The words in the contract
Not the technical vocabulary of search. The commercial vocabulary of the relationship: what you are signing, what you are paying for, who does the work and what happens when you leave.
Every term here came up while reading twenty-four agency websites. Where a company publishes something real about one of these, the term's page quotes it and names them. 34 terms carry a page. 3 sit here as entries because they cannot carry a worked example of their own without repeating another term's, and a glossary that pads itself is worth less than one that stops.
Before you sign
The paperwork that decides how expensive it is to change your mind.
- Retainer
- The monthly fee, and what is actually inside it.
- Statement of work
- The list the retainer buys. If it is not on the list you are not getting it.
- Master service agreement
- The document that outlives every statement of work under it.
- Contract minimum
- The opening period you cannot leave without paying for.
- Notice period
- How much warning you owe, and when the clock starts.
- Auto-renewal
- The clause that turns a twelve-month term into a twenty-four-month one.
- Buyout clause
- The number you pay to take the website with you before the term is up.
- Exclusivity clause
- A promise not to work with your competitors, and what it is worth.
- Territory lock
- The radius the agency agrees not to sell inside.
- Performance guarantee
- What is actually promised, and the conditions attached.
- Deliverable
- Too generic to carry its own page. Covered inside statement of work.
How the money works
Fees, what scales them, and the numbers used to judge the result.
- Management fee
- The part you pay for someone to run it, separate from the work.
- Per-location pricing
- What each extra address adds, and why it is rarely linear.
- Performance bonus
- Upside tied to a result, and who defines the result.
- Cost per lead
- The number everyone quotes and almost nobody defines the same way.
- Cost per acquisition
- The same spend measured against booked work rather than enquiries.
- Lead qualification
- Whether a price-shopper and a replacement quote both count as one.
- Churn
- How many clients an agency loses a year, and why it is the most honest number they have.
- Pass-through spend
- Thin on an organic engagement. Held as an entry rather than a page.
Who does the work
The gap between the people who sell you and the people who deliver.
- Account manager vs practitioner
- Who you speak to, and who actually touches the site.
- White label
- When the agency you hired is not the agency doing the work.
- Subcontracted delivery
- How to find out, and when it is fine.
- Onboarding ramp
- Why month one produces nothing, and what should happen in it anyway.
- SEO audit deliverable
- What a real audit contains, versus a sales document with a score on it.
Reporting and proof
What gets measured, when it arrives, and what it is compared against.
- Reporting cadence
- How often, in what form, and whether a person walks you through it.
- Reporting lag
- Why the report you get in March describes January.
- Baseline measurement
- What has to be captured before work starts, or nothing is provable later.
- Competitive set definition
- Who you are being benchmarked against, and who chose them.
- Attribution window
- How long after a click a booked job still counts.
- Case study
- What counts as one: a named business, a trade, a number, a period.
Leaving
The part nobody reads until they need it.
- Site ownership
- Whether the website is yours, or theirs with your name on it.
- Data ownership
- Call recordings, the analytics property, the Business Profile.
- Platform lock-in
- What leaves with you when the tooling is theirs.
- Offboarding
- The last thirty days, in practice.
- Transition plan
- Handing over to the next agency without losing a season.
- Agency roll-up
- When your agency is bought, and what changes inside a year.
- Content ownership
- Shares its worked example with site ownership and data ownership. Covered in both.