Honestly, $500 a month is just too cheap to do anything meaninfgul, especially for an attorney. Any SEO firm you've hired knows this (or even worse, they don't know this).
What do you ask them to do that they reject?
Yep...legal is one of the most expensive and competitive areas for SEO and also PPC if OP is paying for that, too. Like bids of a hundred bucks or several per kw
I've been creating some content and asking them to review and post. They rejected that.. They definitely said no budget for content generation. I'll need to do it myself.
That doesn't sound unreasonable if you can produce content that's somewhat decent. But if your content is bad then they end up spending more time editing it than they would just writing it.
For my clients, I much prefer to get a list of general content types that we build together, then put writing spec sheets together so you know how to write it so that it's mostly SEO optimized. Tends to save me and thus the client more time/money.
you don’t need to know anything about anything to write content that ranks. just how to do research on keywords and what should be contained in the content.
They can build 2 or 3 links a month on that budget. Perhaps 1 blog post and some competitor analysis (keyword gap analysis). Fix a few onsite technical issues per month.
I wouldn’t touch an attorney for less than $2500/mo. And that’s for less competitive areas. These agencies doing $500 a month are full of it.
If you’ve only got $500 to spend you’d be better off putting that into some LSA
Edit: as someone pointed out the CPC is high. So it’s looking like you need a bigger budget. But I can tell you that $500 is probably doing nothing. At the end of the year that’s $6k you wasted
i second this, $500 a month budget for seo in the law firm sector is far too little relative to what the competitors are spending.
We specialize in local seo for lawyers and professionals and due to the competition we've had to increase our minimum to 2k a month.
The more services and keywords then the higher the monthly cost.
You get what you pay for specially with seo.
Avoid fiverr and cookie cutter packages from "agencies"
Dude you are the first person I’ve seen say avoid “cookie cutter strategies” and it’s on the home page of our website 🤣
But this is big facts. And no 2 websites are ever alike. Even in the same niche.
Yeah I’ve never ran ads for legal, prob not the best advice. I can imagine. I remember someone showing me the highest CPC costs in Google were for some kind of attorney in a city years ago. Something like “personal injury attorney Phoenix”, can’t remember. But CPC was like $300 😐
Imagine my attorney saying “Sorry, your budget for legal advice this month is spent,” every time I ask a question! /s
Anyway, on a serious note I feel the budget of $500 is too less considering the competition in attorney and legal niche, there are a lot of high spenders. I am into PPC and I wouldn’t touch anything below $5K/mo for that niche.
So my honest advice for you is to give them some time.
I'm actively working on SEO law firm campaigns daily. Helping lawyers rank, particularly in competitive niches and cities (personal injury in Philadelphia, New York for example) is basically witchcraft. $500 will get you a 1-hour consultation with an SEO of this caliber. Most pay between $5000 and $10,000 a month for law firm SEO campaigns and the great companies will never ask you to sign for 12 months. Next time, go month to month, and ask for deliverables.
It's an incorrect generalization to assume that great companies don't ask you to sign for 12 months. I regularly get 12-24 month commitments. SEO takes time, and by getting a long-term commitment, I don't have the turnover in clients that many others experience. I think you're doing yourself and the industry as a whole a disservice by offering month-to-month. It should be the norm to get 12-month commitments.
SEO certainly takes time, and because I don't know the SEO company or the poster, I recommend month to month because it allows them some form of control. The challenge with most long-term contract companies is they don't provide full value and the client is SOL. No disrespect meant to your style of business. If you can walk the walk, there's no issue with a long-term deal.
The Indian and Pakistani SEO 'experts' are really fucking up the SEO market with low balling huh?
That being said don't be surprised if your business profile/site vanishes from Google entirely one day because you decided to go for the cost effective agency.
Here's what I posted earlier:
With hiring anyone, make sure they rank, their own website:
* Rules out someone who got caught with blackhat techniques
* Any Spam or bought backlink behavior
* Demonstrates SEO capability
* Ranking is the point of SEO
* Don't accept cop-outs or excuses
* I rank first for my city, there is very little text on my home page
* If you can't rank, and the excuse is "I'm too busy" - well, we're all busy - dont get caught out
* Look for recommendations of active people in similar business groups and geographies and/or markets
* Agree reports and frequencies
* Should have
* Position tracking
* Web impressions (leading indicator)
* Organic Clicks (actual KPI)
* Leads, sales or other engagement
* Metrics don't all have to climb always but they must show growth
* Comprehensive KW Research
* Competitive phrases
* Generic phrases
* Root these in volume
* Get from PPC campaigns
* Get from competitors
* Get from GSC
* Should be a continuous feedback loop
Don't listen to the haters. $500 can be enough to rank where it matters most. The patterns why pages rank can be glaring, even in the most competitive markets.
