decide what you need to see next

Set a date for the next review and give it a clear purpose: agree what progress you will check and what decision it will help you make.

A review needs to end with a decision about the work. Early on, that means knowing whether a repair is done and how it was tested. Later, the searches and inquiries help you decide where to put the next effort. Use that evidence to plan the next stage.

Before you commit, also go through what you keep if you leave: your website, your accounts and the work you’ve paid for. It’s easier to settle that while you’re choosing an agency than while you’re trying to leave one.

Put the foundation first

Marcus’s site is the example: key pages were kept out of Google by technical errors, and his Business Profile had the wrong categories. We fixed those problems before writing a word of new content.

Here is the spending decision that example gives you: put repairs first when errors keep key pages out of Google. Schedule new content after those repairs. You are changing the order of the work, with a clear reason for doing so.

Then move on. Once the basics were right for Marcus, we built pages around the injuries and towns his clients searched for. Month by month, calls started coming from people who needed his work. He could also see where each one came from.

For more questions to take into that first conversation, read Inoriseo’s guide to checks for choosing a law-firm SEO agency.

Questions law-firm owners ask