Ep. 56 - The Silent SEO Problem Costing Your Law Firm

In this episode of the Law Firm Growth Professor podcast, I tackle one of the most overlooked—and costly—questions in law firm marketing: When is it time to walk away from your SEO agency?

It’s easy to spot when things are clearly broken. No results. No communication. No accountability.

But what about when nothing is technically wrong… and yet, nothing is really working either?

That’s where most law firms get stuck—and where real growth starts to slip away.

I break down the subtle warning signs that your SEO agency may no longer be the right fit, even if they haven’t done anything blatantly wrong. From communication breakdowns to shifting priorities, new personnel, and misaligned expectations, these are the issues that quietly stall your momentum.

More importantly, I walk you through what to do before making a final decision—how to address the problem, when to give it time, and how to know when it’s time to move on for good.

Because sometimes, the best way to get better results… is to let your SEO agency go.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The difference between a failing SEO agency and a misaligned one
• The early warning signs most law firms ignore
• Why communication breakdowns are often the real problem
• How agency turnover can impact your results
• The “3-month rule” for evaluating whether things can be fixed
• What to do before terminating your SEO contract
• How to protect your firm during a transition

If you’ve ever wondered whether your SEO is truly working—or just coasting—this is an episode you don’t want to miss.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

Hi and welcome. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came by to join me today. For my returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. It may be one of the most pivotal questions you ever ask regarding your SEO, when is it time to say goodbye to my agency? Now, sometimes this is obvious. If your SEO agency hasn't done anything that's moved the needle in six months, you have to wonder why. If the scope of what they're doing has drifted away from what you initially hired them to do, that's a problem. If they're not getting new results, that's an obvious problem. If they suddenly go no contact, that's also an obvious problem. But sometimes things aren't that dramatic. It's more a mismatch between the agency and you. For example, maybe your SEO agency just hired new people and they did a bunch of internal reshuffling, and now the person who's been working on your SEO since you signed the contract is suddenly obligated to do other things. That's not necessarily a deal breaker in and of itself, but what if you don't get along with your new project manager? What if you don't see eye to eye with them? What if their ideas don't match up with what you contracted for? This is one of those touchy situations where nobody's really right and nobody's really wrong, although you as the customer do have ultimate control over what your SEO agency is and is not doing on your behalf. Or at the very least, you should. And if you don't, then there's an obvious problem right there. But if it's just a mismatch, then before you go saying, you know what, I'm terminating this contract, maybe talk to the higher-ups of the agency and say, look, this person and I just don't match. We don't mesh creatively, we don't mesh intellectually, we don't mesh emotionally. You don't necessarily have to spell out in painstaking detail what it is that you do or don't like about them. Just say we're not a good fit. In many cases, an SEO agency will try to do whatever they reasonably can to preserve a long-standing relationship. Sometimes that's not possible. Maybe your SEO person at that agency moved on to another opportunity, got married, moved out of state, whatever. It doesn't necessarily matter what it was that they were doing or why they're not there now. Uh but now that you've got somebody else who's pinch hitting and they don't even know how your law firm's name is supposed to be spelled, there's a problem. Well, okay, so in a situation like this, I don't advocate cutting them off immediately. What I say in that situation is give them three months and check in with them consistently. Find yourself a contact at the agency that you can check in with as well and say, okay, I just talked to so-and-so about the April game plan and I don't feel like it's going well. I don't feel like they're hearing me. I didn't feel like I'm getting my point across. Is there any way that you can help? Maybe you need a mediator. Maybe you need somebody to come in and sit down with both of you and help you come to a meeting of the minds. People who work in family law will certainly understand that sometimes it's not just a good fit. And you know what? That's fine. That's fair. Not every situation has a perfect solution. And not every SEO agency is going to have the perfect solution for your firm. You'd hope that you would identify any potential problems or non-starters before you get to that point. But that doesn't always work out that way. So fair is fair. Give them a fair chance to get on board with the way you need and want it done before you sever the ties. Now, sometimes, of course, the agency itself recalibrates, retools, or decides they're going to do these things, but not do these other things. They may expand their offerings and try to get you on board with things that don't necessarily uh work for you or that you don't need or want right now. And there's nothing wrong with asking, hey, what do you think about a complete branding refresh? Okay, well, if you've been thinking about that anyway, this would be a great time to do that. But if you're going, yeah, I'm pretty happy with my branding the way it is, and no, I don't want to spend that kind of money right now, this is also a perfectly fair and valid response. Now, most SEO agencies will take that in stride and say, okay, they don't want to do this right now, and they'll move on. But what if they don't? Well, you have every right in the world to say, this isn't what I contracted for, and I don't need the hard sell. I just want the things that I've asked for. Please give them to me, or we'll need to terminate this agreement, which again is totally fair and totally reasonable. You're not talking about cases of obvious malfeasance here. What