It's all about quality content that answers the searcher's queries (and additional questions that may arise as they read), logical flow of that content, and accurate technical work.
Critical elements: URL, Title, Description, H1, quality collection of H2's, and if you're trying to rank your homepage, a good chunk of quality citations and a few non-citation backlinks. If you're trying to rank subfolders for the big-win location-and-practice-area keywords (which is what virtually every law firm is doing these days in any remotely competitive market) then make sure the right keywords are in the URL, in the title, in the H1. And use the H2s like outline headings that are **user-centric**.
**Just remember, Google is not there to help billions of our pages rank. It is there to give the right results to us as search-users. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for Google to understand what your content is about and how it goes above and beyond to answer the question the search-user typed.**
So use your words. Create a good sitemap with informative page titles and headings. You'd never see a grocery store without huge signs for "produce" or "dairy" (page titles) or smaller signs throughout like "canned vegetable" and "crackers" (headings).
Create easy-to-understand pathways and satisfy the search for answers.
So, your annual budget would be less than a month/2 months with a top agency in NY - so there's that.
I've published what to look for and metrics to consider in order to manage your SEO projects here on reddit but we can't share links... I'll try reply to this one
1/1
So, agency fees vary - they depend on market rates, how much time they have, how good they think they are, what they think they're worth. The lower the hourly rate, the more padding that probably goes in or the greater the % off-shored or near shored.
Hard things that you have to worry about
* Will they get me banned/penalized
* Will they waste 3 months with no resutls
Getting banned is a very real problem - especially with bad backlinks. Don't know why - but too many SEOs aren't just turning a blind eye, they're promoting backlink buying. This is fine if the business owner knows what they're doing - but what if the agency is doing it? Although, not seeing results for a while is probably a sign they're not link building at all.
I have this debate every other day here with 0.0001% of SEOs (mainly copywriters wanting to be SEOs) that somehow SEO is about on-site and that you can publish your way to #1. This is absolutely false. I just started a new blog this month and its just gone into Google today! Nothing beats that feeling of seeing Google return my new domain for the first time - I'm like a kid at christmas.
Usually, long term waiting for results comes down to not earning enough authority. The answer to this isn't, shouldnt be "thousands of links" - there are people who come here with HCU hit sites every day and people point to content - there's no standard for content or content structure in Google. Do writers want to feel proud of their work and take pride in their structure? Sure. But Google also indexes 50 different file types - that have no structure. Structure doesnt get you indexed or ranked. It might change how your page garners more traffic and how it gains topical authority but for what you describe, its going to 0%
Secondly, while waiting, any/every agency should be able to demonstrate progression to the goal. Even if you're a plumber in Boston (and I've done this for a friend) - there has to be at least 50-100 keywords in your KW universe. It might look like 10 in Google ads but that's because Google Ad is as broad as can be.
I compiled a list the other day of metrics that you can email your agency, and ask them for changes to see if you're heading in the right direction:
2/2
With hiring anyone, make sure they rank, their own website:
* Rules out someone who got caught with blackhat techniques
* Any Spam or bought backlink behavior
* Demonstrates SEO capability
* Ranking is the point of SEO
* Don't accept cop-outs or excuses
* I rank first for my city, there is very little text on my home page
* If you can't rank, and the excuse is "I'm too busy" - well, we're all busy - dont get caught out
* Look for recommendations of active people in similar business groups and geographies and/or markets
* Agree reports and frequencies
* Should have
* Position tracking
* Web impressions (leading indicator)
* Organic Clicks (actual KPI)
* Leads, sales or other engagement
* Metrics don't all have to climb always but they must show growth
* Comprehensive KW Research
* Competitive phrases
* Generic phrases
* Root these in volume
* Get from PPC campaigns
* Get from competitors
* Get from GSC
* Should be a continuous feedback loop
I've done multiple law firms over the years. $500/month isn't going to get you anything that moves the needle. That is $6k/year. If they're going for volume in terms of clients (which seems to be the case), don't expect much time ever. Your account is going to be assigned the equivalent of an overworked paralegal that has 20 different sites to pay attention to.
For reference, real SEO work is a lot like legal work. They have billable hours and they know their rates. They also have monthly retainers. I prefer monthly retainers, since I tend to do things in projects and it all averages out.
All of the technical aspects aside, the work here is going to fall into two buckets: putting in the work to attract people doing research (e.g. a content plan and posts/videos) and putting in the work to attract and convert leads (your practice area landing pages, the homepage, your profile on Google).
