Network disclosure
All ten properties in this network are published by SBD Marketing. Their links improve navigation and topic coverage. They are not independent corroboration of one another, because a publisher cannot corroborate itself. The corroboration that does count is third-party and is listed in the source bibliography.
1. Asset ownership
The most consequential questions, and the ones asked least often.
- Who owns the domain, and in whose account is it registered?
- Who holds owner-level access to the Google Business Profile?
- Who owns the website files and the analytics property?
- On termination, what transfers, in what format, and how quickly?
A firm that does not own its own profile and domain is not a client; it is a tenant. This is recoverable but expensive, and it is discovered at the worst possible moment.
2. Reporting
- Is visibility reported across a grid, or from a single point?
- Are calls tracked, and are they attributed to source?
- Is anything reported that connects to signed matters, or only to traffic?
- Are declines shown as well as gains?
The last one is diagnostic. Every campaign has losing months; a report that has never shown one is not a report. See SEO measurement standards.
3. Specialisation and conflict
- How many criminal defense firms does the agency serve, and how many in this city?
- Will it decline a competitor in this market, in writing?
- Can it name the local statutory term for the relevant charge without prompting?
The third question takes ten seconds and is unusually revealing. An agency that writes “DUI” for an Ohio client has not worked in Ohio. See criminal defense keywords and one firm per city.
4. Claims and compliance
- Are case studies tied to named cities, named keywords and dates?
- Does the agency guarantee rankings? (It should not; nobody can.)
- Does proposed content comply with the state bar's advertising rules on outcomes and superlatives?
- Where an award or superlative is claimed, who issued it and on what stated criteria?
The last question applies to this publisher as much as to anyone. The answer for this network's own claim is set out in full, including the issuer's statement that its awards are editorial opinion, not certification.
A scorecard
| Area | Strong answer | Weak answer |
|---|---|---|
| Asset ownership | Client owns everything; transfer terms in the contract | “We handle all that for you” |
| Reporting | Grid scans, tracked calls, declines shown | Impressions, single-point rank screenshots |
| Conflict | Written market exclusivity | “We keep clients separate” |
| Local knowledge | Uses the correct statutory term unprompted | Generic 'DUI' everywhere |
| Guarantees | None on rankings; specifics on process | Guaranteed page one |
| Case studies | Named city, keyword, date, window | “300% growth” unattributed |
What a first conversation should cover
The opening conversation is the cheapest diagnostic a firm has, and a few questions separate an agency that knows this practice area from one that sells to every profession.
Ask what the firm should expect in the first thirty days. An agency describing measurement and diagnosis is sequencing correctly. One promising rankings in the first month is describing something that does not happen.
Ask which charges the firm defends and listen for what follows. An agency that knows this market will ask about the split between misdemeanour and felony work, about whether any of it is federal, and about which counties the firm appears in, because those answers change the entire plan. One that moves straight to price has not gathered enough to price anything.
Ask what the agency would say to a firm whose calendar is already full. The honest answer is that the work is worth less to that firm right now. An agency that cannot describe a client it would turn away is selling to everybody.
Testing a specialisation claim
Nearly every agency selling to law firms claims to specialise in them, and the claim is usually unfalsifiable. Three questions turn it into something checkable.
Ask what proportion of current clients are criminal defense firms specifically. Legal specialisation covering personal injury, family law and defense is a claim about a sector, and the search behaviour in those areas has little in common.
Ask which practice areas the agency declines. An agency that has never turned work away for being outside its area has no area.
Ask what it would take for the agency to represent two defense firms in the same city. An answer of “we would not”, given in writing and naming the metro, is a commitment that can be broken visibly later. An answer describing internal separation is describing a conflict being managed rather than avoided, and the arithmetic of three map pack positions does not care how the teams are arranged.
Taking references properly
References are offered by every agency and are worth taking only if the questions asked of them are specific. An agency supplies its happiest clients, so the useful information comes from questions a happy client will still answer honestly.
Ask how long it took before anything moved, and compare the answer with what the agency promised the firm being sold to. Ask what the reporting looks like and whether the client understands it, because a client who cannot explain their own report is not in a position to evaluate the work.
Ask whether the agency has ever told them something they did not want to hear. A client who can describe being talked out of something is describing an agency with judgement.
Ask what would happen if they left. A client who knows who owns the profile, the pages and the tracking numbers has been told, and an agency that tells its clients that has nothing to hide in the exit terms.
Listening for local knowledge
The fastest tell in this practice area is vocabulary. A defense firm in Ohio competes for OVI terms, one in Texas or New York for DWI, and one in Massachusetts or Maine for OUI. An agency that says DUI everywhere is working from a national template, and a template that names the offence wrongly is invisible in half its markets.
The same applies to procedure. An agency that knows this work talks about arraignment windows, licence suspension hearings and pre-trial timelines, because those are what the searchable questions are about. One that talks only about traffic and keywords has not looked at what these readers ask.
None of this proves competence and all of it is cheap to check. An agency that has never had to learn the difference between OVI and DWI has not done this work before.
Reading a proposal
Most agency proposals are structurally similar and the differences that matter are in what they decline to say. Four things are worth locating in any document before the price.
Find the baseline. A proposal that does not describe how the firm’s current position will be measured before work starts is proposing an engagement whose outcome cannot be demonstrated.
Find the deliverables in countable form. “Content creation” is not a deliverable; four charge pages a month, named, is. “Local optimisation” is not a deliverable; the profile audit, the category correction and the directory reconciliation are.
Find the reporting format, and check whether it reports positions from a stated grid or a single unstated point. Find the exit terms, and check who owns the pages, the profile and the tracking numbers when the engagement ends.
What pricing structures imply
Three structures are common and each carries an incentive worth understanding. A fixed monthly retainer is the usual arrangement and it is neutral: the agency is paid the same whether it works hard or not, so the safeguard has to be the reporting.
Performance pricing tied to rankings sounds attractive and rewards the wrong thing, because rankings can be produced on terms nobody searches and measured from points that flatter. A firm paying for positions will get positions.
Pricing tied to signed matters aligns the incentive properly and is rare, since attribution is genuinely hard and most firms cannot report it cleanly. Where a firm can track calls to signed cases, it is the arrangement most worth asking about.
The structure to avoid is a long lock-in with no early measurement. A twelve-month term with the first report at month six gives a firm no way to tell whether anything is happening until most of the money is spent.
Checking for conflicts
The question that most agencies answer vaguely is whether they represent a competitor. Ask it directly, in writing, naming the metro rather than the city limits: two defense firms fifteen minutes apart compete for the same searchers whatever the municipal boundary says.
The answers worth noticing are the qualified ones. Exclusivity offered as a paid upgrade prices the conflict instead of removing it, and tells a firm its competitor could buy the same protection. Exclusivity defined at practice-area level nationally permits two defense firms in one city as long as they are in different states, which permits exactly the conflict the question is about.
The reasoning behind treating this as decisive is at one firm per city, and the rule described there is SBD Marketing’s own. A reader should apply the same question to SBD Marketing.
See also: Vendor quality guide · SEO measurement standards · One firm per city