you're talking about is just an overall mismatch between you and your SEO agency or the representative thereof with whom you were working on your law firm's marketing. It's tempting to say that your SEO agency are the experts. They should know how all of this stuff is supposed to go. But there's a very human element to it that often gets overlooked and all the techno babble and jargon and abbreviations and the acronyms, and the human element gets lost. It takes a lot of creativity to create good content. It takes a lot of outside-the-box thinking to create a good website that really stands out, especially for law firms that are just starting out and don't really know what they need. So you're kind of at the SEO agency's mercy as far as this is what I need, this is what I wanted to do. As we've discussed before, it's generally not a good idea to just give your SEO agency a blank check and let them run with that. They should have a lot of guidance from you. You need to make sure that you know exactly what shade of blue you want. Ideally, uh you'll go online and you'll find the hex code for the exact shade of blue you want or whatever, and be able to tell them, I want this shade of blue and I want this shade of slate gray. And they'll say, okay, because then you have something concrete and actionable to give them. Believe it or not, SEO agencies do not usually like dealing with clients who say, uh, just give me something kind of sort of like this website. Why? Because they're not working on this website, they're working on your website. So when someone tells them to just do something and we'll see what happens, what they're thinking is this is going to be a six-month problem that's going to frustrate you. It's going to frustrate them. And at the end of it, there's going to be a lot of hard feelings and possibly uh a termination or legal action. Nobody wants that. Granted, for attorneys, legal actions are literally our bread and butter. However, that doesn't mean we necessarily want to be party to a legal action. Uh, I'm talking about when it's time to really interrogate your relationship with your SEO agency and say, this just is not working. As I've said, people move, people change, your agency evolves, and your agency uh they may start doing new things. They'll expand or contract their available offerings. Uh sometimes they'll go out of business. And if they go out of business, obviously there's nothing to discuss here because you can't do business with an entity uh that's no longer in business. So that's fair and logical. But what are the warning signs that you need to uh be looking out for that things are not going well and that maybe you need to start looking for another SEO agency? Well, let's say your agency just got this new hot uh hotshot SEO guru, uh whatever they're calling themselves this week, and somebody who thinks they're God's gift to digital marketing, but in reality, they can barely put in a proper URL format. It does happen, and because there's a lack of certification in a lot of areas of SEO and search engine marketing, you're going to find out that sometimes you have people who claim to be great and can do all these wonderful things, but when it comes down to brass tacks, they don't know what they're doing and they rely heavily on online tutorials to do things that you would expect a properly certified, properly accredited person to be able to do, more or less instinctively off the top of their head. One of the biggest warning signs, I think, is when communication stops being free-flowing. Your SEO agency needs to be able to get in touch with you to ask questions and ascertain uh that they're going uh in the right direction. You need to be able to get a hold of your SEO agency. Anytime communication becomes a one-way street, it can be problematic for your relationship with the agency. And it can be tempting once it all blows up to say, oh well, this is so-and-so's fault, when it's really just a communication issue. That becomes more a chicken and egg problem. Well, they didn't respond in a timely fashion to blah, blah, blah. So I stopped responding to them, and the whole thing just kind of spiraled downwards from there. Depending on the circumstances, you could fairly say that there's going to be some blame to go around uh everywhere in a situation like that. The other problem with the lack of communication is that you're almost certainly not going to get what you want. Now, if it's the SEO agency that started the lack of communication, then the blame is obvious. But when it becomes more of a subtle tit for tat sort of thing, we'll stop responding to you as long as you stop uh responding to this, then it becomes a little more complicated. If you're having communication issues with your SEO agency, the first thing you should do is talk to somebody, ideally in a position of authority and power, who can say, okay, we'll fix this, or at least get all the parties to the table so we can find out what the disconnect is and try to fix it. Because onboarding a new client, as we all know, is not easy. There's an on-ramp that has to be followed in order to make sure that you're meeting the client's needs. SEO agencies are really not that different. So you've got to have that runway in place. And that runway takes time to build. You have to have a lot of conversations, you have to have a lot of clarity, and you have to go through a lot of what happens if. And of course, if you don't like the answers, you can walk away from the conversation right then and there. Yes, your competitors down the street told me they could do blah, blah, blah. And you're telling me you can't. Again, be careful of people promising to you uh the moon and stars on your first meeting, because I promise they're only after your marketing budget. They're not after marketing your firm. So try to mitigate it. You try to uh mediate it, and you try to talk it out before it becomes a problem. But if you've had a problem communicating with your SEO agency for more than three months or so, then it's probably a good time to start looking for somebody else. And in the example above, people do move on. The person who you've been with since day one, working with that agency, uh, has some kind of life change, moves, gets married, has a child, uh, whatever, suddenly their focus is divided. Well, okay, and your SEO agency would be expected to bring in somebody