Law firm digital marketing agency: three ways to pay

A UK firm can pay for this in 3 ways: a fixed-scope project that finishes, a monthly retainer that does not, or a salaried appointment. Our builds are £2,400, £4,200 and £6,900; retainers are £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month, with no minimum term.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What are the three ways to pay for this?

A project, a retainer, or a payroll line. Every other arrangement is a variation on one of those.

Two proposals both headed "digital marketing" can be commercially opposite documents. What decides the year is not the channel list on page two, but what triggers the invoice and what is still running the month after the invoices stop.

Read the bottom row first: each model's failure is predictable from the payment structure rather than from the supplier's competence.

What does a fixed-scope project cost, and when does it end?

Ours end on a stated date for a stated figure: £890, £2,400, £4,200 or £6,900 depending on scope.

The Price Transparency Pack is £890 and takes ten working days. Firm Site is £2,400. Firm Site+ is £4,200. Authority Build is £6,900. Each is a defined thing that is either delivered or not, which makes it the easiest of the three models to hold anyone to.

The scope line is where projects go wrong, and it goes wrong quietly. A quotation for "a new website" can exclude the price and service pages the SRA Transparency Rules ask a firm to publish — rules in force since 6 December 2018, checked 3 August 2026 — because those pages read as content rather than design. A firm then pays twice: once for a site, once for the pages the site was supposed to carry. Ask for the page list as a list, not as a page count.

A damaging admission about projects, including ours. A project finishes, and a site that nobody publishes to afterwards ages in public. Within a year it reads as a firm that stopped paying attention, which is the impression the build was bought to avoid. We would rather say that before the invoice than after it.

What does a retainer buy that a project does not?

Continuity, which is the only input search work genuinely requires and the one a project cannot supply.

Ours are £600, £1,200 and £2,400 a month with no minimum term, and £700 comes off a build taken with six months of retainer — a deliberate hybrid, because the sequencing question below usually resolves into buying both.

A retainer is a subscription, so compare it against another subscription rather than against a capital cost. In Leeds, 1,180 people a month search for a conveyancing solicitor and Google charges around £13.80 for one of those clicks, measured 3 August 2026. A £1,200 monthly retainer is roughly 87 of those clicks — arithmetic on the measured click price, not a forecast of anything. In Sheffield the same practice area runs at 1,180 searches and £14.83. That comparison is the useful one because both sides of it recur every month, and it puts a monthly fee in a unit the firm can argue with.

The characteristic retainer failure is a project sold on instalments: twelve monthly invoices, a website delivered in month two, nothing identifiable after month four. The question that exposes it is "what will you send me in month seven, and what did you send your other clients in theirs".

A damaging admission about retainers, including ours. Month one is a build month and produces nothing measurable. Three to four months pass before movement, six to nine before the work can be judged fairly. A firm that needs instructions this quarter should buy paid search instead, and we do not manage ad spend, so saying that sends the work elsewhere.

What does an in-house appointment cost that a supplier does not?

Time before anything is published, and the risk that the role has nobody to report to.

The person is in the building, understands the firm and can chase fee earners for material an external supplier waits weeks to receive. That advantage is real and no agency page should pretend otherwise. The costs off the salary line are the recruitment period, the notice served on a previous employer, the tools bought separately, and a first marketing appointment arriving with nobody to learn the role from.

We publish no salary figure because we have no sourced one for this role, and a plausible number would be the easiest thing here to dispute. The staffing decision in full is on lawyer firm marketing. This page is about how the money is structured, not who receives it.

What happens the month you stop paying?

Different things, and this is the question the three models actually differ on.

Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, 1 offered work with no minimum term. For the other 39 the point was not published, so the answer sits in the agreement and has to be read there rather than assumed — before signing, rather than during the argument. The clause-by-clause version of that check is on lawyer marketing agency.

Rankings do not disappear the week payment stops, nor hold indefinitely: the pages that would have been added are not, and competitors keep publishing. It is a slow fade rather than a switch, and a supplier describing it as either a cliff or as permanent is selling something.

Which model should a firm buy first?

Whichever one closes the gap that is actually open, which for most firms is the site rather than the schedule.

A retainer publishing articles onto a site that answers none of the questions a prospective client asks is spending monthly money on a fixed problem. The order that usually holds:

1. Fix what the site does not say. Price and service information for the specified work types, who does the work, timescales, and how to complain. Those are the disclosures the rules ask for and they are also the highest-intent searches in this market, which is the overlap covered on what the SRA transparency rules actually require on a website and which of your services the price rules cover.
2. Then decide whether continuity is worth £600 to £2,400 a month, with the site already answering the first question a buyer has.
3. Directory listings and award submissions come last, because they are a separate exercise on a separate calendar.

Where a different model beats ours. A firm that already employs a marketing person should buy a project from us and nothing else — a retainer alongside an in-house marketer duplicates the same work and creates an argument about who owns the calendar. Say so at the first meeting and expect the proposal to shrink.

Which of these suppliers publishes a price?

Three of the four named below, from the 40 read on 3 August 2026.

⚠ We record whether a price appeared on the page, not what it was. The figures our tooling collected mixed genuine fees with case values and sentence fragments, and attributing a number to a named business on that basis would publish something unverified about a competitor.

Across all 40:

15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions, measured the same day. A published figure does not tell a firm which of the three models a supplier prefers, and that is the thing to establish first.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026 — including several on this page. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.

The free report gives you the full count, named, so you can repeat it rather than take ours. It also shows how many people search for your practice areas in your town, and what those clicks cost to buy at Google's own prices.

Get the report — five questions, about two minutes →

No call required. Our own prices are on that page.

Where should I read next?

If the question is staffing rather than structure: lawyer firm marketing compares hiring somebody against retaining somebody.

On what the site must contain: what the SRA transparency rules actually require on a website and which of your services the price rules cover.

On the channels: what is the best way to advertise a law firm, what are the marketing ideas for small law firms and how to get ranked in Legal 500.

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