The Framework Managing Partners Use to Evaluate Law Firm SEO Agencies

This guide is written for managing partners, marketing directors, and firm administrators who are actively evaluating SEO vendors — not exploring SEO for the first time. If you are still weighing whether SEO is worth it for your firm, the better starting point is our law firm SEO resource hub, which covers fundamentals and realistic timelines.

If you have already decided SEO is a channel worth investing in and you are now comparing agencies, shortlisting proposals, or trying to sort credible vendors from commodity ones, this guide is for you.

The evaluation framework here applies equally to:

• Solo and small firms (2–10 attorneys) hiring their first dedicated SEO partner
• Mid-size firms (10–50 attorneys) replacing an underperforming agency
• Large firms with internal marketing staff who need a specialized SEO team to augment their existing capabilities

The questions, scorecard, and red flags are calibrated for competitive legal markets — personal injury, family law, criminal defense, immigration, and estate planning in metro areas. Niche or low-competition practice areas may warrant a lighter evaluation process, but the core criteria still apply.

One framing note: hiring an SEO agency is a 12–24 month relationship, not a vendor transaction. The agency you choose will shape how your firm appears in search for years. That makes evaluation worth doing carefully.

Most firms evaluate SEO agencies the wrong way — they compare proposals by price and deliverable count. Neither tells you whether the agency can actually move rankings in your market for your practice area.

A more reliable framework evaluates agencies across four dimensions:

1. Legal-Specific Experience

General SEO skills do not transfer cleanly to legal. Search intent for legal queries is high-stakes and jurisdiction-specific. Content must comply with attorney advertising rules that vary by state. An agency that has only worked with e-commerce or SaaS clients is starting from scratch on these constraints.

Ask directly: What percentage of your current client base is law firms? If the answer is below 30–40%, ask how they account for the regulatory and content complexity of legal SEO.

2. Transparent Methodology

Credible agencies explain what they do and why. They can walk you through their approach to technical site audits, local citation building, content strategy, and link acquisition without vague references to proprietary systems. If an agency cannot explain their link-building approach in plain language, that is worth noting.

3. Measurement and Reporting Alignment

Rankings are a leading indicator, not the outcome. The agencies worth hiring track consultations booked, call volume from organic, and — where your intake system allows — cases opened from SEO-sourced leads. If an agency only reports keyword positions and traffic, ask why conversion data is absent from their dashboards.

4. Contract and Commitment Structure

Reasonable structures include a 3–6 month initial commitment (enough time for early signal), followed by month-to-month or rolling quarterly terms. Be cautious of 12-month lock-ins with no performance review clauses. Equally, be cautious of agencies offering month-to-month from day one — it often signals they are not planning to do foundational work that takes time to pay off.

Use this scorecard when comparing two or more agencies side by side. Score each dimension from 1–5 based on your discovery call and proposal review.

Legal Industry Depth (weight: high)

• Can they name specific law firm clients in comparable markets? (Ask for references, not just logos.)
• Do they reference attorney advertising rules without being prompted?
• Have they worked in your specific practice area — not just "legal" generically?

Technical SEO Competence (weight: high)

• Do they conduct a site audit before scoping work — or propose a fixed package without looking at your site?
• Can they explain Core Web Vitals, crawl budget, and schema markup in context of legal sites?
• Do they address mobile performance given that a large share of legal searches happen on mobile devices?

Content and Authority Strategy (weight: high)

• Do they distinguish between practice area pages, city/location pages, and blog content — and explain what each is meant to do?
• Is their content reviewed or written by someone with legal knowledge, or purely by generalist writers?
• Do they address E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) as it applies to YMYL legal content?

Reporting and Communication (weight: medium)

• Do they provide a dedicated point of contact, or do you get routed through a support queue?
• What does a monthly report look like — and does it connect rankings to business outcomes?
• How do they handle a month where results plateau or decline?

Pricing and Contract Clarity (weight: medium)

• Is pricing itemized — or a bundled retainer with vague deliverables?
• Are contract exit terms clearly defined?
• Are there performance benchmarks built into the agreement?

