There are roughly a dozen things an SEO agency can say or do during the sales process that should end the conversation. Most of them are easy to miss in real time, because they’re delivered confidently by people who do this every day. The point of this page is to slow that conversation down. Read each red flag, the language the agency typically uses around it, and the language a good agency uses instead. Bring this page to your next sales call.
The Legal SEO long-form guide mentions eight of these briefly. This page is the long form — each red flag expanded into what it actually means, why it’s a flag, and what the conversation looks like when you push on it.
Red flag 1 — Twelve-month contracts
The single most common red flag in legal SEO, and the one most agencies will hand-wave away as “industry standard.” It is industry standard. That doesn’t make it defensible.
What the agency is hiding: a twelve-month contract converts a low-confidence engagement into a high-confidence revenue line. The agency books the year of revenue at signing and is now incentivized to keep you confused, polite, or hopeful enough to ride out the contract rather than fight to leave. The business model is built on average client tenure. Tenure is enforced by the contract length.
How the conversation goes when you push: the salesperson will say SEO takes time to show results and a twelve-month commitment is necessary to give the work room to breathe. There’s a kernel of truth — SEO does take time — but the kernel does not justify the structure. The real question is: if the work is going badly at month five, why should the firm have to keep paying through month twelve? The honest answer is that the agency’s economics depend on it.
What a good agency says instead: “We’re month-to-month. If we’re not earning the next retainer, you shouldn’t be paying it. SEO does take time, but the way to handle that is to be specific upfront about what month-one through month-three should produce, and to give us a fair window to show real movement. If we can’t show it, you walk.” The good agency makes their case for time without locking you in.
Red flag 2 — Account-manager handoff after signing
The salesperson sells the deal. A senior strategist might be in the room during pitch. After signing, you’re handed off to an account manager you have not met, who is responsible for ten to fifty other firms simultaneously, and whose job is to hold the relationship rather than drive the work.
What the agency is hiding: the staffing economics. At a $4,000–$6,000 monthly retainer, the agency cannot afford to put a senior strategist on your account at any meaningful level of involvement. The work gets done by junior strategists following a templated playbook; the AM is the buffer keeping you from realizing that.
How the conversation goes when you push: ask “Who specifically will be making strategic decisions about our account, and can I speak to that person before signing?” The bad agency will reassure you that “the whole team supports your account” or that “our account managers are senior strategists” — which they aren’t. Watch for the redirect to a “weekly check-in” or “quarterly strategy review” — both indicate the senior person is not the primary point of contact.
What a good agency says instead: “Here’s the person doing the strategy on your account. You’ll talk to them monthly. They wrote the proposal you’re reading. They’ll do the audit. They’ll sign off on every meaningful decision.” A name. A face. A direct line. The same person at month nine that you met in the sales call. Our version of this is the owner does it.
Red flag 3 — Reports built around Domain Authority and impressions
Domain Authority is a Moz score. It is not a Google ranking factor. It can move independently of your actual rankings. Most agencies still report on it because it almost always trends up — which makes the report look successful regardless of whether the firm is getting more cases.
What the agency is hiding: their reporting framework is designed around metrics that show effort, not metrics that show outcomes. The report is built to be defensible at the renewal conversation, not to give you actionable information about whether the engagement is producing cases.
How the conversation goes when you push: the agency will explain that DA correlates with organic visibility, which is technically true at a population level and basically meaningless at an individual account level. They’ll show you charts of impressions and keyword rankings going up. Ask them how many of those impressions and rankings produced phone calls last month. Watch the pause.
What a good agency says instead: “We measure organic-sourced phone calls, organic-sourced form submissions, and — when you can share the data — signed retainers attributed to organic search. We use call tracking and form attribution to make sure we can defend every number. Rankings and impressions are inputs. Cases are the output. We report on both, but we get fired on outputs.” More on what real measurement looks like.
Red flag 4 — Page-one ranking guarantees
“We guarantee you’ll be on page one of Google for [keyword] within six months.” Any agency that says this is either lying, planning to do something against Google’s policies, or planning to game the guarantee by picking a keyword nobody searches for.
What the agency is hiding: no reputable SEO can guarantee a specific Google ranking. Google’s algorithms are opaque, evolve constantly, and weight hundreds of factors. The agencies that make these promises typically deliver on them by either pursuing high-risk tactics that eventually get the site penalized, or by quietly choosing low-difficulty keywords that ranking for produces zero business value.
