Every business has things it’ll do and things it won’t. Most agencies bury the won’ts — the contract length, the handoff to an account manager, the volume play they’ll run regardless of whether it fits your firm — somewhere a prospective client won’t find them until the third month of the engagement. This page is the opposite. These are the three things PHX Search Co. is built around. They’re non-negotiable. If any of them sounds like a problem for the way you want to buy SEO, we’re probably not the right shop, and that’s fine — better to find that out now than four months in.
The homepage states these three in compressed form. This page is the long version — the why behind each one, what it looks like in practice, and what we’d never do, even if a prospective client asked. Read it like a contract you’re considering signing. Because in effect, that’s what it is.
01 — Month-to-month or nothing.
If we’re not earning your business, you shouldn’t be paying. The contract is month-to-month, every month, forever. There’s no minimum term, no early-termination fee, no clawback on work delivered. If month four lands and you don’t see the work moving cases, you walk and you keep everything we built.
This is a direct shot at the industry standard. The dominant legal-SEO agencies — Scorpion at the top, the agency-mill tier underneath — sell twelve-month contracts with auto-renewal clauses. That’s not an accident of how those businesses are structured. It’s the business model. SEO is a long game, the pitch goes, so you need to commit. What that argument is really saying, when you read it without the salesman’s tone, is: we know there’s a non-trivial chance you’ll be unhappy in month three, and we need the contract to keep you paying through that moment.
We don’t think that’s defensible. The argument for a lockup is the agency’s argument, not the firm’s. The firm’s interest is to keep paying as long as the work is producing cases, and to stop the moment it isn’t. The lockup exists to suppress the second half of that sentence. Once you see it that way, “we need a twelve-month commitment” reads less like an industry norm and more like a tell.
What this looks like in practice: we send an invoice each month for the work that month. If you decide not to send the next one, the engagement ends. There’s no formal cancellation process — you don’t need to give thirty days’ notice, you don’t need to write a termination letter, you don’t need to schedule an exit call. You just stop paying and we stop working. Everything we delivered — audits, page rewrites, recommendations, content — is yours. We don’t roll back the work. We don’t lock features behind a service we’re no longer providing. The pages stay up. The strategy doc is yours. You can hire someone else next month and they can pick up where we left off.
What we’d never do: a twelve-month contract. A six-month contract. A “minimum term” with an early-exit fee. Auto-renewal clauses with a thirty-day opt-out window buried in section nine. A clawback provision that lets us recoup “discounted” early-month rates if you leave. A non-compete that prevents you from hiring our work product. None of these have ever served a client. They’re agency-protection clauses, and they’re a signal that the agency is anticipating you’ll want to leave before the contract lets you.
A twelve-month contract is what an agency asks for when it doesn’t trust its own work to earn the next month.
02 — The owner does the strategy. Period.
You don’t get handed off to an account manager. Every client gets the founder doing the strategic work — the initial audit, the page-by-page recommendations, the monthly direction, the answer to your “hey, quick question” email six months in. The person you talked to in the discovery call is the same person doing the work, the same person writing the report, and the same person picking up the phone when something needs sorting. There is no layer between you and the decision-maker.
The reason the rest of the industry doesn’t operate this way is structural. The bigger agencies — Ignite, Thrive, the firms that have rolled up regional shops into national brands — run on a model where the founder or a senior partner sells the deal, then hands the day-to-day to an account manager, who hands the deliverables to a junior writer or analyst. The math is simple: a senior strategist’s hourly cost is too high to spend on every client’s monthly deliverables, so the agency pushes the work as far down the seniority ladder as it can. The result is that the person doing the strategy is rarely the person who saw the inside of the firm during the sale.
We don’t think you can do good legal SEO at scale that way. The thing that produces results — judgment about which practice pages to fix first, which keywords are realistic for this firm in this market, what to push back on when the firm wants to publish a blog post that won’t rank — is judgment work, and judgment doesn’t delegate cleanly. A junior analyst can run a Screaming Frog crawl. A junior writer can hit a word count. Neither of them can tell you that your DUI page is targeting the wrong intent and your highest-revenue sub-practice doesn’t have a page at all. That’s the senior call. And the senior call is what you’re paying for.