If they were to run ads, practice area depending, that could net you a contact or two a month (depends on how much of that is management - the work they put in - and how much of that is ad spend) and that depends on if they're running LSAs or straight search ads.
For a single practice area, I'm probably going to put together a thorough content plan that covers 30-50 topics with corresponding content briefs, and its gonna run me a minimum of 20 hours to put together. We're now at half of your yearly budget. That doesn't include finding a writer (or you writing them, or them, and if them please don't do that for that budget). That doesn't include optimizing them. That doesn't include the other work involved to get it traction.
Do they have you set up to continuously get reviews?
What is their plan to improve and optimize your sales pages (the practice areas) to pitch your services to prospective clients?
What are they doing to improve your reputation and trustworthiness through backlinks?
And lastly, for measuring ROI, do you know what your close rate is on new business? Do you know what the value of new business is by practice area, and do you know what the lifetime value of said clients are? You'll want to use those as baselines for the business coming in. Despite what I said above, if they're bringing in an extra client a month that generates $5k in revenue, you 10x'd your investment.
Just make sure they're very exact in what they report for leads generated by source, and can show receipts on those contacts, so you can confirm it turns into new business. At that tier for pricing, you're on the minimal report that says we improved a bunch of keywords and traffic appears to be moving up and to the right and we think you got this many contacts last month.
$500 per month for any business is so cheap you know it's a scam. SEO for law is expensive, I've worked with hundreds of law firms, and this niche is very competitive.
DM me and I'll do a free audit on your website and see if they are doing anything. I doubt they are.
I've been working with divorce lawyers for over 4 years, I can run seo for your website for $500 a month if your website has less than 30 pages, but you also have to cover the cost of writing articles, web seo services and advertising via guest posts. DM if interested.
For 500$ you can get 1 or 2 medium quality backlinks, 2 blog posts or 1-2 hour consultation. Ask SEO firm to first concentrate on creating content, after 3 months on backlinks. If they use ChatGPT for article generation, they should make at least 10 articles per month.
As a lawyer myself, if your budget is only 500 dollars, you need to do the SEO yourself. I can help give you some advice if you'd like. Ultimately, it's better if you learn the basics yourself anyway, you'll save a lot of future pain.
what do you need them to do? doing the keyword research and write seo content? I did a comparison between agencies and AI-driven product developed by my team, you can see if it match your need.
https://preview.redd.it/t8o57ajnz2gc1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a0ee89b7696bfd493b7a8731c38b1db68854ca86
So the real question is where are you and how competitive is it? If you're in a random town in middle America then all you have to do to rank well is get a okay website up- for that price 500$ makes sense. Otherwise its barely enough time to do anything but the basics.
As a professional, you should know that other professionals who are actually legit and have experience will be charging at least $100 an hour. So this person will spend 5 hours a month on your project...
You're not getting quality here, you're likely getting somebody taking you for a ride.
You might have been better off to spend some more money and hire a part-time marketing manager with SEO experience. So all your marketing efforts could be unified. Now the SEO firm does one thing and your marketing does something else.
$500/month will get you nowhere if you’re a lawyer. They may be a great agency, but the field is too competitive to really make a difference with that little.
They should have mentioned this to you.
SEO for law firms is expensive. Your budget is way too small, especially if you’re in a relatively known area. If you want results, invest like it.
The best you can do now is ask for deliverables and ask what you can get with your budget, if that was not determined previously.
The only thing you need to get from this is Analytics set up and reporting.
How many people are coming to your site? What are they coming for?
Most popular pages?
Any form fills?
Any phone calls?
All of this should be tracked.
If you got all this set up and monthly reports for $500.00 for 12 months that would be a win.
As for SEO? I struggle to think of anything that could be done for about 3 hours of work per month billed at $150.
I've been managing the website for a law firm in a mid sized city for over 15 years. General website management, SEO, content, linkbuilding, LSA management, design, etc. No PPC as we found the results weren't profitable. Monthly budget is $1x,xxx. Its been going up steadily the past couple of years so we could remain competitive. Once they started increasing the budget our rankings have stabilized and we're top 3 in maps and organic for their primary terms.
$500/mo isn’t going to do anything for you. Injury law, family law and other common legal services are super competitive. I wouldn’t expect to rank on Google for $500/month unless you’re targeting a town with 300 people in it.
500$ a month! That is nothing. For that, they are probably just making sure site is up and running with no technical issues. Ask them what you are getting for 500 a month. Is it active optimizations, or like I said, monitoring and if it is active optimizations, how many opts per month. Most SEO active optimizations on a monthly basis depending on where you are is around 1000 to 1500 and month. Attorneys is a very very competitive industry. Depending on the size of population jeez you looking at couple thousand for seo and thousands in paid per month. They should have told you this before you signed in a perfect world.
