SEO for lawyers,without the agency tax.
A buyer's guide and a service. Read the questions you should be asking every SEO proposal, then decide if we're the answer.
Talk to the owner directly
What most agencies won't tell you.
The SEO industry has a sales problem. The person you talk to on the discovery call is almost never the person who will touch your site. They're paid commission. They have a quota. Their incentive is to close you on a 12-month contract before you find out who's actually doing the work, usually an overseas content team using templates.
For a small law firm, this is a particularly bad deal. Legal SEO rewards specificity, attorney voice, and real local knowledge. None of that survives a template-driven, account-manager-buffered process.
The five questions to ask every SEO proposal
Before you sign anything, get answers to these in writing, not over a sales call:
- Who, by name, will do the work each month? If the answer is "our team", it's an offshore content farm.
- If I cancel in month 6, what do I keep? Should be: the site, all content, Google Business Profile, analytics access. If they keep any of it, walk away.
- What keywords are we targeting in month 1? A specific list, in writing. Vague "we'll research" answers mean they haven't looked at your market.
- Can I see a current client's rankings I can verify? Real agencies have clients they'll name. Sketchy ones hide behind NDAs.
- What's the contract length? 30-day terms after an initial build is the honest answer. 12-month minimums are the agency hedging against bad work.
Why we built Sites by Harris this way
We're the answer to those five questions, by design. The owner does the work. You own everything. Keywords are listed in writing in month one. Anything we deliver is verifiable in your own Google Search Console. And we're month-to-month after the initial build. That's not a marketing position, it's just how the firm is structured.
If you see any of these, don't sign.
Guarantees of page-one rankings in 30 or 60 days
Impossible without black-hat tactics that will eventually get you penalized. New domains physically cannot rank competitively that fast.
The agency owns your Google Business Profile or website
GBP is the single most valuable digital asset a local law firm has. If the agency owns it, they can hold your case flow hostage during a dispute.
Vague monthly reports full of 'impressions' and 'reach'
Real reports show keyword rankings, organic traffic, calls from search, and form submissions tied to revenue. Vanity metrics hide bad work.
12-month contracts as the only option
Long contracts exist because the agency knows you'd cancel if you could. Honest providers do 30 days.
Refusal to name current clients or share verifiable rankings
Every legitimate SEO provider has at least three clients who will speak on the record. If they hide behind NDAs, they're hiding something.
No mention of E-E-A-T, schema, or local citations
These are the table stakes for legal SEO. If they don't come up in the sales conversation, the agency doesn't know legal.
Owner-led legal SEO, end-to-end.
Keyword strategy in writing
Month-one deliverable: a specific list of keywords we'll target, by practice area and city, with search volume and difficulty for each.
On-page + technical fixes
Schema, Core Web Vitals, crawl errors, internal linking, mobile speed. The boring fundamentals that 80% of competitors skip.
Real attorney-voiced content
Practice-area pages written like an attorney explaining the case to a friend, not like an SEO blog post. Higher trust, higher conversion.
City + practice-area pages
Location-specific landing pages for the markets you serve, tied to the practice areas that get real search volume. The on-site half of local SEO.
Reporting tied to revenue
Monthly report shows ranking changes, organic traffic, calls from search, and form fills, with notes on what we did and why.
Month-to-month
30-day cancellation after an initial build. You keep the site and all content. No clawbacks, no fine print.
What lawyers ask when hiring SEO.
Ask three questions: (1) Who is actually doing the work, the person on the sales call, or someone offshore? (2) Will I own the website, content, and Google Business Profile if I cancel? (3) Can you show me a current client whose rankings I can verify in Google myself? If any answer is fuzzy, it's a bad proposal.
Legal SEO ranges from $150 to $15,000 per month. The middle of that range ($2,000–$5,000) is mostly account-manager overhead, sales commissions, and reporting tools, not better SEO work. Sub-$1,000 services are usually template content farms. The two ends, owner-led specialists and elite competitive-market agencies, actually do the work.
Never sign a 12-month contract on month one. Any provider confident in their work will offer 30-day terms after an initial build. Long contracts protect the agency from getting fired when rankings don't move, not the client.
Legal specialist, every time. Legal is a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) niche with strict E-E-A-T rules, bar ad regulations, and intent patterns generalists don't understand. A specialist costs the same or less and ranks faster.
Guarantees of 'page one in 30 days', refusal to name the keywords they'll target, ownership of the site or GBP staying with the agency, no monthly reporting, or a sales rep who can't explain what schema markup is or why it matters.
Yes, if you have 10 hours a week to learn it. Realistically, most lawyers' billable hour is worth more than what a specialist charges. The math almost always favors hiring, not doing it yourself.
Use the five questions on us. We'll answer in writing.
Request a free landing page mockup and the keyword target list for your practice area. Zero commitment.