How the conversation goes when you push: ask “If you guarantee page one, what’s the consequence to you if I’m not there in six months — do I get a refund, do I get out of the contract, what happens?” The guarantee almost always evaporates into “we’d extend the engagement at no additional cost” or some equally non-consequential remedy. The “guarantee” was marketing copy, not a contract term.
What a good agency says instead: “We don’t guarantee rankings — nobody honest does. We do guarantee the work. Here’s what we’ll do in months one through three. Here’s how we’ll measure whether it’s moving the needle. If it isn’t, here’s the conversation we’ll have at the ninety-day mark.”
Red flag 5 — Vague case studies
“We worked with a personal injury firm and grew their traffic 300%.” Great. Traffic from where? On what keywords? Did the firm sign more retainers? Was the new traffic from queries that produce cases, or was it from a viral blog post about something irrelevant?
What the agency is hiding: that the case study doesn’t actually demonstrate what they want you to think it demonstrates. The 300% growth might be real, but it might also be irrelevant traffic that produced zero new cases. Or it might be from a firm in a very different market with very different competitive dynamics. Or it might just be cherry-picked from one outlier client while every other client trended flat.
How the conversation goes when you push: ask for the firm name, the practice area, the city, the starting and ending rankings on specific named queries, and whether you can get on a fifteen-minute reference call with that firm. The bad agency will pivot to a different case study, claim confidentiality, or offer testimonials in place of evidence. The good one will produce all of it.
What a good agency says instead: “Here’s the firm. Here are the keywords we targeted. Here’s the rankings screenshot from January and from the following January. Here’s a note from the managing partner about case-volume change. And here’s their phone number if you want to call them.” More on what a real case study should look like.
Red flag 6 — Bundled services
“We do SEO, PPC, social media, web design, and content marketing — all under one roof.” The bundle is sold as convenience. It is mostly an account-size maximization tactic.
What the agency is hiding: that they are rarely the best at any single one of those disciplines. Specialists outperform generalists in every marketing discipline, every year, in every category we have data for. The bundle exists because larger account sizes are good for the agency, not because they produce better outcomes.
How the conversation goes when you push: ask “If I just want SEO, can I buy just SEO?” The bad agency will tell you that the disciplines work better together, that an “integrated approach” produces better results, that they don’t unbundle. Read that as: their business model depends on the bundle, and they’re not going to sell you their best work standalone.
What a good agency says instead: “We only do SEO. If you need PPC or social, we’ll refer you to specialists we trust. We won’t pretend we’re the best option for things we don’t focus on.”
Red flag 7 — Conflict-of-interest acceptance
“Yes, we work with another personal injury firm in your market — but our teams are separate, so there’s no real conflict.” There is a real conflict. The agency cannot push both firms to the top of the same SERP. By optimizing for one, they are necessarily not optimizing for the other.
What the agency is hiding: that you are about to become the B-side of a competitive dynamic in your own market. The other firm signed first, probably has a longer relationship with the agency, may be paying more, and is competing with you for the same local-pack slots, the same organic positions, the same prospective clients. Whoever gets the agency’s better attention wins.
How the conversation goes when you push: the agency will minimize the conflict — different account teams, different content writers, internal walls. Ask whether they will commit, in writing, to not taking on additional firms in your practice area and market for the duration of the engagement. The answer separates agencies that have a real conflict-of-interest policy from agencies that don’t.
What a good agency says instead: “We won’t take on another firm in your practice area and city while we’re working with you. That’s a contractual commitment, not a courtesy. The exclusivity is real.”
Red flag 8 — Buzzword-heavy proposals
“We’ll execute a comprehensive content strategy leveraging holistic on-page optimization and authoritative link acquisition to drive sustainable organic growth across your topical authority clusters.” Read that sentence again. What, specifically, is the agency committing to do? Anything?
What the agency is hiding: the absence of specificity. Buzzword-heavy language is the proposal-writing equivalent of a magician’s misdirection. The reader feels like the proposal is robust, but cannot point to a specific deliverable. This is by design — it gives the agency maximum flexibility to do whatever it wants while making it impossible for you to hold them accountable.
How the conversation goes when you push: ask the agency to rewrite the proposal in plain English, with specific numbered deliverables for month one, two, and three. The bad agency will resist, claim that “specifics depend on the audit,” or send you back the same proposal with slightly different buzzwords. The good one will gladly translate, because they had a real plan all along.