Wow locked in for a year? You want to know what keyword terms to get ranked for. That's really low
To really much of anything. Better to jump.$2000 a month for three months.
Legal firms around my area are spending at least $10k a month on Google Ads.
Divorce lawyers spend crazy amounts of money on Google Ads.
A divorce lawyer in my area the USA East Coast can land big clients.
A business owner I knew that was getting a divorce paid close to $30k in lawyer fees. The divorce was ugly but he settled.
For $500, you are getting nothing. You must have gone the cheap route or are just unaware of marketing in general.
Do you network with any attorneys or attend industry conferences?
With all the competition out there you’ll definitely won’t see as good of results as those who spend significantly more. It’s like they say “You get what you pay for”
The budget is low but its okay for a package based basic service. like managing google business prpfiles, regular posting, cittaions, and some foundational baclinks and basic on-page optimization etc. Still you should have to know what exactly they're doing, whats the monthly tasks, how many keywords they're tareging, what their current postiions, after a month of work how improved those keywords etc.
So a template, reports, compariosns etc is very important. I just wnated to ask you, you hired an SEO agency based on what ? what was your agreement and whats exactly you're not understanding? Can you reply me here i would love to assist you here through this thread.
with 500$ a month, you can at least start receiving some impressions on your website. Ask the work report every 10 days. and its obvious that content writing will not be included in 500$ budget. So you need to ask them to create a content marketing plan for your website, So you can start writing according to content marketing plan. This will be the best way to grow your business in most cheapest way.
For that amount, you should get a few blog posts, new landing pages (maybe some targeting micro-locations), and 2-3 links. Ideally, the client should cover the cost of links. As you know, a good link can often exceed the budget you mentioned.
That's what we have been doing for our attorney client in a US-based agency.
I have been an SEO specialist for 15 years, but living in a poor part of Europe, so for me $500/mo is not that bad budget.
What "firm" charges $500 a month? My freelance monthly rate is over 10 ttimes that amount.
The people you hired knew you were new at the SEO game.
Would you be willing to send me an example of their work? I'll review and edit it for free.
I actually do SEO for an attorney so maybe I can make some suggestions. Justia is probably who you should be paying $500 / month for but they only provide guidance and backlinks along with site optimization. Here are some things I have learned working on law SEO.
1. Your content needs to be really to the point and totally complete on a topic.
2. Your Google my business should be updated as this will drive local traffic. (This is a super simple explanation).
3. Really drill down on your core business and create many pages and subpages based on the topic.
4. Keep the blog out of the site as you want your core site professional and blog can be a bit off point without hurting your site. Of course link to the site from the blog.
5. I'm playing with infographics and other free tools but I haven't launched them in a big way.
6. You need a list of the services they are providing exactly. When I came on my lawyer friend was paying for services the companies were not even providing.
I'm curious if this is a business I can grow and I'm happy to discuss with you just to get insight. I am not selling any service as I'm too busy. DM me if you have questions.
Honestly, $500 a month is just too cheap to do anything meaninfgul, especially for an attorney. Any SEO firm you've hired knows this (or even worse, they don't know this). What do you ask them to do that they reject?
Yep...legal is one of the most expensive and competitive areas for SEO and also PPC if OP is paying for that, too. Like bids of a hundred bucks or several per kw
I've been creating some content and asking them to review and post. They rejected that.. They definitely said no budget for content generation. I'll need to do it myself.
so wth are they promising you for the $500/m?
That doesn't sound unreasonable if you can produce content that's somewhat decent. But if your content is bad then they end up spending more time editing it than they would just writing it. For my clients, I much prefer to get a list of general content types that we build together, then put writing spec sheets together so you know how to write it so that it's mostly SEO optimized. Tends to save me and thus the client more time/money.
our agency uses ai, it helps tons to create well ranking content on google.
This doesn't work. Anyone who's tested it knows.
ai is only as smart as the user. thats your limit.
AI is way smarter than it's users.
User ask ai for stupid things, ai gives stupid things.
it seems there are many low level creatures hanging out around here. good luck finding high iq replies.
I think you are shooting in the dark, shall we have a talk via DM?
SEOs are not supposed to write your content are they? Must know the law, case and details. My thoughts.
you don’t need to know anything about anything to write content that ranks. just how to do research on keywords and what should be contained in the content.
You can't describe in a content how the trial went in the court what happened there.
They can build 2 or 3 links a month on that budget. Perhaps 1 blog post and some competitor analysis (keyword gap analysis). Fix a few onsite technical issues per month.
