The Truth About Lawyer Internet Marketing

Most Common Internet Marketing Mistakes:
Letting your yellow pages salesperson talk you out of a good plan and into a bad one.

Both of these cases studies are based on true stories I have heard from attorneys. Names and possibly genders are changed to protect their anonymity.

Case study one:
Tom is waiting for his yellow pages rep to meet with him to go over his yellow pages plan. He is prepared to cancel his whole plan because he remembers; “The calls are not coming in like they used to, and I am tired of paying $5,000 a month for a yellow pages ad because I am afraid that I will miss out on that one I case I would have received had I been in there. I am going to put this money towards something that will bring me more and better business or buy a Porsche and give up on this advertising thing.”

The yellow pages rep, Joe, arrives with Judy; his “Internet Specialist”.

They explain the “power of the Internet”. They say “Online yellow pages yada-yada, Google yada-yada this, Yahoo! yada-yada that, and yada-yada websites.”

Then they say:
“If you take advantage of our Internet marketing/SEM/SEO/PPC/online yellow pages program for $3,000 a month, we will lower the price of your print yellow pages to $3,000 a month.”

Tom thinks: “Wow, I only have to pay 20% more than I paid last year, and I will now have a website and an Internet marketing program from my trustworthy yellow pages salesperson and their brilliant Internet Marketing Guru! This is going to be my year!”

Stories like this have been going on for years nationwide, and they still happen every day across the country; especially to attorneys.

The next day, week or month Tom realizes he has just signed a 12 month contract he cannot possibly get out of, and he is worse off than he was the year before. He does not have a $3,000 Internet marketing program. He has a sub-par website, a sub-par Internet marketing program that is at best over priced, at worst completely useless and he still has a yellow pages ad that is generating fewer calls than ever.

He has invested more money, he is getting fewer clients and now there is less of a chance Tom is going to get a Porsche, a boat, or buy a house for a homeless family anytime soon. (You were thinking of doing the last one, right?)

Ouch!

Case study two, part 1:

Eva cancelled her “double-truck” (2 page) yellow pages ad last year when the yellow pages rep visited. The rep, Justin, called shortly before the close of the book and said; “Eva, we would like to invite you to get back in the book for half price. Would you be interested in that?”

Eva said “Certainly-come on out and let’s talk about it.”

Justin came out with his “Internet Guru” Judy. They offered the Yellow Pages ad at $7,500 (half the “rack rate”) and an online program for $2,500 a month.

Eva was mad. She said; “I only paid $10,000 for my double truck last year. You have two choices:
1-Leave now.
2-Give me my ad this year for $5,000 like you ‘implied’ (promised?) over the phone, and then leave.”

She got her ad for half price.

Case study 2, part 2:
Mike and Dan from the company that built her custom website the year before came in to visit with her a few days later and began to talk to her about the advantages of SEO.

They had a sound strategy that made sense:

1. They could show her examples of other law firm websites they had optimized in other competitive markets.
2. They offered conversion tracking-not just clicks and impression tracking.
3. They offered transparent reporting of the work being done on her website and monthly ranking reports.
4. They offered limited exclusivity, so she knew they would not be providing this service to all of her competitors.

She asked for references and she got them. Mike and Dan came back a week later and she signed up for the program.

Case Study 2, part 3:
8 months later the yellow pages came back with the tactic attempted in case study one. Eva said: “My SEO is working. I dominate Google and other search engines for my search terms and I am getting clients from the program every month. There is no way I am going to mess with that. Either renew my yellow pages at the same rate I had last year or take me out of the book.”

And so it goes…

Yellow page has become a very tricky business. In this post I will attempt to give you some insight from my experience with the yellow pages, what I am hearing from other attorneys and even some reliable statistics on yellow pages vs. Internet usage.

(For a comprehensive analysis for your firm please feel free to call me anytime at 720-985-7945)

Don’t get me wrong-the yellow pages is  a viable way to market a local service business, but in the current world it is often over priced and over rated by the people selling it. Of course, that can be said about many people selling advertising and marketing programs.

10 or 15+ years ago, businesses used to line up at the local yellow pages office (the “real yellow” pages-always associated with the phone company) to buy ads so they could grow their business. It was like trying to get Jonas Brother tickets. You had to get in line early, make the big decision on whether or not your were willing to spend a few hundred dollars a month on the biggest ad in your heading-which at one point was a “half page ad”.

Year after year the yellow pages grew the size of the ads, and admittedly accomplished some very high quality full color ads on paper that was maybe slightly thicker than the paper in a compact bible.

This program often worked very well for attorneys until recently.

Then came cover ads, spine, inside covers, tabs, magnets and even brochures and magazines delivered with the books. Not to mention all of the smaller community books. For example, I believe Dex Media (the YP for Qwest) has as many as 20+ books being delivered in the Denver metro area alone. The Yellow Pages for a long time has been a cash cow with huge profits-up to 60% on each book.

