Someone finds out their wages are being garnished on a Tuesday, tells nobody, and starts searching that night: what Chapter 7 costs, whether they lose the car, whether their employer finds out. The firm that answers those questions plainly is the firm they call. That decision gets made long before your phone rings.
Shame does the rest of the work. They will not ask a friend for a referral, because asking means saying it out loud. Google is the only place they are willing to be seen looking, which means your visibility there is not one channel among many. For this client, it is the channel.
You have tried the fixes. An agency at several thousand a month producing pages that read like a brochure and one that used the word “eliminate” in a way that made you close the tab. A cheaper writer who did not know the debt relief agency disclosure existed. Every draft comes back needing your read, and your read costs more than the writing did.
So the intake stays thin and unpredictable, while the firm across town has two hundred answered reviews, a listing posted to this week, and a library of pages doing the quiet work of being found by someone who cannot bring themselves to ask a human.