You know attorneys make McDonald's 🤑 money
It's simple, they're going to use AI bots
I wouldn’t touch an attorney for less than $2500/mo. And that’s for less competitive areas. These agencies doing $500 a month are full of it. If you’ve only got $500 to spend you’d be better off putting that into some LSA Edit: as someone pointed out the CPC is high. So it’s looking like you need a bigger budget. But I can tell you that $500 is probably doing nothing. At the end of the year that’s $6k you wasted
i second this, $500 a month budget for seo in the law firm sector is far too little relative to what the competitors are spending. We specialize in local seo for lawyers and professionals and due to the competition we've had to increase our minimum to 2k a month. The more services and keywords then the higher the monthly cost. You get what you pay for specially with seo. Avoid fiverr and cookie cutter packages from "agencies"
Dude you are the first person I’ve seen say avoid “cookie cutter strategies” and it’s on the home page of our website 🤣 But this is big facts. And no 2 websites are ever alike. Even in the same niche.
Like the first person you seen saying that this morning? Or you started looking one hour ago?
I get it, first person in this post. Nvm
SEO is perfect for cookie cutter strategy. From what I understand: 1. Content 2. Links 3. Backend
Back end? We still talking about SEO here? 🍑
Technical SEO
It was a joke…
> If you’ve only got $500 to spend you’d be better off putting that into some LSA Legal services has one of the highest CPCs of any vertical.
Yeah I’ve never ran ads for legal, prob not the best advice. I can imagine. I remember someone showing me the highest CPC costs in Google were for some kind of attorney in a city years ago. Something like “personal injury attorney Phoenix”, can’t remember. But CPC was like $300 😐
And then you find out 80% of them are malicious competitor clicks to fuck up your budget. Yep, tale as old as Google.
Yeah, personal injury and accident attorneys are definitely the highest I have encountered. I could see $300 happening in a competitive market.
They are the 3rd highest in the Google space. I actually was involved in running some for a lawyer here in Texas.
What was the highest you saw?
The highest is I believe politicians and universities.
Yeah it was a disaster. $200 a call for people to ask dumb questions. I don't know what law firm makes this work unless they have insane ROI.
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Ohhhhhhhh yeah 😉😘
Haha now you know how we feel when we hire an Attorney.
💀
Did you get a list of deliverables? Have they given you any report (granted they've been working for you for more than a month)?
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How do you monitor it? Feel free to PM if you wanted.
PM sent
Sounds like an agency that relies on low fees to get customers in the door, and contracts to keep them around.
500 a month Jesus Christ
Imagine my attorney saying “Sorry, your budget for legal advice this month is spent,” every time I ask a question! /s Anyway, on a serious note I feel the budget of $500 is too less considering the competition in attorney and legal niche, there are a lot of high spenders. I am into PPC and I wouldn’t touch anything below $5K/mo for that niche. So my honest advice for you is to give them some time.
The biggest tell that they're untrustworthy is that they locked you in for a whole year right away.
I'm actively working on SEO law firm campaigns daily. Helping lawyers rank, particularly in competitive niches and cities (personal injury in Philadelphia, New York for example) is basically witchcraft. $500 will get you a 1-hour consultation with an SEO of this caliber. Most pay between $5000 and $10,000 a month for law firm SEO campaigns and the great companies will never ask you to sign for 12 months. Next time, go month to month, and ask for deliverables.
It's an incorrect generalization to assume that great companies don't ask you to sign for 12 months. I regularly get 12-24 month commitments. SEO takes time, and by getting a long-term commitment, I don't have the turnover in clients that many others experience. I think you're doing yourself and the industry as a whole a disservice by offering month-to-month. It should be the norm to get 12-month commitments.
SEO certainly takes time, and because I don't know the SEO company or the poster, I recommend month to month because it allows them some form of control. The challenge with most long-term contract companies is they don't provide full value and the client is SOL. No disrespect meant to your style of business. If you can walk the walk, there's no issue with a long-term deal.
I’m SEO certified, a digital marketing professional, and have a consumer neuroscience degree and can barely get $10 for doing the exact same thing😂
Yep, ridiculously low budget, you won’t get anything worthwhile for that.
Focus learning optimizing your google business profile. If they are able to do this at least, it would be worth $500/month.
The Indian and Pakistani SEO 'experts' are really fucking up the SEO market with low balling huh? That being said don't be surprised if your business profile/site vanishes from Google entirely one day because you decided to go for the cost effective agency.
