Six Questions to Ask An SEO Agency

When you hire a law firm SEO agency, you entrust its team members with your brand and reputation. At best, partnering with the wrong agency wastes time and money. At worst, a careless agency could deal a blow to your firm by publishing incorrect or inappropriate content. 

You must be able to trust your agency will use your investment to help you grow and deliver more calls and cases. Your decision becomes more complicated as the law firm SEO industry becomes more saturated. 

Big marketing agencies may accept any firm, meaning they may be working for you and your chief competition within the same market. But do the smaller agencies have the experience and resources your firm needs? 

Here are six questions you can ask a prospective law firm SEO company to help uncover red flags that point to a risky relationship. 

1. How does the SEO company talk about SEO?

An agency that uses marketing jargon during the sales process is insulting your law firm. The people you speak to should be able to describe their philosophy and process in plain English and back up their reasoning with data. 

Ask any company you are interviewing to show examples of their work and explain its effectiveness. When discussing the work, agency representatives should display knowledge of current design, technology and SEO approaches. This includes, for example, how design principles help lead to conversions and how the platform and technical specs affect performance. 

SEO isn’t magic. It’s the result of hard work and diverse tactics done by a variety of people. Those people should be able to show and explain their work. 

2. Do they have answers to your questions about AI Search Optimization

For several years, Google has been updating its search results page to continuously feature more AI answers. At this point, if you search using the most recent release, most of the content on the first page could potentially be AI summaries rather than organic results. 

Putting the quality of AI summaries aside, the reality for law firms is that websites are seeing less traffic as searchers read summaries rather than clicking on links. How will your SEO firm handle this reality? Do they monitor answer engine results? Do they have strategies for getting your firm’s content into AI summaries? 

An agency should be able to demonstrate its knowledge of AI and answer engine optimization on more than a surface level. 

3. Who has control of creative assets?

You hire a marketing agency to build a narrative about your firm, develop strategies to reach people and use this narrative to convince them to hire you. Depending on the scope of your agreement, your agency will consistently create and update intellectual property like a website, ads, photos, videos, custom illustrations and potentially more. 

You are paying for these assets, and you should own them. If your firm participates in a photography session organized by your agency, you should own the images and be able to use them outside your relationship with your marketing agency. Your videos and ads should come with you should you choose to move on from your agency.

The biggest item on this list is likely your website. Beware of agencies that do not let you own your website or content. Also, beware of companies that use proprietary content management systems and do not give you access to your accounts. You could be headed for big, costly headaches — and potentially a complete website rebuild — should you try to take your site to a different provider or manage a portion of your marketing internally.

4. How do you know your investment is paying off?

Vague reporting is a huge red flag. Steer clear of marketing companies that cannot talk about how they get results or how they will tell you if your marketing is effective. 

Your marketing company should even be a little obsessed with data. Data tells you what works and what doesn’t. It tells you when to pivot and when to double down. You should have first-hand access to reports and data, not access filtered through your marketing company’s lens. 

Transparency and reporting are critical parts of the agency-law firm relationship. Companies that act as information gatekeepers are probably only hiding the fact they don’t know what they are doing.  

5. Do its promises seem unrealistic?

Marketing companies that make specific guarantees or provide unequivocal timelines are making promises they may be unable to keep. Search engine optimization is an ever-changing field. Google updates its algorithm regularly. Sometimes, these updates are minor, and sometimes, they shake up results listings for months. Your marketing company cannot know when that is coming, but it should be able to describe how it will handle these upheavals when they inevitably happen. 

Getting results from an organic search marketing plan takes time. And companies that are doing it right are spending a lot on the process. 

Even seemingly small pieces of an SEO strategy often involve input from several people. A single piece of content, for example, may be written, scripted, and produced into a video, illustrated in an infographic, used in an e-book layout, and potentially more. After all this exists, it needs to earn links. Different professionals with different skills do this work on multiple items every month. Companies that offer the world for a small investment are selling a process that is too good to be true. 

6. Are the people you talk to curious?

You should not be the only one asking questions during the onboarding process. Your marketing company should be curious about who you are and who your clients are. This is because any agency that offers a one-size-fits-all is giving you a recipe for failure.

Every firm, even those practicing in the same areas, faces a different growth landscape. Every marketing plan should be custom-developed with that landscape in mind. Plans should also be executed with the knowledge that adjustments will need to be made based on changing inputs. Flexibility, communication and openness are all critical to success. 

If you get a bad gut feeling about communication, feel like an agency is being opaque or think you are being given unrealistic promises, you are probably right. Your marketing partner should be able to answer all these questions satisfactorily. Due diligence will help ensure your investment will produce results.