Reply To: What does an SEO firm actually do?

[Reddit__Dev]

3k/month for what sounds like mostly GBP maintenance is hard to justify.

From your description, this feels like maintenance not growth.

What a $3k/month local SEO retainer should include:

Technical SEO:
Full crawl + indexation control
Internal linking optimization
Schema (LegalService, LocalBusiness, FAQ)
Core Web Vitals improvements
Location page architecture

Authority Building:
Ongoing backlink acquisition
Legal directory placements (Avvo, Justia, etc.)
Local citations + NAP audits
Geo-relevant links

Content Strategy:
Practice-area expansion
Long-tail + FAQ clusters
Topical authority building
Conversion-focused landing pages

Performance Reporting:
Rank distribution (Top 3 / 4–10 / 11–20)
Local grid tracking
Competitor visibility comparison
Organic vs GBP breakdown
Call tracking + form attribution
Cost per lead

Line graphs alone aren’t enough.

If content stopped and there’s no active link building, growth will plateau especially after 3 years in legal.

The bigger issue here isn’t necessarily performance. It’s opacity.

You should be able to clearly answer:
What backlinks were built in the last 6–12 months?
What technical changes were implemented?
What keywords moved into Top 3 recently?
How many signed cases came from organic vs GBP?

Also I hope you’re running Google Ads. In legal, SEO alone is slow and volatile. Paid search captures high-intent demand immediately.

If it were me:
Reduce the SEO retainer to true maintenance pricing
Hire a more transparent agency
Reallocate budget into aggressive Google Ads
Own both paid + organic locally

Month-to-month is leverage. Use it.