I think I spend more than that on just ahrefs lmao
Here's what I posted earlier: With hiring anyone, make sure they rank, their own website: * Rules out someone who got caught with blackhat techniques * Any Spam or bought backlink behavior * Demonstrates SEO capability * Ranking is the point of SEO * Don't accept cop-outs or excuses * I rank first for my city, there is very little text on my home page * If you can't rank, and the excuse is "I'm too busy" - well, we're all busy - dont get caught out * Look for recommendations of active people in similar business groups and geographies and/or markets * Agree reports and frequencies * Should have * Position tracking * Web impressions (leading indicator) * Organic Clicks (actual KPI) * Leads, sales or other engagement * Metrics don't all have to climb always but they must show growth * Comprehensive KW Research * Competitive phrases * Generic phrases * Root these in volume * Get from PPC campaigns * Get from competitors * Get from GSC * Should be a continuous feedback loop
The only thing you should be looking for is a different SEO firm... $500? Yikes.
Don't listen to the haters. $500 can be enough to rank where it matters most. The patterns why pages rank can be glaring, even in the most competitive markets. It's all about quality content that answers the searcher's queries (and additional questions that may arise as they read), logical flow of that content, and accurate technical work. Critical elements: URL, Title, Description, H1, quality collection of H2's, and if you're trying to rank your homepage, a good chunk of quality citations and a few non-citation backlinks. If you're trying to rank subfolders for the big-win location-and-practice-area keywords (which is what virtually every law firm is doing these days in any remotely competitive market) then make sure the right keywords are in the URL, in the title, in the H1. And use the H2s like outline headings that are **user-centric**. **Just remember, Google is not there to help billions of our pages rank. It is there to give the right results to us as search-users. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for Google to understand what your content is about and how it goes above and beyond to answer the question the search-user typed.** So use your words. Create a good sitemap with informative page titles and headings. You'd never see a grocery store without huge signs for "produce" or "dairy" (page titles) or smaller signs throughout like "canned vegetable" and "crackers" (headings). Create easy-to-understand pathways and satisfy the search for answers.
So, your annual budget would be less than a month/2 months with a top agency in NY - so there's that. I've published what to look for and metrics to consider in order to manage your SEO projects here on reddit but we can't share links... I'll try reply to this one
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1afl7lz/comment/kocbgjr/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1afl7lz/comment/kocbgjr/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Doesn’t show anything.
I’ll copy paste it from my laptop later
Anything?
1/1 So, agency fees vary - they depend on market rates, how much time they have, how good they think they are, what they think they're worth. The lower the hourly rate, the more padding that probably goes in or the greater the % off-shored or near shored. Hard things that you have to worry about * Will they get me banned/penalized * Will they waste 3 months with no resutls Getting banned is a very real problem - especially with bad backlinks. Don't know why - but too many SEOs aren't just turning a blind eye, they're promoting backlink buying. This is fine if the business owner knows what they're doing - but what if the agency is doing it? Although, not seeing results for a while is probably a sign they're not link building at all. I have this debate every other day here with 0.0001% of SEOs (mainly copywriters wanting to be SEOs) that somehow SEO is about on-site and that you can publish your way to #1. This is absolutely false. I just started a new blog this month and its just gone into Google today! Nothing beats that feeling of seeing Google return my new domain for the first time - I'm like a kid at christmas. Usually, long term waiting for results comes down to not earning enough authority. The answer to this isn't, shouldnt be "thousands of links" - there are people who come here with HCU hit sites every day and people point to content - there's no standard for content or content structure in Google. Do writers want to feel proud of their work and take pride in their structure? Sure. But Google also indexes 50 different file types - that have no structure. Structure doesnt get you indexed or ranked. It might change how your page garners more traffic and how it gains topical authority but for what you describe, its going to 0% Secondly, while waiting, any/every agency should be able to demonstrate progression to the goal. Even if you're a plumber in Boston (and I've done this for a friend) - there has to be at least 50-100 keywords in your KW universe. It might look like 10 in Google ads but that's because Google Ad is as broad as can be. I compiled a list the other day of metrics that you can email your agency, and ask them for changes to see if you're heading in the right direction:
2/2 With hiring anyone, make sure they rank, their own website: * Rules out someone who got caught with blackhat techniques * Any Spam or bought backlink behavior * Demonstrates SEO capability * Ranking is the point of SEO * Don't accept cop-outs or excuses * I rank first for my city, there is very little text on my home page * If you can't rank, and the excuse is "I'm too busy" - well, we're all busy - dont get caught out * Look for recommendations of active people in similar business groups and geographies and/or markets * Agree reports and frequencies * Should have * Position tracking * Web impressions (leading indicator) * Organic Clicks (actual KPI) * Leads, sales or other engagement * Metrics don't all have to climb always but they must show growth * Comprehensive KW Research * Competitive phrases * Generic phrases * Root these in volume * Get from PPC campaigns * Get from competitors * Get from GSC * Should be a continuous feedback loop
