Most of the questions firm owners ask before hiring an SEO consultancy are the same ones, in roughly the same order. I’d rather answer them here than make you sit through a sales call to find out whether the basics line up. The questions below are organized into four sections — working with us, the actual work, fit and conflicts, and operations. If a question you have isn’t here, the contact form is at the bottom, and the answer will be in the first reply.
About working with us
How long is the contract?
There isn’t one. Every engagement is month-to-month — no minimum term, no auto-renew, no exit fee, no clawback. You pay for the month that just happened, and if the next month isn’t worth it, you don’t pay it. We do it differently on purpose. The full version is on the approach page.
Practically: you get an invoice at the start of each month for that month’s work. If you want to pause, you send a note and we stop. The work delivered up to that date is yours to keep.
What do you charge?
Most engagements land between $3,000 and $9,000 per month. The exact number depends on the size of the firm, the state of the existing site, the competitive density of the market, and how much foundational work needs to happen in the first ninety days. There are no tiers. There’s no bronze-silver-gold. There’s one quote for your firm based on what the work actually requires.
The free audit produces a real number — not a range, not a “starting at,” not a quote contingent on a second sales call. You’ll know what the engagement costs before you decide whether to start it. The full breakdown of what’s included at each spend level is on the pricing page.
Who actually does the work?
I do. The owner. Audits, page-level recommendations, monthly strategy direction, the monthly report — every piece of strategic work comes from me. There’s no account manager between you and the person making decisions. There’s no junior strategist who actually runs your engagement while I sit on a quarterly review call.
Execution — page rewrites, schema, technical fixes — is handled by a small network of writers and a developer I’ve worked with for years. Every piece goes through me before it ships. The firm hears from one person.
How long until I see results?
Leading indicators move first — rankings on the pages we rewrite typically shift within four to eight weeks. Calls and form submissions usually lag rankings by another four to eight weeks because Google has to re-index, the new positions have to get clicked on, and the intake has to come through. So you should expect to see ranking movement within sixty days, and a meaningful change in call volume within ninety to one hundred twenty days on most engagements.
That said: SEO is not linear. If your site is in worse shape than it appeared, the first ninety days will be foundation repair and case-volume change won’t show up until month four or five. The free audit gives you a realistic timeline for your specific firm before you commit.
Do you guarantee rankings?
No. Anyone who guarantees rankings is either lying or using the word “guarantee” in a way that doesn’t mean what it sounds like. Google’s algorithm changes constantly, the competitive set in your market changes constantly, and ranking on any specific keyword on any specific date is not something a consultancy can promise.
What we do instead: we earn the retainer every month. If the work isn’t moving rankings, and rankings aren’t moving calls, you stop paying. That’s the only guarantee that actually matters — you’re never locked into paying for work that didn’t produce.
Can I cancel anytime?
Yes. Send an email. Work stops at the end of the current month, you pay for the month that just happened, and the engagement ends. No retention call, no fee for leaving. If you decide to come back later, the same month-to-month terms apply.
About the work itself
What’s included in the audit?
The free audit is a one-page document covering the three highest-impact things on your existing site. It’s not a forty-page PDF, not a deck, and not a recycled template with your logo dropped on it. The audit is based on a manual review of your site, your top three competitors, your Google Business Profile, your review profile, and the keywords your firm should be ranking for in your primary market.
You keep it whether you hire us or not. If you take the plan and hand it to your current agency, fine — the audit is usually enough to either get them working on the right things or confirm they won’t. Either outcome is useful.
How do you measure success?
Calls and cases. Specifically: call volume from organic search, form submissions from organic search, and — when the firm is willing to share it — case-acquisition data tied back to which channels the case originated from. Rankings and traffic are leading indicators that we track because they predict the lagging indicators, but the report you get every month is built around the things that actually pay the firm.
If your current agency sends you a monthly report that opens with “domain authority increased to 32” and never gets to call volume, that’s the report we don’t send. Ours opens with what changed in your intake and works backward to the SEO work that caused it.
Do you do PPC, social, or web design?