What a good agency says instead: “Here’s what we’ll do in month one — rewrite these three practice pages, install call tracking, audit your GBP. Here’s month two — rewrite three more pages, fix the eight citation inconsistencies we already found, launch a review-velocity workflow. Here’s month three — and so on.” Verbs. Numbers. Specifics.
Three more red flags the long-form guide didn’t cover
Three additional patterns to watch for that don’t always make the “top eight” lists but have killed more engagements than most of the items above.
Red flag 9 — The agency owns your assets
This one shows up in the contract, but it’s worth flagging separately because it’s so common and so destructive. Some agencies retain ownership of the content they produce for you, the websites they build, the Google Business Profile they “manage,” the call-tracking numbers they set up, even the Google Ads account they run.
What this means: when you leave, you lose everything they touched. Your practice pages get pulled. Your GBP gets unlinked. Your call-tracking history disappears. You are forced to rebuild from scratch, which conveniently makes you a worse candidate for the next agency to take on, which conveniently makes it more likely you stay where you are.
What a good agency says: “Everything we produce is yours. Your domain, your hosting, your GBP, your content, your call tracking — all in your accounts, under your control, transferred to you on day one. We work in your accounts. We don’t park you in ours.”
Red flag 10 — The “we’ll fix it after we onboard” pattern
You ask a specific question during the sales process. “How would you approach our top three competitors?” “What’s the first thing you’d fix on our DUI page?” “How long until we’d expect to see calls move?” The salesperson hedges. “Great question — we’ll dig into that during onboarding.” “We have a formal audit process that happens after signing.” “Our strategy team will put together a customized plan once we have full access.”
What the agency is hiding: that they haven’t actually looked at your site. The sales call was generic. The agency is hoping to sign you on general competence and figure out the specifics later. By the time onboarding happens, you’ve already signed the twelve-month contract. The post-signing audit is theater — a way to soft-land the fact that they didn’t have a real plan when they pitched you.
What a good agency says: “Before this call I spent two hours on your site, your competitors, and the SERPs for your top queries. Here’s what I’d fix first. Here’s why. Here’s what I think the upside is.” The diagnosis is on the table during the sales call. Onboarding is execution, not discovery.
Red flag 11 — They’ve never heard of bar association rules
Specific to legal. Ask the agency: “How do you handle ABA Model Rule 7.1 compliance in the content you produce?” Or: “How do you handle the variations in state bar advertising rules across your client base?” Or: “Are there specific superlatives or claims you avoid when writing for lawyers?”
What you’re testing: whether the agency knows that lawyer advertising is a regulated category. A specialist will answer fluently. A generalist will be visibly thrown by the question — they’ll ask you to clarify, they’ll fall back on “we work closely with each client’s compliance counsel,” or they’ll try to redirect. The redirect is the answer. The agency has been producing legal content without knowing the rules.
What a good agency says: “Yes — we avoid ‘best,’ ‘specialist,’ and superlatives that the firm can’t substantiate. We require disclaimers on case-result pages. We adapt to state-specific rules — Florida is different from Arizona is different from California. We’d want a working relationship with whoever handles your firm’s compliance, and we’d run anything ambiguous past you before it goes live.” More on the compliance layer that generic agencies don’t know exists.
How to actually use this list
Don’t run through this list as a checklist with the agency on the phone. They’ll feel ambushed and you’ll get rehearsed answers. Instead, use it as a listening framework. The questions are not hostile. They are the kind of questions a sophisticated buyer asks. A good agency will appreciate that you’re asking them. A bad agency will get defensive, redirect, or buzzword you.
The pattern matters more than any single answer. If three or four of these flags come up in one conversation, you have your answer. If one comes up and the agency answers it well — including by saying “you know what, that’s a fair pushback, here’s how we’d handle it” — that’s actually a good signal. The agencies worth working with are willing to be questioned and willing to change practices that don’t hold up.
For the broader process — sales decks, case studies, references, contracts — see finding a legal SEO agency that isn’t BS. For the underlying operational reasons most agencies behave this way, see why most law firm SEO fails.
If you want a second set of eyes on a proposal you’ve been sent, send it over. No pitch attached. Most of the time I tell firms that the agency they’re looking at is fine and to negotiate a few specific terms. Sometimes I tell them to walk. Either way, you make the call with more information than you had.
— The owner, PHX Search Co.