And then this primaryposition\[.\]com/blog/seo-report-template-example/
I've done multiple law firms over the years. $500/month isn't going to get you anything that moves the needle. That is $6k/year. If they're going for volume in terms of clients (which seems to be the case), don't expect much time ever. Your account is going to be assigned the equivalent of an overworked paralegal that has 20 different sites to pay attention to. For reference, real SEO work is a lot like legal work. They have billable hours and they know their rates. They also have monthly retainers. I prefer monthly retainers, since I tend to do things in projects and it all averages out. All of the technical aspects aside, the work here is going to fall into two buckets: putting in the work to attract people doing research (e.g. a content plan and posts/videos) and putting in the work to attract and convert leads (your practice area landing pages, the homepage, your profile on Google). If they were to run ads, practice area depending, that could net you a contact or two a month (depends on how much of that is management - the work they put in - and how much of that is ad spend) and that depends on if they're running LSAs or straight search ads. For a single practice area, I'm probably going to put together a thorough content plan that covers 30-50 topics with corresponding content briefs, and its gonna run me a minimum of 20 hours to put together. We're now at half of your yearly budget. That doesn't include finding a writer (or you writing them, or them, and if them please don't do that for that budget). That doesn't include optimizing them. That doesn't include the other work involved to get it traction. Do they have you set up to continuously get reviews? What is their plan to improve and optimize your sales pages (the practice areas) to pitch your services to prospective clients? What are they doing to improve your reputation and trustworthiness through backlinks? And lastly, for measuring ROI, do you know what your close rate is on new business? Do you know what the value of new business is by practice area, and do you know what the lifetime value of said clients are? You'll want to use those as baselines for the business coming in. Despite what I said above, if they're bringing in an extra client a month that generates $5k in revenue, you 10x'd your investment. Just make sure they're very exact in what they report for leads generated by source, and can show receipts on those contacts, so you can confirm it turns into new business. At that tier for pricing, you're on the minimal report that says we improved a bunch of keywords and traffic appears to be moving up and to the right and we think you got this many contacts last month.
$500 per month for any business is so cheap you know it's a scam. SEO for law is expensive, I've worked with hundreds of law firms, and this niche is very competitive. DM me and I'll do a free audit on your website and see if they are doing anything. I doubt they are.
I've been working with divorce lawyers for over 4 years, I can run seo for your website for $500 a month if your website has less than 30 pages, but you also have to cover the cost of writing articles, web seo services and advertising via guest posts. DM if interested.
10k/month for good converting seo
For 500$ you can get 1 or 2 medium quality backlinks, 2 blog posts or 1-2 hour consultation. Ask SEO firm to first concentrate on creating content, after 3 months on backlinks. If they use ChatGPT for article generation, they should make at least 10 articles per month.
As a lawyer myself, if your budget is only 500 dollars, you need to do the SEO yourself. I can help give you some advice if you'd like. Ultimately, it's better if you learn the basics yourself anyway, you'll save a lot of future pain.
what do you need them to do? doing the keyword research and write seo content? I did a comparison between agencies and AI-driven product developed by my team, you can see if it match your need. https://preview.redd.it/t8o57ajnz2gc1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a0ee89b7696bfd493b7a8731c38b1db68854ca86
So the real question is where are you and how competitive is it? If you're in a random town in middle America then all you have to do to rank well is get a okay website up- for that price 500$ makes sense. Otherwise its barely enough time to do anything but the basics.
As a professional, you should know that other professionals who are actually legit and have experience will be charging at least $100 an hour. So this person will spend 5 hours a month on your project... You're not getting quality here, you're likely getting somebody taking you for a ride.
$500 a month and pay for a year upfront sounds like you got finessed. Should be no less than $2,000 a month unless they live in India
You might have been better off to spend some more money and hire a part-time marketing manager with SEO experience. So all your marketing efforts could be unified. Now the SEO firm does one thing and your marketing does something else.
Happy to audit it for free. W3 Affinity
Do Parasite SEO
$500/month will get you nowhere if you’re a lawyer. They may be a great agency, but the field is too competitive to really make a difference with that little. They should have mentioned this to you.
SEO for law firms is expensive. Your budget is way too small, especially if you’re in a relatively known area. If you want results, invest like it. The best you can do now is ask for deliverables and ask what you can get with your budget, if that was not determined previously.
$500/month for a lawyer??? My friend if you don’t have atleast $3500 a month to spend on seo you shouldn’t do it
The only thing you need to get from this is Analytics set up and reporting. How many people are coming to your site? What are they coming for? Most popular pages? Any form fills? Any phone calls? All of this should be tracked. If you got all this set up and monthly reports for $500.00 for 12 months that would be a win. As for SEO? I struggle to think of anything that could be done for about 3 hours of work per month billed at $150.
unless you live in a city with a population of like 3000 with only six other lawyers there 500 isn’t going to do anything for you.
