What results should I expect after six months with a marketing agency? By month six you should have a measurable position on your primary terms, a Map Pack presence, a body of content that is ranking, and a cost per signed case you can state — plus a clear sense of which channel is carrying the programme.
Judge month six by what exists, not by one month's call count. A programme can have a quiet month and still be exactly where it should be.
- 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.
What Should Exist by Month Six
- Map Pack presence on at least your secondary and neighbourhood terms, with movement on the primary ones. Local work resolves faster than organic, so six months is plenty here.
- Measurable organic movement against the dated baseline on your named terms — not necessarily position one, but a direction you can see.
- A body of indexed content. Roughly 15 to 30 pages if content was in scope, with the earliest ones beginning to rank.
- A settled cost per lead on any paid channel, after five months of negative keyword work. It should be lower than month one, materially.
- A stateable cost per signed case. You should be able to say the number out loud. If you cannot, the instrumentation failed, whatever else happened.
- A known best channel. By month six it should be clear which channel produces signed matters, and budget should have begun moving toward it.
What It Is Fair Not to Have Yet
Being precise about this protects you from both directions — from an agency making excuses and from firing one unfairly.
Position one on your most competitive term in a major metro. Those positions are held by firms that have spent years and large sums. Six months is an opening position.
A fully matured organic programme. Content written in month five has barely been indexed. The pages that will carry year two are still young.
Stable month-to-month numbers. Ranking and call data is noisy. A single quiet month at month six means very little; three declining months mean something.
Recovery from a bad migration, if that is the starting point. Recovering lost rankings is slower than building new ones, and a site that collapsed in a redesign is doing the harder of the two jobs.
Month by Month to Get There
- Month 1. Baseline recorded and dated. Site live. Tracking installed. Profile claimed and corrected. Campaigns built. First content published.
- Month 2. Map Pack movement on secondary terms. Paid search shedding waste as search-term data accumulates. More content.
- Month 3. First organic appearances on longer queries. Review activity building. Cost per lead falling. The first honest review point.
- Month 4. Primary-term organic movement begins. Content from month one ranking. Which channel is working should be becoming visible.
- Month 5. Compounding visible. Budget should start shifting toward the productive channel rather than staying spread evenly.
- Month 6. Review properly, against the baseline, with cost per signed case calculated and the next two quarters planned.
Red Flags at Month Six
No baseline exists. The most serious one. If nobody wrote down the starting line, month six cannot be assessed at all and neither can month twelve.
No list of what was done. Ask for pages created or edited with URLs and dates across six months. An agency that cannot produce it has not been producing much.
The metrics have changed. If month one's report led with calls and month six's leads with impressions, calls fell. Metric substitution is the clearest signal in reporting.
You cannot see your own accounts. If the Google Ads account or Google Business Profile is not accessible to you in your own name, you have six months of history you do not control.
Still no answer on attribution. Six months in, the question “which channel produced this client” should have a mechanism behind it, not a guess.
Our engagements are built so month six has an answer. The day 0 baseline is the starting line in writing; monthly Map Pack heatmap and ranking reporting runs on every tier against up to 30 keywords of your choosing; call tracking with recordings and lead attribution from the Growth tier handles the attribution question; and the Google Ads account and Google Business Profile are in your firm's name, so six months of history belongs to you regardless of what happens next. Month to month with 30 days' notice means month six is a decision rather than a renewal.
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
Map Pack presence on at least secondary terms with movement on primary ones, measurable organic movement against the dated baseline, roughly 15 to 30 indexed pages if content was in scope, a settled and materially lower cost per lead on paid channels, a cost per signed case you can state, and a clear sense of which channel is working.
Position one on your most competitive term in a major metro, since those positions reflect years of spending by established firms. A fully matured organic programme, because content written in month five is barely indexed. Stable month-to-month numbers, as ranking data is noisy. And full recovery if the starting point was a botched migration.
No baseline exists, which makes the whole period unassessable; no list of pages created or edited with dates; the reported metrics have changed since month one, which usually means the original ones fell; you cannot access your own ad account or Google Business Profile; and attribution is still a guess rather than a mechanism.
Usually not. Ranking and call data is noisy enough that a single quiet month carries little information. Three consecutive declining months against a recorded baseline is a signal. The more useful test at month six is what exists — the inventory — rather than one month's call count.