What to Check Before Signing an SEO Contract for a PI Clinic

Most SEO contracts a personal injury clinic sees are written to be hard to leave. The work below takes twenty minutes and changes what you are agreeing to. ## Who actually does the work Ask which named people will touch the account and how many other accounts they carry. An agency that will not answer that is telling you the answer. For a clinic, the person writing about spinal injections needs a way to check what they write with someone clinical, and that review step should appear in the contract rather than in the pitch. ## Content ownership Every article, image and schema block produced under the contract should be yours on termination, in a portable format, without a fee. If ownership is silent, assume it is not yours. Ask for an explicit clause and ask what the handover file looks like. ## Link practices Ask where links will come from and ask to see the last ten built for a comparable client. Paid placements on sites that exist to sell links are a liability on a medical domain, and the clinic carries that liability, not the agency. ## Reporting cadence and what is in it Monthly is fine; what matters is whether the report shows rankings for terms that produce calls, or a long list of terms nobody searches. Ask for a sample report before signing, and check whether it separates branded traffic from the rest. Branded traffic makes any campaign look like it is working. ## The exit Check the notice period, whether there is an early termination fee, and what happens to the Google Business Profile, the analytics properties and the Search Console access. These should be owned by the clinic and merely shared with the agency. If the agency created them under its own account, that is a hostage arrangement, and it is worth fixing before signing rather than after. ## What good looks like A contract worth signing names the people, hands over the content, shows its links, reports on terms that convert, and lets you leave in thirty days with every asset in your own accounts. If a clause resists all five, the resistance is the point.