What this looks like in practice: you talk to me on the discovery call. I do your audit. I write your one-page plan. I do the page rewrites — or I write the brief specific enough that a copywriter I trust can — but the strategy and the editorial review on every piece is mine. I send the monthly report and I’m the one who answers when you reply. There is no "your account manager will be in touch." If you want to talk strategy, you talk to me. If you have a question about a deliverable, you talk to me. If something breaks, you talk to me.
What we’d never do: hire an account manager to sit between you and the work. Bring on a sales team to close deals that someone else delivers. Roll out a “client services” tier where junior staff handle the relationship and senior staff handle “strategic reviews” quarterly. Scale past what one strategist can handle well. If we ever hit that ceiling, the answer is to close the waitlist, not to hire AMs. We’d rather work with fewer firms and do it right than work with more firms and run the same playbook the agencies our clients are leaving run.
03 — Fix what’s already there before publishing more.
The industry’s default move is volume — more blog posts, more pages, more links, more content. Fifty posts a month. Twelve-month content calendars. Junior writers spinning out informational content that targets queries the firm’s prospects don’t search. That model produces a great-looking deliverable list on a monthly report. It also produces, in our experience, almost no cases.
What actually moves cases for most local law firms is the foundation: the small stack of core practice pages, the Google Business Profile, the review profile, the citation graph, the technical layer of the site. Those are the things that earn rankings and convert searches into calls. And those are the things that, in the vast majority of audits we run, are under-optimized or broken. The firm has been paying for blog content for two years and the personal injury page hasn’t been touched since the site launched. The GBP has the wrong primary category. Two-thirds of the citation graph is wrong or missing. The reviews are sitting at twenty-three, three years stale.
The reason “fix the foundation first” isn’t the dominant industry pitch is that it’s hard to scale and hard to invoice as volume. A single rewrite of a practice page — done right, by someone who actually understands the practice — is one deliverable. It might be the highest-leverage thing the firm could do, but it doesn’t look like $5,000 of work on a deliverable list. Fifty blog posts looks like $5,000 of work. So even the agencies that know better default to publishing, because the volume play is what justifies the retainer every month. We covered this argument in more depth on the Practice Pages guide — it’s the thesis the whole consultancy is built around.
What this looks like in practice: a first engagement with us typically spends the first three to six months on the foundation. We audit the existing practice pages and rewrite the ones doing the heavy lifting. We clean up the GBP, the citation graph, the local pack signals. We work on the review profile — strategy for getting more, responses on the ones that are there, removing fake or defamatory ones where the platform’s policies allow. We fix the technical layer if it’s broken. Then, after the foundation is producing rankings and calls, we discuss whether new content earns a place in the strategy. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the firm’s case volume is already where it needs to be and the answer is to maintain rather than expand.
What we’d never do: launch an engagement with a blog content calendar before auditing the existing site. Sell a “content package” priced by post count. Stuff a monthly deliverable list with low-impact volume work to justify the invoice. Recommend a site rebuild when the existing site has fixable problems. Push for new pages on a domain that hasn’t proven it can rank the pages already on it. All of these are agency revenue plays, not firm-growth plays. The job is to make your phone ring with case-worthy leads. Anything else is theater.
What this means if you hire us
Three concrete commitments and a fair warning. The commitments: you’ll never sign a contract longer than the next month, you’ll always be talking to the person doing the strategy, and the work you pay for will be aimed at producing cases rather than producing a deliverable list. The warning: in a typical engagement, the first ninety days look smaller and less impressive than what a competitor agency would have promised. Fewer pages published. No content-calendar gantt chart. A short, plain-English monthly report instead of a forty-page deck. If the volume of activity is what you’re measuring, you’ll feel under-served. If the cases coming in are what you’re measuring, you’ll be glad we didn’t run the standard play.
The full version of how the first engagement looks lives on the homepage’s 30-Day Test section and on the services overview. The owner story — why this consultancy exists, what we walked away from to build it — is on the about page. How we charge, including the range and what shifts the number, is on the pricing page. If you’ve read this far and want to talk, the audit is free.
— The owner, PHX Search Co.