Ten contract terms worth refusing.
Long lock-ins, borrowed proof, vague reporting, and the ownership clause that keeps your own site hostage.
Why this list exists
The documented pattern in roofing marketing is not fraud. It is contracts written so that a disappointing outcome costs the agency nothing. Each term below appears routinely, each one is negotiable, and each one tells you something about how the engagement expects to end.
The ten
In rough order of how much they cost you.
The most expensive term on any contract, because leaving becomes a migration you cannot schedule without their cooperation.
Terms exist to survive the period before results arrive. If the deliverables are specific, the term is unnecessary.
Thirty days notice on an annual term means one missed diary entry costs you a year.
Four hours of SEO a month is not a deliverable. Six service pages and a schema implementation is.
Agree the metric before signing, and make it enquiries or booked jobs.
Silence usually means shared, which at $200 to $300 a lead and an 8 to 20 percent close rate is the most expensive channel you can buy.
Dentists and yoga studios in the same deck is the published warning sign in this vertical.
This holds your published pages hostage against an invoice dispute.
The window always closes before you have seen how the site performs.
Read carefully. Some versions restrict who you can hire.
The one that costs most
Ownership. If the agency holds the domain or the hosting account, leaving costs a migration on their timetable, and in the worst cases a domain dispute. Every engagement should state plainly that the client owns the domain, the hosting, the files, and the content from day one, whether or not the relationship ends well. Ask for that sentence specifically.
What to ask for instead
Five substitutions that a reasonable vendor will accept.
If you have already signed one
You are not stuck as completely as it feels. Read the notice window, take copies of your analytics, Search Console, form submissions, and content, and confirm who holds the registrar before giving notice. The sequence matters more than the speed, and it is set out step by step in the guide to leaving a bad agency in this cluster.
Clauses worth adding rather than removing
Five additions a reasonable vendor will accept.
Read the payment schedule against the delivery schedule
A contract billing half up front and half at launch, with no milestone between, gives you no leverage during the months when the work is actually happening. Tie payments to deliverables: research document, architecture sign-off, staging build, launch. Each stage becomes a checkpoint rather than an invoice.
Who signs, and what that means
Check whether the agreement is with the agency or with a holding entity you have never heard of, and whether it names the people who will do the work. Contracts freely assignable on the vendor's side let the engagement change hands without your consent, which is how contractors end up managed by a team they never chose.
Related guides.
Eighteen vetting questions in the order that disqualifies fastest, and how to read the answers.
One template strategy applied across unrelated trades, billed monthly. The pattern is documented, not alleged.
How to vet a roofing marketing agency, the contract terms to refuse, and why generalists keep failing this trade.
Vet us the same way.
Ask us all eighteen. The audit is $2,500 and answers most of them.