Then competitors like Yellowbook came into many towns and in some cases offered an excellent return on investment for the attorneys and other businesses in their markets. I will not try to explain in any detail how this affected the legal industry, because I know that many of the attorneys could tell that story better than I could.

Then came the search engines, and the shift from using the yellow pages to find local information to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others-but mostly Google.

I worked for Dex Media for a while at their headquarters working with product development and sales. From 2004 to 2005 we more than doubled the revenue Dex generated from Internet marketing, however, that did not make a dent in the lack of growth in the print side of the business-which at the time was a $1.6 billion source of revenue, vs. under $70k in Internet advertising revenue.

Let’s get some facts:

This report came out in October 2008 from TMP Directional Marketing; a reputable company that sells Pay Per Click marketing, Online Yellow Pages and Yellow Pages. They act as representatives for all of the major yellow pages across the country for businesses that need to advertise in multiple states but want one point of contact. They have credibility with me because they have to approach direct advertising from a consultative approach for national and international businesses like Pizza Hut and Porsche, and they have to deliver results to stay in business.

Here is the report they put out from their research last fall:

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire - October 9, 2008) –
TMP Directional Marketing (TMPDM)-the largest local search marketing agency…
…announced today the findings of its second annual Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore, which confirms shoppers still use a variety of online and offline directional media resources to find local business information.
First sources used are Search Engines (31%)
Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%)
Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%)
Local Search Sites (11%)
(61% of Searches are online searches-more than twice the usage of the books)
This represents a change from last year’s study, which ranked:
Print Yellow Pages first (33%)
Followed by Search Engines (30%).This affirms what most attorneys I talk to are experiencing, and as a result I am seeing many attorneys this year do one of two things:1-Pull their ads from the book

2-Negotiate some pretty amazing deals

3-Get talked into a very bad Internet marketing strategy managed by their yellow pages provider

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire - October 9, 2008) - TMP Directional Marketing (TMPDM), the largest local search marketing agency, announced today the findings of its second annual Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore, which confirms shoppers still use a variety of online and offline directional media resources to find local business information.

First sources used are Search Engines (31%)

Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%)

Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%)

Local Search Sites (11%)

61% of Searches are online searches

This represents a change from last year’s study, which ranked:

Print Yellow Pages first (33%)

Followed by Search Engines (30%).

Bottom Line: It is now very apparent that local search is being dominated by the Internet.

Come back soon for the best ways to capitalize on these drastic market changes-and how to win the negotiation battle with your yellow pages representative.

“BSEO”:

BSEO obviously stands for “Bad Search Engine Optimization”, but some people seem to think it implies something else.

The major problem with “BSEO” is that it is difficult to define. “BSEO” programs are usually vague “BSEM” (Bad Search Engine Marketing) which include other programs like online yellow pages and pay-per click programs that provide very limited or no results in terms of ROI (Return On Investment). The Best case “BSEO” or “BSEM” scenario is a low priced “SEM” program that is very expensive due to the amount of wasted time and wasted money. Worst case scenario is a long contract costing a LOT of money that wastes even more time and more money.

I have to give credit to LexisNexis Territory manager Mike Mahoney, who came up with the term “BSEO” after he heard me describe a Seattle yellow pages “SEO” program.

Something different: Transparent SEO:Transparent SEO is an integrity based SEO service. It is a service where the SEO expert informs you along every step of the way as to what you are paying for, and what you are getting in the way of service and results. They do not make you sign any long term contracts (more than a year), nor do they ask for huge sums of money up front. You will own the content that you are paying to have developed for you, and you own your optimized site. This minimizes your risk and builds continued trust between you and your outsourced SEO expert that you can keep, promote or fire at any time. In this partnership environment the SEO expert strives to continually earn your business by under promising and over delivering results.

How to detect “BSEO”

1)      Your “SEO expert” implies a lot, but never says anything definitively. For example; “See all of our customers who are near the top of Google? Sign here, pay us only $500 a month and we will build YOU a website.!”

Questions to ask that will thwart their evil plan:

a.      “Are you saying that for $500 a month I will experience the same results your other customers will experience for my competitive keywords like (for example) ‘injury attorney seattle’?”

b.      “I see you have a few customers whose sites are well optimized-how many firms do you limit your services to in a given geographic area for specific areas of practice?”

c.      Can you put any of this in writing?

2)      Your “SEO expert” gives you a quote for a service that includes some sort of landing page, and/or a Pay-Per-Click program combined with an SEO program.

Questions to ask that will expose their elusions:

a.      How much of my money will go towards Pay-Per-Click vs. SEO?

b.      What specific services do you provide on a regular basis that will help my site rise to the top of organic search results?

c.      Do you have examples of other attorneys in my area of practice in a comparable market that you have successfully optimized sites for? 

More on this in my next post. In the meantime, for a free, comprehensive and honest Internet marketing analysis call me on my cell anytime at 206-501-4569.