to help ease that transition. Now, is there any guarantee that it's going to be a smooth or easy transition? No, absolutely not. You're always gambling to a certain degree when a new person steps into an existing frame. If you've ever replaced your office manager at your firm, you already know exactly what I'm talking about. And for the same reasons, they're learning your firm, your expectations, and how you want things to work. At the same time, you're learning how they function, how they work, and how they approach these day-to-day issues that a law firm's office manager would be expected to deal with. So you hope for a smooth, easy, painless transfer of responsibility from one person to another that doesn't always guarantee that you'll have a smooth, easy transition uh from one person to the next. And sometimes you'll find somebody that you just flat cannot work with. Okay, this is where you talk to your SEO agency and you say, hey, look, I appreciate you detailing uh, let's call her Sarah just for fun. I appreciate you detailing Sarah to replace Kimberly. Uh, but Sarah's not really doing the job. She's not as responsive, she's not as communicative, and she's not as like fill in the blank as what Kimberly was. And in this case, you may have just a mismatch of communication styles. Nothing wrong with that as such. And there's no reason that this has to be a big thing in and of itself. But if you've sat down with Sarah and their superior and you and yourself and you've explained, this is what I want, this is what we were doing, and this is the roadmap that we were working off of. And then all of a sudden, instead of going to Boise, Idaho, we're going to Baja, California, and nothing has changed. It's definitely time to look at a new SEO agency. Another issue is what do you do when that new agency uh and that relationship falls apart? Well, first obviously, you have to follow the contract. They're bound by it, you're bound by it. Uh, but what makes this a binding contract? So you follow the terms and conditions and you make sure that you've done everything you need to do, uh, and you say, hey, this just is not working, and I'm not willing to do this anymore. At that point, there really shouldn't be anything to say, but okay, I understand we've tried and we wish you well. But remember, your contract with your SEO agency is no less binding because it's with an SEO agency. Now, of course, they owe you the same standard of care and the same due diligence. Ideally, in the example above, Kimberly would have briefed Sarah on what your firm was doing, what the marketing scheme was, and how you had already arranged for it, uh, for it to be executed. And Kimberly should have made sure that Sarah was ready for that. If it wasn't Kimberly, because she was your original manager and she got terminated or whatever, then it's implicit in the SEO agency's responsibilities to make sure that the new person is up to scratch and up to speed. Before you meet them, they should already know what you're doing, why you're doing it, how you're doing it, and what's already been done so that they can hit the ground running for you before you ever know that there's a new person in play. And a lot of people drop the ball at this point. But again, that's in and of itself not necessarily a deal breaker unless they have really, really failed to make sure this person was ready to take on your law firm's SEO. In which case, no, they shouldn't expect you to pony up and they shouldn't expect you to be happy with a subpar result. So make sure you have dotted all your I's and you've crossed all your T's. Make sure every conversation is documented. Send an email. I sat down with Sarah and Jane regarding our law firm marketing for April, and these were the key points that were discussed. If there's a communication stoppage, then you need to make sure that's noted. If you talked about going a different direction, you need to make sure that that's uh is talked about and noted as well. Uh you can't go wrong with having more documentation. More is always better. The fact of the matter is that uh relationships do fall apart. They end. Uh people move on from your digital marketing agency, from your SEO agency. They move on to other things. Uh, some people just wake up one day and say, you know what, I'm tired of doing what I'm doing and I want to do something else. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong with your SEO agency. It doesn't mean that they've done anything wrong. It does mean that the relationship is inevitably going to change. So be thinking about that. And it might be a good idea to quietly, informally ask your SEO agency what plans or protocols that they have in place in case you run into a situation where the person you've assigned to your law firm is suddenly unavailable. Let's say they get sick for six weeks. Uh it's not their fault. They're out of communication, they're sick, they're on maternity leave, whatever. Well, having babies is about as natural as it gets. But of course, while they're worrying about keeping this new human alive, uh, they're probably not as concerned about whether or not all your meta tag, uh metadata tags are on point. So it's logical that your SEO agency would try to replace that person or have somebody as a backup in a way that makes this transition seamless. But if you've tried to uh to work with them, you've tried everything, and you're sure that you've adhered to your part of the contract as the one you signed as the original person involved, then it's time to start looking around for another SEO agency. How you do this is up to you. And again, I would caution you against uh suddenly taking action without making sure that you've tried to sort it out with your agency beforehand, because that's not entirely fair to them either. But sometimes the best way to get the results you want from your SEO agency is to let your SEO agency go. Again, I'm John Rizviy, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button and make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any updates from this channel. And don't forget to share with your friends and colleagues, other attorneys, anybody that may find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today, and make sure you tune in next week for more tips and ideas on making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you all next time. Thank you.