No. SEO only, law firms only. If you need PPC, a new website, social management, or any of the dozen adjacent marketing services agencies typically upsell into, we’ll point you toward people we trust on each. We won’t try to add line items to the engagement to grow account size. That’s part of why the engagements stay focused — and part of why we can run a small book without dropping quality.
Do you do content writing?
Yes, but not the way most agencies do. We don’t run a content calendar that publishes fifty blog posts a month. Most law firms don’t need that — they need their existing service pages rewritten, their practice-area pages strengthened, and their location pages built out. That’s the bulk of the writing we do, and it’s hand-written by writers who have legal-marketing experience, edited by me.
Blog posts and informational content get written when there’s a strategic reason to write them — supporting a service page, capturing a high-intent informational query, addressing a topic that prospects ask about. We don’t write blog posts to hit a quota. The reasoning behind that is laid out on the practice pages guide and the legal SEO guide.
About fit and conflicts
What practice areas do you specialize in?
Personal injury and criminal defense are the largest segments of the book — they’re also the most competitive in most markets, which is where the work pays off the most. We also work with family law, estate planning, business law, and employment law firms regularly. The shorter list is what we don’t do: we don’t work with class-action shops, mass-tort marketing operations, or firms whose practice depends entirely on TV-and-billboard intake rather than search.
If you’re in a less common practice area and want to know whether your market is something we can be useful in, the practice areas page covers what we’ve done in each, and the fastest answer is a note.
Where are you located?
Phoenix, Arizona. The lead market is Phoenix and the surrounding cities — Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Glendale, Peoria. Most of the book is within a thirty-mile radius of central Phoenix. The full breakdown of the local markets is on the Phoenix page.
Do you work nationally?
Yes, selectively. There are clients in Denver, Atlanta, and a few East Coast markets. Engagements outside Phoenix get evaluated on a case-by-case basis because local SEO is local — being able to walk the market your client is competing in changes how I see the SERP. The further out a prospective client is from Phoenix, the higher the bar on whether the engagement makes sense for both of us.
Do you work with my competitors?
No. One firm per practice area per city is a hard rule. If you’re a PI firm in Scottsdale, we won’t take on another PI firm in Scottsdale. The rule applies to direct competitors in the same primary market — a Phoenix PI firm and a Scottsdale PI firm sometimes count as the same market, sometimes don’t, depending on where they actually overlap. We’ll tell you on the discovery call whether we have a conflict, and if we do, the answer is no and you’ll get a referral to someone I trust who doesn’t have the conflict.
We’ve turned down good-fit prospects because we already had their competitor on the book. That’s the cost of the rule, and it’s the right cost.
About operations
How quickly do you respond to inquiries?
Within one business day. Usually faster — most emails that arrive before late afternoon Phoenix time get a same-day reply. If you call during business hours and I’m not on another call, I’ll pick up. If I can’t take you on, you’ll hear that in the first reply, not after a sales-qualification dance.
What’s the onboarding process?
It’s deliberately short. After the discovery call and the free audit, if both sides want to move forward, the first month starts within two weeks. Week one is a deeper-dive audit, access setup (analytics, Search Console, GBP, the CMS), and the prioritized work plan. Weeks two through four are execution on the highest-impact items from the audit. No kickoff fee, no setup retainer, no ninety-day “discovery phase” that’s just billed planning work.
The 30-day structure of the engagement is laid out on the homepage and in more detail on the services page.
What if my current agency has IP ownership of content?
This comes up more than you’d expect. Some agency contracts contain clauses claiming ownership of the content they produced — meaning that if you leave, they can demand it be taken down or charge a buyout fee. Read your contract carefully before you give notice; the clause is usually buried under “intellectual property” or “work product.”
If there is an IP clause and the work is genuinely worth keeping, a one-time buyout is sometimes the path of least resistance. More often, the content under dispute is mediocre enough that rewriting it from scratch — which we’d likely do anyway as part of foundation work — is faster than negotiating with a departing agency. It’s not a reason to stay locked in.
— The owner, PHX Search Co.