Is it better to hire a marketing agency on a trial basis? A genuine trial is good, but most offered ones are not genuine — a discounted first month or a 90-day term with a setup fee tests nothing. A short notice period achieves the same thing continuously and is the better structure.
Month-to-month is a trial that never ends. That is strictly better than a trial that expires into a contract.
- 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.
Most Trials Are Not Trials
The instinct is right. Committing a year to an agency you have never worked with, on the basis of a sales conversation, is a poor trade — and wanting to test before committing is the correct response.
The problem is what gets offered in response. Four common structures, none of which test anything:
- A discounted first month. A price promotion, not a trial. The term after it is unchanged, and the discount is recovered over the following year.
- A 90-day term with a setup fee. The setup fee is the real commitment. Leaving after 90 days means paying for a build and walking away from it.
- A 30-day trial of a six-month programme. Thirty days of search work shows a documented baseline and perhaps some profile movement. It cannot show whether the programme works, so the "trial" ends before the evidence exists and converts into the full term by default.
- A free audit that is a sales document. Useful if it is a genuine technical audit you keep. Usually it is a presentation of problems followed by a proposal.
What these share is that the exit is not actually clean — either you have paid for something you leave behind, or the trial expires into the commitment it was supposed to help you avoid.
What a Real Trial Requires
For a trial period to produce information you can act on, four things have to be true.
- A documented baseline at the start. Without it the trial cannot be assessed, which makes it a payment rather than a test.
- Countable deliverables inside the period. Specific pages, specific campaigns, a specific report. So "did they do the work" is answerable separately from "did it produce."
- A stated test. Agreed in advance: what should have moved, roughly how much, and what you will look at. Decided afterwards, the test becomes an argument.
- A clean exit with assets retained. You keep the pages, the profile work, the account structures and the data. If leaving means losing what was built, it was not a trial — it was a deposit.
The fourth is the one that most often fails, and it is worth checking specifically. Work done on your Google Business Profile stays with you because the profile is yours. A website built on an agency's proprietary platform does not.
How Long It Has to Be
Long enough for the thing being tested to show movement, which depends on what is in scope.
| What is being tested | Minimum honest period |
|---|---|
| Whether they do the work and communicate | 30 days |
| Google Business Profile and local pack movement | 45-60 days |
| Paid search efficiency | 60-90 days — the account needs data before it stops guessing |
| Organic search contribution | 120+ days, realistically |
Which exposes the difficulty with fixed trials. A period long enough to test the organic half is most of a year, by which point it is not a trial. A period short enough to be a trial tests execution and communication rather than results.
That is not an argument against short periods. Execution and communication are worth testing and they are the things that go wrong most often. It is an argument against believing a 30-day result predicts a 12-month one.
Why Month-to-Month Is Better
A rolling engagement with a short notice period gives you everything a trial gives you, permanently, without the cliff edge at the end.
Under a trial, the agency's incentive is to perform well for the trial period and then relax into the term. Under rolling notice, there is no such period — every month has to be worth the next one. That is a structurally different relationship, and it shows up most clearly around month seven, where fixed-term engagements commonly drift.
It also removes the decision cliff. A trial forces a judgment on a fixed date, usually before the evidence is complete. Rolling notice lets you keep going while it is working and stop when it is not, which is what you wanted from a trial in the first place.
The honest counterargument: an agency on thirty days' notice may be reluctant to invest heavily in front-loaded work that pays back over a year. Some genuinely cannot justify a large build against a short commitment. The answer to that is not a long term — it is an agency whose model does not require one, which usually means one without large setup costs to recover.
How to Ask for One
If an agency offers only a long term, there are three requests worth making, in descending order of preference.
Rolling with thirty days' notice. Ask first. Some agencies offer it and do not advertise it.
A long term with a performance exit at month three or four. Defined against the documented baseline, with a stated test agreed in writing at the start. This gives the agency its runway and you a real decision point.
A long term with no setup fee and assets in your name. The weakest of the three, but it caps the damage: if it goes badly you have lost months of fees rather than months of fees plus everything that was built.
An agency that refuses all three is telling you that the commitment is the product.
Attorney Pro Marketing is month to month with 30 days' notice and no setup fee, which is the structure this page argues for rather than a trial period — every month has to earn the next one, permanently.
The closest thing to a trial is the start of it: a day 0 baseline taken before anything is built, the site launched within three days, and a day 14 report showing movement against that baseline before you are billed for that period. If it has not moved enough to be worth continuing, you owe nothing for that period and the Google Business Profile work stays with you, because the profile is yours. Published pricing at $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500, so there is no quoted number that changes depending on how the trial goes.
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
A real trial is better than a long contract, but most offered trials test nothing — a discounted first month, a 90-day term with a setup fee, or a 30-day trial that expires into a six-month programme. A rolling month-to-month engagement with short notice achieves the same thing continuously.
It depends what is being tested. Thirty days shows whether they do the work and communicate. Google Business Profile movement needs 45 to 60 days. Paid search efficiency needs 60 to 90 days before the account stops guessing. Organic search contribution realistically needs 120 days or more.
Four things: a documented baseline at the start, countable deliverables inside the period, a test stated in advance rather than argued afterwards, and a clean exit where you keep the pages, profile work, account structures and data. If leaving means losing what was built, it was a deposit.
Generally yes. A trial creates a decision cliff on a fixed date, usually before evidence is complete, and the agency's incentive is to perform during the trial and relax into the term afterwards. Rolling notice means every month has to earn the next one, which matters most around month seven.