Here’s what happens when you reach out. You send a note or place a call. I read it or pick up. If your firm looks like a fit on a thirty-second read, I write back the same day to schedule a thirty-minute discovery call. That call ends with me agreeing to run a free one-page audit on your site — yours to keep, no obligation, whether you end up hiring us or not. That’s the whole funnel. No drip sequence, no "nurture" emails, no sales-development rep, no automated follow-up. Just a note, a call, an audit.
The email goes to me directly — there’s no assistant filtering it, no auto-responder routing it to a queue. The phone is the same. If you call during business hours and I’m not on another call, I’ll pick up. If you call outside business hours or I’m on a call, leave a voicemail and I’ll call you back within one business day. Most prospects use email — it’s easier to communicate the specifics of your situation in writing than to walk through them on a cold call — but pick whichever is more comfortable.
What to include if you’re emailing
If you’re a serious inquiry — meaning you’re a law firm partner or marketing lead actively looking to switch SEO vendors or start an engagement — the more of the following you include in the first note, the faster I can give you a useful answer:
- Your firm name and website URL. The URL is the single most useful thing — most of what I need to do an initial read is in your existing site.
- Your top three competitors if you know them. Not the firms you wish you competed against — the firms your prospects actually compare you to. This tells me whether the competitive picture is realistic for the work you’re considering.
- What’s broken, in your own words. "Calls are flat, agency keeps publishing blog posts, our PI page is on page three." That kind of plain-English description is more useful than any KPI dashboard.
- Your current SEO situation. Who you’re working with now (or if you’re in-house or DIY), what you’re paying, how long the relationship has been going. Whether you’re under contract and when it ends.
- What you’d like to be different. One or two sentences on what would have to be true twelve months from now for the engagement to have been worth it.
None of this is required. A two-sentence note that says "I’m a managing partner at [firm], here’s our site, I’m done with our current agency, can we talk" is fine — we’ll cover the rest on the call. But the more context you give in the first email, the more useful the first reply will be.
Response time
I respond within one business day. Usually faster — most emails get a same-day reply if they arrive before late afternoon Phoenix time. If I can’t take you on — because we have a conflict in your market, because the engagement is below or above the scope where our pricing makes sense, or because what you actually need is something other than SEO — I’ll say so honestly on the first reply, and I’ll refer you to someone I trust if I know one. There’s no incentive to string a non-fit prospect along, and we don’t.
Two things, politely, that aren’t a fit for this inbox
I get a fair amount of email at this address that isn’t from prospective clients. Two patterns specifically, which I’ll flag here rather than reply to individually each time:
Please don’t pitch SaaS or services. Every SEO consultancy gets cold outreach from rank-tracking tools, link-building services, AI content platforms, white-label agencies looking to subcontract, lead-gen companies, and offshore content shops. I appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit. I’m not going to reply. If you have something genuinely novel and you’re sure it fits, send a one-paragraph note with a link and I’ll read it when I have a minute — but please don’t follow up.
Please don’t ask for free SEO advice via cold email. "Quick question — can you tell me whether my agency is doing X correctly?" is, in practice, a request for a free audit, and audits take real time to do honestly. If you’re a prospective client, book a call and we’ll do a proper audit together. If you’re not a prospective client and you’d just like to learn how this works, the four core guides on the site cover most of it: Legal SEO, Local SEO, Practice Pages, and Reviews & Reputation. The Q&A pages under each guide cover the specific questions most firm owners ask. Read what’s there, and if you still have a question after, send it.
The fastest path to a conversation is a real note from a real firm about a real problem. The audit is yours either way.
If you’re a partner, marketing lead, or firm owner and any of this site resonated, the audit is the next step. Email the address above, or call. I’d rather hear from you than the other way around.
— The owner, PHX Search Co.