Nearly every client we take on has a horror story.
On a good day, the last agency was incompetent. Usually, the work just simply never occurred. In the worst cases, the work was so bad it needs to be undone.
While most agencies are ok about letting go, a handful hold attorney’s digital assets hostage. Unfortunately, it’s common enough that we’ve started this service – Digital Asset Recovery for Law Firms – where we help law firms recover their Google Business Profiles, web hosting, WordPress passwords, domain names, etc.
Anyway, here are some spooky stories straight from the trenches of the SEO world.
👻The Ghost of Google Analytics:
This week, a client came to us who needed to get away from their horrific marketing agency. I won’t name names here but I’ll say it’s a fishy firm.
The attorney wanted access to Google Analytics. The previous agency was hesitant about turning it over.
They looped me into the conversation and I sent them step-by-step instructions on how to turn the GA4 account over to the attorney’s marketing manager.
Of course, the agency already knew how, but instead of arguing I just sent them a checklist and waited. I wasn’t really in a hurry because I could tell there was absolutely no traffic to this site whatsoever.
It took them about a week, but they finally turned the account over.
Guess what? Google Analytics was never set up.
This is something that takes approximately 5 minutes to configure, and they had 5 YEARS to set this up.
I sent them the following screenshot, showing the configuration screen:
The lawyer replied and said they did NOTHING. EVER. Once we helped them with this law firm, they brought their second law firm over, too! Screenshot:
💀The Haunted Hotline:
A client came to us earlier this year with a wide variety of problems. They were on page 7 of organic, not showing in the Local Pack and their website was hacked and displaying spam for Chinese toys. It was beyond neglected.
When we took over, the previous marketing agency refused to turn the CallRail call tracking numbers over to the law firm. This would have taken them about 1 minute via the CallRail Account-Level Numbers tool, but, they chose to be as much of a pain as possible.
We helped the client set up their own CallRail account and add us as a user, which is how it should be set up. Never give someone else control of your CallRail account!
🎃The Phantom Pay-Per-Click Campaign:
An attorney in Ohio came to us who was using a digital marketing agency that had been “stinging” him.
They had been paying this agency $10,000/mo for Google Ads PPC.
The agency hides all of the data but generates a report, telling the attorney they were receiving 100 calls per month from this PPC campaign. And, I already know they keep around 60% or more of your ad budget for themselves. This means they were generating around 100 calls/mo from $4k.
Now if you know ANYTHING about PPC for Personal Injury Attorneys (or read our study on what PPC ads cost PI lawyers) you would know that a single (worthwhile) click is at least $300.
Obviously, the agency was sending EXTREMELY low quality traffic to the law firm.
We convinced the attorney to completely stop PPC. They did.
The result was ZERO loss in leads, AND – they stopped receiving around 100 garbage calls each month, freeing up their phone lines and intake coordinator.
🦇The Backlinks that Vanished Before they Appeared:
Another law firm came to us this year who had the same fishy marketing agency referenced earlier. They had promised backlinks needed to rank. After a few years of the website not ranking, the law firm decided to cut the line with them and contact us.
Once we were able to log into Google Search Console, we decided to take a look at what this agency was doing or not doing.
It turns out they were doing absolutely nothing. They straight up stole the marketing dollars.
Here’s a screenshot of the backlink report in Google Search Console:
👻The Ghosted Google Business Profile Account:
All business owners should be the “Primary Admin” on their GBP account. It’s easy to add and remove users with the “Manager” role as needed.
A recent client had no access to their GBP and the previous agency was ghosting them. They reached out to us to gain control of it. This is a fairly easy fix, you just request access, and if nobody disputes it, you get control of the GBP.
Don’t get ghosted!
