is moz local actually worth it for attorneys at this point or am i about to repeat the same mistake

Some of you might remember me venting about this a while back. Immigration law practice, spent about six months paying an agency around $1,400/month for what they called a "comprehensive local SEO package." Citations, GBP updates, backlink building, the whole pitch. Meanwhile my law school friend running a PI firm was getting actual clients from the same exact strategy. Agency kept telling me to trust the process.

I stopped trusting the process.

Dropped them about eight months ago and started doing everything myself. Claimed my Google Business Profile properly (turns out they hadn't even filled out half the fields), started asking clients for reviews after we closed their cases, and built out individual service pages for each visa type instead of one generic "immigration services" page. H1B appeals, marriage-based green cards, asylum, each with their own page in English and Spanish.

Honestly? That alone brought in more consultations than the entire time I was paying the agency. The reviews especially. I'm at about 35 now and the difference in how often I show up in maps is night and day compared to when I had 6 reviews and a hundred citations pointing nowhere.

So now I'm looking at Moz Local ($129/year) because I figure I should still have consistent NAP across directories and it seems like a cheap way to handle that without hiring anyone. But the more I think about it the more I'm wondering if I'm just buying a smaller version of what the agency was selling me. The citations they built over those six months? I genuinely cannot trace a single client back to any of them. Not one.

Every SEO guide I read says citations are "critical" for local rankings but the only things that actually moved anything for me were the reviews, the GBP optimization, and the service pages (which, by the way, none of the guides even emphasize that much compared to how much they talk about citations and backlinks).

I don't want to be cheap about $129 if it actually helps. But I also don't want to keep throwing money at the citation thing just because everyone says you're supposed to. Especially in immigration where most of my clients aren't even searching "immigration lawyer near me," they're searching specific visa questions in their own language.

Anyone else been through this? Am I overthinking it or is the citation stuff just not what it used to be for specialized practices?

ha, i remember your first post. glad you fired the agency honestly.

short answer on moz local: its fine for $129 but its not going to do what you think its going to do. and you already figured out why.

moz local pushes your NAP to data aggregators like acxiom and infogroup. those feed into general directories. yelp, bing, apple maps, that kind of stuff. the problem is it doesn't touch any of the legal directories that actually matter for attorneys. no avvo, no justia, no findlaw, no martindale-hubbell. those you still have to do manually.

and heres the part nobody talks about. these automated citation tools use the same business description across every directory they submit to. word for word identical. google sees duplicate content and just... ignores it. so you're paying for listings that google doesnt even count. thats basically what your old agency was doing at scale for $1,400/month. moz local just does it cheaper.

the reason your reviews and service pages worked is because those are the actual ranking factors now. moz did their own study on this and citations account for maybe 10-15% of local ranking signals. reviews and GBP signals are closer to 40%. you accidentally stumbled into the right strategy by ditching the agency.

if you want my honest take: use the free moz local scan to check if your NAP is consistent everywhere. fix anything thats wrong manually. save the $129. spend that time getting 5 more reviews instead.

curious though - are you tracking which languages your site visitors are searching in? google search console shows this under queries. if 30-40% of your impressions are non-english thats your whole strategy right there. double down on that, forget citations entirely.