Every question worth asking before we talk.
Scope, pricing, process, reporting, AI search, technical work. The answers below come from real questions partners actually ask after the free audit. If something is missing, the contact form takes free-form notes.
Pick a topic, or scroll the lot.
The five most common categories of question, in the order partners usually ask them. Anchor links below jump to each section.
What you can actually hire me for.
hey-ash only works with US law firms. Three services: Law Firm SEO, AI Search Optimization, and Law Firm Web Design. Everything else is out of scope by design.
Narrow focus is not a marketing pose. It is what makes the work compound.
What services do you actually offer?
Three. Law Firm SEO is the full Google practice covering technical, content, local, links, E-E-A-T, and schema. AI Search Optimization is the same job aimed at ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews. Law Firm Web Design is conversion-focused site builds that meet the same E-E-A-T and technical bar.
The free audit will tell you which one or which combination fits your firm. Most firms start with SEO and add AI Search inside the same engagement.
Do you work with non-law-firm clients?
No. hey-ash is law-firm-only. Other niches are run as separate brands. The reason: legal SEO is a YMYL category with specific E-E-A-T, ethics-rule, and search-behavior patterns that take years to build pattern recognition for. Mixing niches dilutes that.
Which practice areas do you work across?
Personal injury, family law, criminal defense, estate planning, immigration, business law, employment, and bankruptcy are the most common. The playbook is the same across them. What changes is the search intent and competitor pattern, which is why every engagement starts from an audit rather than a template.
Solo lawyer or small firm. Am I too small?
No. Several of the case studies on the Results page started as solos or two-attorney firms. The work compounds best when there is one decision-maker, which is often easier at smaller firms. The starting scope just gets sized to match.
Can you take over from another SEO agency?
Yes. The audit will cover what is currently working, what is harmful, and what is invisible. Common cleanups include thin or AI-generated content stacks, low-quality link patterns, schema conflicts, and abandoned local citations. Transitions usually take a quarter to stabilize before new gains compound.
How the money works.
One free starting price (the audit) and then scoped pricing per firm. No public retainer ladder because the scope changes too much from firm to firm.
The audit is the deliverable that scopes the contract. It is not a sales call.
Why is the audit the only public price?
Because the actual scope changes too much firm to firm. A solo personal injury attorney in a mid-size city and a fifteen-attorney boutique in NYC need very different work. Publishing a fixed retainer would either overcharge the solo or undersell the boutique, and neither result is useful.
The free audit removes the guesswork. The written scope after it includes a number you can decide on.
Roughly what range do engagements fall into?
Most live engagements are monthly retainers in the four- to mid-five-figure range. Project work like a site build or a one-time AI Search readiness review is scoped separately. The written scope after the audit will have the actual number.
What is the contract length?
Three months minimum for retainers, because anything shorter cannot show whether the strategy is working. Month-to-month after that. No multi-year lock-ins, no auto-renewals that require notice to cancel. The work earns the next month.
Do you offer one-off audits or projects?
The first audit is free. Deeper one-off audits, technical migrations, or AI Search readiness reviews are available as fixed-scope projects. The audit will tell you whether a project or a retainer is the right shape for your firm right now.
Do you take equity or revenue-share deals?
No. Cash retainers only. Equity and revenue-share deals create incentive misalignments around lead quality and case mix that I do not want to manage inside an SEO engagement.
How an engagement actually runs.
Async by default. No account manager. The person who answered your first email is the person doing the technical work.
A fifteen-minute reply with specifics beats a thirty-minute call without them.
Who actually does the work?
Me. Ashikur Rahman. LLB and LLM in international law, six-plus years operating in legal SEO. No subcontracted writers, no overseas link-building pods, no account manager layer. The audit, the strategy, the technical work, and the reporting all come from the same desk.
How fast do you respond to messages?
Inside one business day for non-urgent emails. WhatsApp typically same day during waking hours. The time zone is UTC+6 (Bangladesh), so most replies for US clients land overnight, which usually fits how partners actually work.
How many calls per month?
Usually one. A monthly review call covering the dashboard, what shipped, and what is next. Ad-hoc calls happen when something material requires real-time discussion, but most decisions get made over email faster than scheduling a call would take.
