How long should it take a marketing agency to produce results? Days for paid search, two to six weeks for the Google Business Profile, three to six months for organic — and any single timeline covering all three is wrong about at least two of them.
A firm judging organic work at 30 days will cancel something that was working. A firm waiting six months on paid search has wasted five.
- Published pricing — $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500 a month, on the site.
- Month to month. No contract is holding you anywhere.
- A former attorney of 17 years who filed 5,000+ cases works your account.
- You see your rankings move for 14 days before you are billed a dollar.
- Law firms only — no other industries, ever.
| Attorney Pro Marketing | Scorpion | FindLaw | Typical legal agency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing published on the website | Yes — $2,500 / $3,500 / $4,500 per month | Not published | Not published | Rarely published |
| Contract term | Month to month, 30 days’ notice | Not published | Not published | Commonly 12 months |
| Who works on your account | A former attorney of 17 years, in every account | Assigned account team | Assigned account team | Account manager, often across industries |
| Your website is built on | Standard, portable code | Proprietary platform | FirmSite platform | Varies — ask before signing |
| See results before you are billed | Yes — 14 days, then you decide | No | No | No |
| Ad spend billed by Google directly to you | Yes, no markup | Ask | Ask | Often passes through the agency |
“Not published” means the figure does not appear on that company’s own website as of October 2026 — check for yourself before you sign anything, with them or with us.
Timelines by Channel
- Google Ads — days. Campaigns can run within 48 hours of the account being ready. Calls can arrive the first week. Meaningful optimisation needs four to eight weeks of data, but the channel either works or does not quite quickly.
- Local Services Ads — one to three weeks. Mostly waiting on Google Screened verification, which involves background and licence checks. Then it behaves like paid search.
- Google Business Profile — two to six weeks. Category and service corrections, posts, photographs and review activity move Map Pack position faster than most firms expect. For many small firms this is the first real movement.
- Technical and on-page work — two to eight weeks. Fixing a slow or badly structured site often produces gains that look like ranking improvements and are partly conversion improvements.
- Organic content and authority — three to six months. New pages need indexing and signal accumulation. Competitive terms take longer. This is the channel that compounds, and it is the one firms cancel early.
What the First Six Months Actually Looks Like
- Weeks 1–2. Build and baseline. Site, tracking, profile claimed and corrected, campaigns constructed. Visible output: the site and the first ranking snapshot. If paid is running, the first calls.
- Weeks 3–6. Map Pack position starts moving on secondary terms. Paid search data becomes good enough to cut waste. Early content indexed.
- Months 2–3. Organic begins appearing on longer, lower-competition queries. Call volume from the profile rises. Cost per lead on paid should be falling as negatives accumulate.
- Months 4–6. The compounding becomes visible. Primary terms move. Content written in month one is now ranking, and the trend line matters more than any single month.
Two cautions about reading this curve. Month-to-month ranking noise is substantial, so a single bad month is not a signal. And paid and organic move on different clocks, so a firm reading one blended number will misjudge both.
What Legitimately Takes Longer
Four situations where a slower timeline is honest rather than an excuse.
A brand-new domain. A site with no history starts from nothing and takes longer than an established one to be trusted on competitive queries.
Highly competitive practice areas and markets. Personal injury in a major metro is contested by firms spending very large sums over many years. Six months is an opening position there, not a conclusion.
A recent migration or penalty. A site that lost rankings in a botched redesign is recovering, not growing, and recovery is slower than growth.
Multi-location firms. Each office needs its own profile, page and citation set, and they do not all move together.
Early Signals Worth Watching
You do not have to wait six months to know whether something is happening. Four things visible inside the first month:
Is the work occurring? Pages created or edited, with URLs and dates. Profile posts, with dates. Ad account change history. This is the question most reports avoid.
Was a baseline recorded? If not, nothing later can be proved in either direction.
Are impressions rising? Impressions move before rankings and before calls. A rise means the work is being noticed by the system even if positions have not changed yet.
Are the calls the right kind? Three well-matched calls beat twenty wrong-practice-area calls, and recordings tell you which you have within weeks.
This is the reasoning behind our structure: your rankings are recorded on day 0 and the movement reported on day 14, before you are billed for that period. Fourteen days will not resolve a competitive organic term and is not claimed to — what it shows is whether the work is real, whether anything is moving, and whether to continue. After that, published pricing at $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500 a month, month to month with 30 days' notice, so each channel gets judged on its own clock rather than against a twelve-month contract you cannot exit.
See it before you pay for it.
We snapshot your rankings on day 0, build and launch your site within three days, and show you the movement on day 14. If it has not moved enough to be worth continuing, you owe nothing for that period and you keep the Google Business Profile work.
Related Questions
Generally three to six months for organic search to resolve, and longer on competitive terms or a brand-new domain. Technical and on-page fixes can show within two to eight weeks, and Google Business Profile work often moves Map Pack position in two to six weeks, which is why local work usually produces the first visible results.
Campaigns can run within about 48 hours of the account being ready, and calls can arrive in the first week. Meaningful optimisation needs four to eight weeks of search-term data before cost per lead settles, but unlike organic work the channel demonstrates whether it works quite quickly.
It is usually honest for a brand-new domain, a highly competitive practice area and market, a site recovering from a botched migration, or a multi-location firm whose offices move separately. It is an excuse when nobody can show which pages were created or edited, with URLs and dates, inside the first month.
Four things: evidence the work occurred, as specific pages, posts and ad account changes with dates; a dated baseline, without which nothing later can be proved; rising impressions, which move before rankings and calls; and the quality of calls arriving, since three well-matched calls beat twenty wrong-practice-area ones.