Scott Steinberg · Consultant, Analyst and Business Strategist
Search engine optimization and marketing disputes are unusually provable. Analytics, search console data, crawl records and link histories leave a trail showing what was delivered, what was claimed and what actually happened to a site. A consultant to 3000+ brands on IP, business, marketing, digital strategy and more, Scott Steinberg is one of today's most sought-after consulting and testifying advisors.
Expert reports, declarations, deposition and trial testimony on search agency disputes, ranking and traffic representations, link building practice, algorithmic penalties, migration failures, intellectual property (IP) and more.
The evidence in these matters is both generally good and unusually perishable. Analytics platforms aggregate and purge historical detail on rolling schedules, which makes preservation the first practical priority.
Most matters here are a client saying an agency delivered nothing and an agency saying the scope never promised what the client assumed.
Testimony covers areas like what the engagement actually contracted for, what work the record shows was performed, and what a competent agency would have delivered for that fee.
Guarantees of position, promises of traffic growth and projections presented as commitments are common in this industry and rarely substantiated when made.
Reports look at items such as what representations were made, what basis existed for them, and whether anyone in the field could have delivered them.
Link acquisition ranges from legitimate outreach to networks and paid schemes that expose a client to penalty, and the distinction was documented well before most disputes arose.
Opinions review sample areas like what link practice the field treated as acceptable at the relevant time and what the backlink record shows was actually built.
When rankings collapse, the question is whether it followed an algorithm update affecting everyone, a manual action against this site, or work the agency performed.
Testimony separates those causes using timing evidence, search console records and comparison against how competing sites moved in the same window.
Migrations destroy search visibility with unusual reliability when redirects, URL structure and crawl accessibility are not planned, and the damage is usually visible within weeks.
Work addresses migration practice standards and what the crawl and redirect record shows about what was and was not done.
Content disputes involve scraped or duplicated material, thin pages produced at volume, and whether what was delivered met any reasonable definition of the work billed.
Research hits on items including but not limited to content practice standards and what the published record shows about origination and quality.
Reporting disputes concern which metrics were selected, how ranking data was sampled, whether branded traffic was separated from non-branded, and whether the picture presented was fair.
Work covers reporting convention and identifies where a report flattered the work through selection rather than substance.
Quantifying loss requires establishing a defensible baseline, separating the alleged cause from seasonality and market movement, and connecting traffic to revenue through actual conversion behavior.
Review supplies those inputs and addresses whether a claimed loss survives testing against alternative explanations.
Search console data has hard historical limits and analytics retention varies by configuration, so the window for capturing the record is genuinely narrow. Any party may instruct.
Written opinions on things like service delivery, claim substantiation, practice standards and traffic loss causation.
Testimony translating analytics and search console evidence into terms a fact-finder can weigh.
Responsive analysis of causation claims, ranking assertions and traffic loss attribution.
Non-testifying preservation guidance, data scoping and review of agency deliverables and reporting.
Scott Steinberg is an analyst, consultant and business trends expert with over 25 years of experience providing management and strategic consulting services to more than 3,000 businesses and brands ranging from startups to government agencies and Fortune 500 firms.
He has testified in sample areas including intellectual property — copyrights, trademarks and patents — patent infringement, marketing, branding, video games, mobile applications, consumer product development, and the growth and monetization of online distribution platforms.
He is the author of over 30 books and has published more than five thousand articles addressing areas including but not limited to marketing, technology, leadership, innovation, advertising, digital transformation, data privacy and social networks. He appears regularly on ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, and has led seminars and training programs for organizations including Wells Fargo, the PGA Tour, Century 21, Ford, Dell and Procter & Gamble.
His consulting work has been broadly recognized. He has served as a thought leader for the American Bar Association and Corporate Counsel magazine, and has received honors from the International Association for Scholastic Excellence, Fortune, and the 21st Century Icon Awards, among others.
Establishes things like what search engine optimization marketing work was actually performed, whether representations about rankings and traffic had any basis, whether the techniques used met the standards of the field at the time, and what caused a change in organic performance. The evidence is helpful if it is preserved.
Search console retains limited historical data, analytics platforms aggregate detail on rolling schedules, and third-party ranking tools keep only what was tracked at the time. Once those windows close the record cannot be reconstructed, so preservation requests belong at the start rather than at expert disclosure.
Frequently yes, with appropriate information and inputs. Timing against known algorithm updates, search console messages, crawl and index records, and how competing sites moved in the same window together usually distinguish an industry-wide update from a site-specific penalty from agency-caused damage.
The field has understood for a long time that specific position guarantees cannot be delivered, since no agency controls the ranking system. Whether a particular promise was reasonable when made is assessable against what practitioners at the time knew and said publicly about such claims.
Generally by establishing a pre-event baseline, adjusting for seasonality and category movement, isolating the alleged cause from other explanations, and connecting the traffic difference to revenue using the site's own conversion behavior. The causation work is usually harder than the arithmetic.
Initial conversations about scope, timing and conflicts are without charge. Helpful detail includes the site, the engagement or event at issue and the period involved, plus any expert disclosure deadline already set.
A conflicts check is run before any substantive discussion. An initial note listing the party names and a one-line description of the dispute is enough to start; please hold privileged or confidential material until the check clears.