Any agency that scores consistently low on legal depth or technical competence should not be compensated for by a low price. The cost of poor legal SEO is not just wasted budget — it is months of lost organic positioning in a channel with long compounding returns.

These questions are designed to separate agencies that have done this work from those pitching a general SEO framework with legal branding. Listen for specificity — vague answers to specific questions are informative.

About Experience

• "Can you walk me through a law firm you worked with in a competitive market — what was the starting point, what did you do, and where did they land after 12 months?"
• "What practice areas have you run campaigns for, and which ones do you have the most experience in?"
• "Have you worked with firms that needed to comply with state bar advertising guidelines? How did that affect your content process?"

About Strategy

• "If you were starting with our site today, what would be your first 90 days of work?"
• "How do you approach link building for law firms — and what types of links do you actually acquire?"
• "How do you handle practice area pages for firms that operate in multiple cities?"

About Reporting

• "What does a monthly report include — and what does it not include?"
• "How do you connect SEO activity to client intake outcomes?"
• "If rankings plateau after six months, what does your diagnostic process look like?"

About the Relationship

• "Who will actually be working on our account day-to-day — and what is their background?"
• "What do you need from our team to do your best work?"
• "What does a client relationship look like when it is working well — and when it breaks down?"

You do not need perfect answers to all of these. You need honest, specific answers — and you need to notice when an agency deflects, pivots to features, or answers a different question than the one you asked.

Managing partners often arrive at the hiring decision with reasonable hesitations. Here is how to think through the most common ones.

"We tried SEO before and it did not work."

This is the most common objection, and it usually reflects a past experience with a generalist agency, a content mill, or an approach that prioritized volume over relevance. The question to ask is: what specifically did the previous agency do, and what did they measure? If the answer involves a lot of blog posts and keyword reports but no technical audit, no link strategy, and no intake correlation — that is a methodology problem, not an SEO problem.

"We get most of our clients from referrals."

Referral-driven firms often underestimate how many prospective clients still Google them after receiving a referral — to check reviews, read attorney bios, and confirm credibility. SEO for referral-heavy firms is often about confirming trust rather than generating cold discovery. That is a different scope of work, and a good agency will size it accordingly.

"The timeline is too long — we need results now."

SEO timelines are real: most firms see meaningful organic movement in 4–6 months, with compounding returns building from month 9 onward (varies by market competition and starting authority). If the timeline is genuinely too long, the right conversation is about whether paid search should run in parallel — not whether SEO should promise faster results than the channel allows. An agency that promises faster results to close the deal is a red flag.

"We do not have someone internally to manage this."

You do not need a full-time marketing director to work with an SEO agency — but you do need one person who can approve content, answer questions about firm positioning, and relay intake data. If that does not exist, factor it into the scope conversation before signing.

Some agency behaviors are not negotiable. If you encounter any of the following, it is reasonable to disengage regardless of how competitive the pricing is.

• Ranking guarantees. No agency controls Google's algorithm. Any guarantee of a specific rank within a specific timeframe is either a misrepresentation or a signal that the agency uses tactics that create short-term gains and long-term penalties.
• No site audit before scoping. An agency that sends a proposal without reviewing your current site is proposing a package, not a strategy. Effective SEO is always site-specific.
• Vague link-building answers. If an agency cannot explain what types of links they build and how they acquire them, assume the answer involves low-quality directories or link networks that violate Google's guidelines.
• Overpromising on timelines. Legitimate SEO takes time. Agencies that promise first-page results in 30–60 days for competitive legal keywords are not being honest with you.
• No legal-specific content process. If content is produced by generalist writers with no legal review and no attorney advertising awareness, the content will either be generic or non-compliant — often both.
• No transparency on who does the work. Some agencies pitch senior strategists and deliver the work through offshore teams with no legal knowledge. Ask who specifically will be on your account.
• Reluctance to provide references. A credible agency with law firm experience can connect you with at least one client willing to speak to their experience. Hesitation here is informative.

If you want to see what compliant, well-executed legal SEO looks like in practice before signing with any agency, explore our law firm SEO services and credentials — including how we structure campaigns, what we report on, and how we handle attorney advertising compliance.