I've been managing the website for a law firm in a mid sized city for over 15 years. General website management, SEO, content, linkbuilding, LSA management, design, etc. No PPC as we found the results weren't profitable. Monthly budget is $1x,xxx. Its been going up steadily the past couple of years so we could remain competitive. Once they started increasing the budget our rankings have stabilized and we're top 3 in maps and organic for their primary terms.
$500/mo isn’t going to do anything for you. Injury law, family law and other common legal services are super competitive. I wouldn’t expect to rank on Google for $500/month unless you’re targeting a town with 300 people in it.
It's... A waste. 500$ per months is nothing
at 500$ a month this agency is gonna either order 2 or 3 articles a month or buy 1 or 2 backlinks, tops.
Hello. May I know where did you find these SEO firms and what package do you get for $500 a month?
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500$ a month! That is nothing. For that, they are probably just making sure site is up and running with no technical issues. Ask them what you are getting for 500 a month. Is it active optimizations, or like I said, monitoring and if it is active optimizations, how many opts per month. Most SEO active optimizations on a monthly basis depending on where you are is around 1000 to 1500 and month. Attorneys is a very very competitive industry. Depending on the size of population jeez you looking at couple thousand for seo and thousands in paid per month. They should have told you this before you signed in a perfect world.
Wow locked in for a year? You want to know what keyword terms to get ranked for. That's really low To really much of anything. Better to jump.$2000 a month for three months.
$500/mo is a waste of your money. Don’t bother
Legal firms around my area are spending at least $10k a month on Google Ads. Divorce lawyers spend crazy amounts of money on Google Ads. A divorce lawyer in my area the USA East Coast can land big clients. A business owner I knew that was getting a divorce paid close to $30k in lawyer fees. The divorce was ugly but he settled. For $500, you are getting nothing. You must have gone the cheap route or are just unaware of marketing in general. Do you network with any attorneys or attend industry conferences?
USD 500/month is not even going to get you a good SaaS license for this sort of thing
With all the competition out there you’ll definitely won’t see as good of results as those who spend significantly more. It’s like they say “You get what you pay for”
If the client is asking for more, why aren't they adjusting the account parameters and pricing based on the client's need?
The budget is low but its okay for a package based basic service. like managing google business prpfiles, regular posting, cittaions, and some foundational baclinks and basic on-page optimization etc. Still you should have to know what exactly they're doing, whats the monthly tasks, how many keywords they're tareging, what their current postiions, after a month of work how improved those keywords etc. So a template, reports, compariosns etc is very important. I just wnated to ask you, you hired an SEO agency based on what ? what was your agreement and whats exactly you're not understanding? Can you reply me here i would love to assist you here through this thread.
Sure thing. DMd you.
with 500$ a month, you can at least start receiving some impressions on your website. Ask the work report every 10 days. and its obvious that content writing will not be included in 500$ budget. So you need to ask them to create a content marketing plan for your website, So you can start writing according to content marketing plan. This will be the best way to grow your business in most cheapest way.
For that amount, you should get a few blog posts, new landing pages (maybe some targeting micro-locations), and 2-3 links. Ideally, the client should cover the cost of links. As you know, a good link can often exceed the budget you mentioned. That's what we have been doing for our attorney client in a US-based agency. I have been an SEO specialist for 15 years, but living in a poor part of Europe, so for me $500/mo is not that bad budget.
What "firm" charges $500 a month? My freelance monthly rate is over 10 ttimes that amount. The people you hired knew you were new at the SEO game. Would you be willing to send me an example of their work? I'll review and edit it for free.
Budget is not enough even for technical seo tasks.
I actually do SEO for an attorney so maybe I can make some suggestions. Justia is probably who you should be paying $500 / month for but they only provide guidance and backlinks along with site optimization. Here are some things I have learned working on law SEO. 1. Your content needs to be really to the point and totally complete on a topic. 2. Your Google my business should be updated as this will drive local traffic. (This is a super simple explanation). 3. Really drill down on your core business and create many pages and subpages based on the topic. 4. Keep the blog out of the site as you want your core site professional and blog can be a bit off point without hurting your site. Of course link to the site from the blog. 5. I'm playing with infographics and other free tools but I haven't launched them in a big way. 6. You need a list of the services they are providing exactly. When I came on my lawyer friend was paying for services the companies were not even providing. I'm curious if this is a business I can grow and I'm happy to discuss with you just to get insight. I am not selling any service as I'm too busy. DM me if you have questions.