What do you need from me to get started?
For the audit: just your domain. Anything else is optional. For the engagement after: Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, and admin access to the WordPress or CMS. NDAs available on request before any of that is shared.
What about confidentiality and case-specific data?
I do not touch case files. SEO work operates on the public-facing website and search data. No PII from your visitors leaves your CRM. Mutual NDA on request. Case studies on the Results page have client names and identifying details withheld for exactly this reason.
What you see in the dashboard.
Honest numbers from Search Console, Google Business Profile, and AI Performance dashboards. No vanity metrics, no rank-tracker theatre.
If the chart only goes up because the metric is meaningless, you should know to ignore it.
When should I expect to see results?
Technical fixes and on-page wins can surface inside 30 to 60 days. Real practice-area traffic typically takes a full quarter to compound, and AI Search citations move on a different curve again because LLMs retrain on intervals. The audit will give you a specific timeline based on your starting position, not a generic promise.
What metrics do you actually report on?
Impressions and clicks per practice-area cluster, position and CTR shifts on commercial intents, Google Business Profile views and calls, AI Search citation counts from Search Console’s AI Performance report, and qualified intake when you have a way to surface that back. Rank-tracker keyword positions are reviewed but not reported as the headline number.
How often do you report?
Monthly written review, monthly live dashboard, and ad-hoc updates when something material happens (algorithm update, technical incident, new ranking on a high-value commercial term). You can also see the GSC data live yourself; nothing is hidden.
What is a realistic ceiling for my firm?
That number is in the audit. It is a function of market size, competitor depth, current authority, practice-area mix, and how aggressive the work plan is. The honest answer is always a range, and the audit shows you both ends of it.
What happens if something goes backwards?
You hear about it the same day. Algorithm updates, manual actions, technical incidents, and competitor reshuffles get flagged immediately with a written recovery plan. Case study 03 on the Results page is a Queens firm we rescued from a malware penalty under exactly this protocol.
The technical questions.
Plain answers about AI Search Optimization, GEO, AEO, E-E-A-T, schema, and how this work differs from classic SEO.
AI search is not a separate channel. It is the same content getting graded by a different reader.
What is AI Search Optimization, and is it different from SEO?
AI Search Optimization is the work that makes a firm citable inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews. About 70% of it overlaps with Google SEO (entity clarity, schema, authority signals, content structure). About 30% is specific to how LLMs parse and cite (passage-level extractability, source diversity, query fan-out patterns).
The GEO guide on the blog walks through it in detail.
What about GEO and AEO? Are they real or buzzwords?
Both real. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the broader category covering everything that gets a brand surfaced inside generative answers. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the older term for being the cited source in featured snippets, voice answers, and now AI Overviews. The work is the same; the labels travel through different industry vocabularies.
How does YMYL and E-E-A-T affect legal SEO specifically?
Legal sits firmly inside Your-Money-Your-Life. That means Google and the LLMs apply heavier weight to author credentials, citation-grade sources, original analysis, and verifiable expertise. Generic copy, ghost-written bios, and AI-spammed practice-area pages tend to plateau or decay specifically in this category. The YMYL SEO blog post covers this in depth.
Do you handle Google Business Profile and local SEO?
Yes. GBP optimization, review velocity, local citations, and Map Pack work are part of the Law Firm SEO scope by default. For firms with multiple offices, each location gets handled as a separate entity with its own profile and citation footprint. Case study 04 (Brooklyn) is a local-SEO heavy engagement.
What about backlinks? Do you do link building?
Yes, but inside a digital-PR frame, not a link-broker frame. Citable journalism comments, original data and survey assets, bar-association and legal-directory placements, and recovery work on lost backlinks. No PBNs, no paid placements on link farms, no bulk guest-post pods.
What schema do legal sites actually need?
LegalService and Attorney on the practice-area and bio pages, LocalBusiness on the contact and office pages, Article and Person on blog posts, FAQPage and HowTo on resource content, and BreadcrumbList everywhere. Conflict-free, no duplicate Article-and-WebPage stacking, and built so AI engines can extract entity relationships cleanly.
Then put it in the form.
The contact form has a free-form notes field. Ask whatever the FAQ did not cover. The reply lands inside one business day.