Most agency pricing pages are designed to obscure rather than inform. Three columns labeled Bronze, Silver, and Gold. A grid of features with checkmarks and X’s. A footer asterisk explaining that "custom enterprise pricing" is available on request. This page is the opposite. The model is simple, the range is honest, and the number we’d quote you depends on three or four real factors that I’ll walk through plainly below.
The model: month-to-month, custom scope, one quote
Every engagement is on a single monthly invoice. There’s no setup fee, no kickoff fee, no annual contract with a discount, no auto-renewal. We send you an invoice for the month’s work. If you pay it, the work continues. If you don’t, the engagement ends. There’s no termination process — you don’t need to give notice, you don’t need to write a cancellation letter, you don’t need to schedule an exit call. The work product we delivered is yours regardless. We don’t claw back rewrites, audits, or strategy documents if you leave.
The scope is custom. We don’t sell packages. Every engagement is built around what the specific firm actually needs — a firm that’s mostly missing the practice-page foundation needs a different shape of work than a firm whose pages are solid but whose local pack signals are broken. The quote you get reflects what we’d actually do for you, not a tier number on a pricing page. We give you one number, in writing, with the scope it covers. If the scope changes mid-engagement, the number changes with it, and we tell you that before any work happens.
Tier pricing is built for an agency-mill model where the same playbook runs across every client. We’re not running the same playbook across every client. A tier comparison page would force us to lie about that. So there isn’t one.
The general range
Most engagements land between $3,000 and $9,000 per month. That’s the honest range across the current book — not a marketing-claim range, the actual range of the invoices we send. The anchors:
Around $3,000/month is the floor — a small firm, one to three attorneys, single practice area, single location, modest existing site that needs foundational practice-page and local-pack work. Scope covers the initial audit, two to three page rewrites in the first quarter, GBP and citation cleanup, and ongoing monthly direction.
Around $9,000/month is the ceiling for most engagements — a mid-firm with multiple practice areas, multiple locations, a larger site needing more attention, and a more competitive market. Scope includes a deeper audit, four to six rewrites per quarter, multi-location local SEO across distinct GBP profiles, more aggressive review-strategy work, and the technical scope that comes with a bigger site.
The middle — $5K to $7K — is where the typical engagement lands: a partner-led firm with two to four attorneys, a primary practice area plus a secondary one, a Phoenix-area or comparable mid-size market. About half the current book sits in this band. Above $9K is rare but happens — multi-state firms, top-twenty markets, site rebuilds we’re embedded in.
What changes the number
Four factors, in roughly the order they affect the quote:
The state of the existing site. A site that’s structurally sound but under-optimized gets a different quote than one with technical problems layered on top of the content issues. The second is more work, and the quote reflects that.
Firm size and practice-area count. A solo attorney with one page and one location is a different engagement from a four-partner firm with eight practice pages and three offices. The number of pages to audit, GBP profiles to manage, and writing to do all scale with the firm’s footprint.
Market competitiveness. A Phoenix PI firm competes against twenty established firms with mature SEO. A criminal-defense firm in a smaller city competes against three. The first needs more sustained work to move rankings, and the quote reflects the workload.
Scope inclusions and exclusions. Some firms have an in-house developer and want us writing briefs rather than doing WordPress work. Some want the whole thing handled end-to-end. Where the line falls between our scope and your internal resources moves the number, sometimes meaningfully.
What’s not included
Worth being direct. We don’t do, and don’t include in any engagement:
- Paid search. Not our discipline. If you need Google Ads or LSAs run well, we know two people we’d refer you to.
- Web design and development. We work with whatever site you have. If the site needs to be rebuilt, we’ll tell you that and point you to a developer. The new site can incorporate our SEO recommendations, but we’re not the ones writing the CSS.
- Blog content mills. No package of "twenty blog posts a month." If blog content is genuinely the right move for your firm — which is uncommon, and which we cover in detail on the Practice Pages guide — we’ll either write a smaller volume of substantive posts ourselves or work with one of two writers we trust. We won’t subcontract you to a content farm.
- Scholarship-link schemes, link-exchange programs, or any link-building tactic that wouldn’t pass a Google quality reviewer’s eyeballs. Real, earned links from real publications are part of the work. Manufactured links are not.
- Generalist marketing. Social media management, email marketing, PR, brand strategy. All real disciplines, none of them ours.
If your firm needs any of these in addition to SEO, that’s fine — get them from someone who specializes. We’ll happily coordinate with the other vendors. We’ll just not pretend we do them.
The free one-page audit
Before any engagement begins, you get a free one-page audit. I look at your existing site, your top three competitors in your highest-revenue practice area, and the queries that matter for your firm. You get a written one-pager with the three things that would produce the most case volume if fixed first, in priority order, with specifics on what’s broken on each. No deck. No fluff. Yours to keep whether you hire us or not.
The audit serves both sides. For you: it’s a real artifact to evaluate whether the work we’d do is worth the cost — and if you decide we’re not the right fit, you can hand the same audit to your current agency and push them to focus on the right things. For us: it’s how we figure out whether the engagement makes sense. About a third of audits end with us telling the firm we’re not the right shop. We’d rather give that answer up front than take a retainer for an engagement we don’t believe in.
How we measure ROI on the retainer
The only metric that matters is cases. Calls that become consultations. Consultations that become signed retainers. Signed retainers that become revenue. We track rankings as a leading indicator because rankings predict traffic and traffic predicts calls, but we report on cases as the lagging-but-real measure. If we set up call tracking and form tracking on month one — which is standard in every engagement — we have direct visibility on whether the SEO work is producing inbound that converts.
The math the firm should be doing on the retainer is simple. What’s your average case value? How many net-new cases per month would justify the retainer? For most engagements, the number is small — one or two additional signed PI cases a month pays for a $6K retainer many times over, even at conservative case values. For estate planning, family law, criminal defense, the case-value math is different but the principle holds. We do this math with you on the discovery call so the expectations are calibrated to your firm’s actual economics, not to a vanity-metric framing.
And the report you get every month reflects the same math. Cases. Calls. Forms. Trend in rankings. What we did this month. What we’re doing next month. Three to five pages, plain English, no charts you can’t act on. The whole point of the month-to-month structure is that you should be able to read the report and decide whether to send the next invoice. The report exists to make that decision easy, not to make it impossible.
We’d rather charge less and do less than charge more and deliver theater.
If the pricing is in your range and the model makes sense, the audit is the next step. If the pricing is way off — well above or well below — say so on the first call. We’ll either point you somewhere that fits better or talk about whether the scope can be adjusted. For the long version of how we think about the work itself, the approach page is the read. For the four disciplines a typical engagement covers, see the services overview.
— The owner, PHX Search Co.