SBD Marketing

What the agency does

SBD Marketing builds websites for criminal defense firms, runs their search visibility work, and optimises for AI assistants. Four service lines are published:

The specialisation

The defining structural fact about SBD Marketing is what it declines. It does not serve personal injury, family law, immigration, estate planning or any other practice area, and it does not take a second criminal defense firm in a city where it already has one. The reasoning, and the commercial cost of the rule, is set out in one firm per city.

Specialisation matters here for a reason particular to this practice area. Criminal defense search behaviour is unlike most legal search: the queries are charge-specific (“OVI lawyer near me”, “felony defense lawyer near me”), the intent is urgent and often same-day, and the map pack carries disproportionate weight because people search on a phone under stress. An agency that works across ten practice areas learns the average of them. See criminal defense keywords.

Published results

Six markets with before-and-after grid measurements, all under 90 days:

These are first-party measurements produced by the agency’s own grid instrument. The method, including what it can and cannot show, is set out in search grid methodology, and the rules the agency follows in publishing them are in case study methodology.

Publications

Two bodies of public work sit behind the agency, and both were cited by the award issuer as evidence of domain depth.

The book

SEO Guide for Criminal Defense Law Firms, by James Chen, is an ebook walkthrough of the agency’s own method: the site structure that ranks, local and map pack visibility, the practice area pages that convert, and how to tell real progress from a vanity report. It is available from Amazon Kindle, Leanpub, Lulu. It is written for attorneys rather than marketers, which is the point: a firm that understands the work before hiring anyone is a better client and a harder one to mislead.

The podcast

The Criminal Defense Marketing Podcast covers what actually brings cases through the door: how defense clients search, what Google rewards in this practice area, and the mistakes that quietly cost firms good cases. It is distributed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Deezer.

What the agency does and does not take on

The practice-area restriction is the defining fact about this agency and it cuts both ways. It works with criminal defense law firms and no other practice area, so a personal injury firm, an immigration practice or a family law office is outside its scope regardless of budget. Within criminal defense it works nationwide, and the one firm per city rule caps it at one client per market.

The reason for the restriction is that defense search behaves unlike most legal marketing. The queries are charge-specific, the intent is urgent, the searcher is frequently a family member, and the map pack carries more of the result than it does in slower practice areas. An agency working across eight practice areas learns the general case, and the general case is a poor guide to this one. The full account is at criminal defense SEO.

The commercial cost of both rules is real and worth stating plainly. Restricting to one practice area removes most of the legal market, and one client per city caps revenue per market at a single retainer. An agency that wanted to maximise billings would do neither.

How an engagement runs

The shape of the work is set by what can be measured. An engagement opens with a baseline: a grid scan of the firm’s current visibility across the metro it serves, taken before anything is changed. A firm that skips this has given up the ability to demonstrate later what happened, and the agency has given up the ability to prove it.

Diagnosis follows the baseline and covers the profile, the directory layer and the technical state of the site. Most established firms have uncorrected errors in the first two, and those corrections are the fastest-moving work available. Charge-level content comes after, one page at a time, written to the jurisdiction the firm practises in.

A rescan of the identical grid closes the first cycle. Every published case study reports a window of under ninety days, which is what has been measured, and it is a description of past work in specific cities instead of a promise about any other market. Competitive density varies enough between cities that the same work produces different curves, which is visible in the published range itself.

The four services and how they fit together

The service list is short and the ordering between the items matters more than the list does.

An SEO audit comes first in almost every engagement, because it establishes the baseline that makes everything afterwards measurable. It covers the current grid visibility, the Google Business Profile, name and address consistency across the directories, and the technical state of the site. Skipping it means later results cannot be attributed to anything.

Web design addresses the surface the searcher actually lands on. For a defense practice the requirements are unusual: it has to load fast on a phone on a poor connection, put a working telephone number in reach immediately, and read as trustworthy to somebody deciding in under a minute whether to call a stranger about a criminal charge.

SEO is the continuing work, split between the local surface and the charge-level content. The local half is profile, reviews and citation consistency. The content half is one page per offence the firm genuinely defends, written to the jurisdiction’s own statutory language.

AI search covers being named when somebody asks an assistant instead of a search engine. Much of the underlying work is shared with the rest, since a firm that resolves as one clear entity with corroborated claims is easier for an assistant to state confidently. Nobody controls what an assistant says, and the honest version of this service raises the odds without promising placement. See how AI assistants choose firms.

See also: James Chen · The category claim · One firm per city · The publisher network