LAW FIRM MARKETING · GUIDE 01

How many cases did my SEO agency actually sign?

Your agency sends rankings and traffic. You want signed cases and revenue. Here's how a law firm connects the two — with the exact monthly report to ask for.

There's a sentence I hear from partners more than any other, usually about four minutes into the first call:

"I get a report every month. I couldn't tell you how many clients we signed because of it."

It's not a small complaint. It's the whole complaint. Everything else lawyers say about marketing agencies — the junk leads, the long contracts, the account manager who reads the PDF out loud — sits underneath this one. If you knew, with confidence, that the $6,000 you paid last month turned into four signed cases worth $90,000 in fees, you'd put up with a lot. If you don't know, every invoice feels like a guess.

So let's fix the not-knowing. Not with a better dashboard. With a chain of custody from the search to the signature.

Why your report doesn't answer the question

Most agency reports stop at the edge of the website. Rankings, impressions, clicks, sessions, maybe "conversions" — which usually means somebody clicked a phone number, whether or not anyone answered. Then the report ends, and a different system takes over: your phone, your intake person, your case management software. The agency can't see into that system, and honestly, most don't try.

That gap is where the truth lives. A click is not a call. A call is not a consultation. A consultation is not a signed case. And a signed case is not revenue until the matter is worth what you thought it was worth. Each step loses people, and the losses are where you'd learn the most — but nobody is counting.

The agency has a reason not to count. Rankings and traffic go up on almost every account, eventually. Signed cases don't. Reporting the numbers that always improve is easier than reporting the number that matters. It isn't malice. It's incentives. But you're the one paying for it.

What "tracked to the case" actually requires

You need four things, and they all have to be connected. Not fancy. Connected.

1. A phone number and a form that belong to the marketing. Every channel gets its own tracking number — one for the Google Business Profile, one for the website, one for ads — that forwards to your main line. Same for forms: each one records where the visitor came from. This is off-the-shelf software (CallRail, WhatConverts, and a dozen others) and costs less than one lost consultation. Now every call and every form arrives with a label: Maps, organic search, AI answer, paid search, referral.

2. A record of what happened on the call. Recording (with the consent notice your state requires), duration, whether it was answered, and — this is the part everybody skips — a one-line note from intake: wrong practice area, out of area, can't afford, scheduled consult, signed. Thirty seconds per call. Without this, you're back to counting rings.

3. A link between that call and your case management system. When a lead becomes a matter in Clio, MyCase, Filevine, whatever you use, the matter carries the lead's source with it. Some systems do this natively. Some need a field called "Marketing source" that intake fills in from the tracking software. Either way, the matter now knows where it came from.

4. A number on the matter. Estimated value at signing; actual fees when the matter closes. For PI that's the settlement fee; for flat-fee work it's the flat fee; for hourly it's the retainer plus what you expect to bill. Doesn't have to be perfect. Has to exist.

Connect those four and you can answer the question. Break any one of them and you can't.

The report you should be getting (and what it looks like)

Here's the monthly report I build for firms. Notice what's at the top and what's at the bottom.

Cases and dollars first. Then the funnel that produced them, by channel. Then the junk and the misses, because those are the two things you can fix fastest. Then the work we did. Rankings on page four, where they belong.

Two things to notice. First, the "from AI answers" line — a year ago it was zero for everybody; now it's a real channel and it's growing fastest. Second, "missed calls: 6." Six people who wanted a lawyer badly enough to call and got voicemail. That's not a marketing problem, and no amount of SEO fixes it. But you'd never see it in a rankings report.

"My agency says they can't see my case data"

They're right that they can't see it by default. They're wrong that it's not their job to ask.

Here's the arrangement that works: intake tags every lead (thirty seconds a call), the tracking software collects the tags, and once a month someone on the agency side sits with someone on your side for twenty minutes and matches the leads to the matters that opened. It's not automatic. It's not hard either. An agency that won't do it is telling you which numbers it prefers to be judged on.

If you're evaluating agencies right now, ask a simpler version: "Show me a report for a current client that starts with signed cases." Watch what happens.

What to do this week

1. Get call tracking on the three numbers that matter (GBP, website, ads). One afternoon.
2. Add a "Marketing source" field to your intake form and your matter template.
3. Ask intake to add one line per call: outcome. Give them the five options above.
4. Tell your agency the report changes next month: cases and value at the top, channels next, rankings last. Send them this article if it helps.
5. In 60 days, look at cost per signed case by channel. That number will tell you where the next dollar goes better than anything an agency will ever send you.

Frequently asked questions

Isn't it unfair to judge SEO on signed cases when intake drops the ball? It's the only fair way, as long as intake is in the report too. That's why missed calls and outcomes sit right next to the channel numbers. When a good lead dies on the phone, it shows up — and gets fixed — instead of becoming an argument about whose fault it was.

How long before this report says anything useful? You'll see call volume and lead quality by channel in the first month. Signed cases lag by however long your intake-to-signing cycle takes — days for criminal defense, weeks for PI, longer for business matters. By month three the trend is real.

Do I need a CRM for this? No. A "Marketing source" field in whatever you already use, filled in consistently, is enough. A CRM makes it easier, not possible.

What about cases that came from a referral but the person also Googled us? Count them as referrals and note the Google touch. The goal is honest, not flattering. Over time you'll see how often search confirms a referral — that's useful in its own right.

Want to see your numbers before you pay anyone? Your Growth Plan shows where your calls come from today, who's taking the cases you're not, and what it would take to change it — free, in 48 hours. Get your Growth Plan

Attorney advertising services. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Figures in the sample report are illustrative.