I found a pretty good article on law.com about the value of search engine optimization for lawyers. I basically agree with all of the key points and the overall theme that SEO done well can have tremendous value for law firms, or any small business. And the specific SEO techniques and advice are all on the money.

The author doesn’t appear to be a subject matter expert herself, but did some decent research, and interviewed a talented SEO guy, Brad Fallon. She also cited top notch SEO resources like webmasterworld, seomoz, and Aaron Wall’s seobook.

The issue I do have is with the “hook” of the article, the story of the legal secretary who fixed the company website and launched it to the top of google in 7 days, and saved the busness and her job. I’m not saying that it didn’t happen – it’s certainly possible – but if it is true, then there was a lot more going on then just some research and hard work by an amateur.

It is not realistic to think that just anyone could relaunch a site and shoot to the top of the rankings and pick up business-saving traffic levels in a week’s time. I’m sure most SEO experts would agree with this, and would also tell you that anyone who promised such extraordinary results would most likely be scamming you.

And no, I’m not trying to suggest that most SEO is so tricky that only experts can pull it off. You can get pretty far in a lot of markets with quality content, and good site navigation and title tags.

But in a relatively competitive business like DUI attorneys in a major market, you can expect that a lot of your competition has the basics right. So what else can make the difference in top rankings?

Analysis of a New Site and a “Bad” Site

The woman in the story, Araceli Parra, states clearly that the site as it existed before her work was a “really bad site” before she fixed it, 2 years ago. The (new) site number1duioffice.com actually looks pretty good to me at a quick glance. It has lots of good content, and the basic SEO seems fine. However, according to a domain check at domaintools the domain has only been in existence for 2 years, , so it is not immediately clear what the bad site was before her work. So we’ll have to dig into that to figure it out.

Site Age

The age of a web site matters alot. Some SEO experts say it’s actually the age of the links in to a site that are the most important, but either way, it’s very difficult to get a new site to rank well for competitive terms. I think it is possible that a two year old site could rank #1 (and #2) for a presumably valuable term like oakland dui lawyer (well done!) as it does now, but I don’t believe that is would happen instantly upon launch, and be sustained for 2 years.

There must have been a previous site, or something else going on here. Let’s dig into the links.

The Value of Links

Buried pretty far down in this article is an important quote about one of the most important areas of SEO, aquiring good links. Says Brad Fallon:

“Probably 80 to 90 percent of what matters for your search-engine rankings is the quantity and quality of incoming links”

This is an absolutely key point. So let’s take a cook at these links. I use a paid tool called seoelite, for this purpose but I’m guessing aaron wall’s free backlink tool would be fine too.

According to my tool, this site only has a couple of actual backlinks into the site. That doesn’t make much sense on the surface. (One of these links is from an SEO firm taking credit for the site, so between them and Ms. Parra, they should get their stories straight!)

How can a new site with only a couple of links rank well for these terms? As it turns out, a couple of these links are from sites that are permanently redirected to this new site. A permanent, or 301 redirect, is the search engine friendly way to redirect all the link juice, and authority from an old site to a new site. Aha! We may have found the source of this site’s strength.

The Source of the Power

One of the redirected sites is duioffice.com, which has a decent number of good links, and has been around since 2000. That’s relatively old in the lawyer world, so the redirect from this site is almost certainly a critical source of the new sites power and authority.

There is another dui lawyer domain redirected to number1duioffice.com, and also a redirect from a redirect coming in via duioffice.com, so there are a number of things going on here.

Just as an aside, I wonder why the bothered to change the primary site from duioffice.com to number1duioffice.com? I probably would have just fixed up duioffice which is a better domain, then having to worry about all the redirecting. But it certainly seems to be working out fine for them.

Bad Site? Not So Bad.

I could go on into a discussion about the previous site by viewing in on the internet archives, and the short answer is, sure, the old site probably needed a lot of basic optimization. And no doubt the new site and the work that Ms. Parra did was important in getting the value out of that site, and that her new content may well have been critical in getting the most important thing from the web site – phone calls and customers.

But the bottom line is that there is no way that any of that would have happened without the well aged, quality “link juice” that came from the original site. She was sitting on a nice oil field, and figured out where to drill, maybe because she was smart enough to realize that, or maybe she just got lucky and had no idea what was even there.

Conclusion

This article is somewhat deceptive about the results she achieved, and whether that is really possible in the vast majority of cases. Most people are simply not sitting on an old site with some nice links that is badly optimized.

Again, it is perfectly plausible to build a great site with great content, well optimized, get good links, and do extremely well in the medium and long term. It happens all the time. But it is rare and difficult to be an overnight success starting from scratch.

As part of an occasional series analyzing the countless pitches lawyers receive for internet marketing, SEO, and related services, I present AttorneysDelivered.com.

Here is the unsolicited marketing offer (yes, spam) I received from AttorneysDelivered.com, a lawyer directory listing website.

The email was as follows:

My name is (removed). My company launched an attorney product/platform that was recently spoke of on LAW.COM/ALM’s official blog and other places so I am just reaching out to see if you are interested.

It is a very inexpensive, PROVEN platform/profile that is serviced and designed to show up high on the search engines for important keywords, generate more customers, build valuable links that point back to your site, etc. . .It does a great deal for the price. . . and as a member of our directory, we will send you any relevant leads we receive.

Here is an example of what your profile page would look like:

http://lawyers.attorneysdelivered.com/divorce/new-york/great-neck/Barton-Resnicoff.html

…

Signup Link: https://lawyers.attorneysdelivered.com/signup

Just so you know you aren’t wasting your time, you can see what LAW.COM and ALM.COM have to say about our system:

http://legaltechnology.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/04/attorneys-deliv.html

I am always interested in this offers, since in event that such a site had a legitimate value, I’d gladly be a buyer for many of my sites. But, not surprisingly, most of these offers are scams. And I do get asked by attorneys for help in figuring out who can be trusted.

And, debunking can be fun. So let’s do it!

Analysis of Email Offer

Let’s start by analyzing the pitch and the information contained in this email. The email clearly states that buying a listing on their site will benefit your law firm in generating rankings and traffic to your site. Fair enough, we’ll look into that later.

It also cites law.com as an authoritative recommendation for this service. And, it shows an example of a profile that you will get for your money. Two thoughts on these points:

1. I don’t think an anonymous typepad.com blog post is a very good stand-in for an endorsement from law.com, even if it does appear to be owned by the same company.
2. I’d recommend they have someone spell check the example listing of their featured law firm profile page. (I’m particularly suspicious of the word “Perferred”) [they did at least fix this --Ed.]

We’re not off to a great start here from a marketing perspective, but maybe this is just nitpicking their email pitch.

So let’s be fair and dig a little deeper into the actual value offer this directory could provide for your law firm.

Analysis of Offer on the Site

From the web site http://www.attorneysdelivered.com/member-benefits.html we learn that benefits of being listed include branding and search engine rankings. Let’s break them down.

Branding Benefit

Image of google search result copied from AttorneysDelivered site

According the offer, their page will rank well for your brand. The example is on a Google search for “Steven Kazan Law firm”, their page shows up on Google’s first page. See their example image to the right.

This is a seriously weak “benefit” for the following reasons:

1. Anyone searching for “Steven Kazan Law firm” presumably wants to find the actual official firm web site. And they will, rightly so, right at the top of the search results. So who cares if there is another page related to the firm further down on  the search page?
2. This ranking is not a significant accomplishment, as the “competition” for this search phrase is extremely limited. They have a page about the firm, and all the keywords are in the title tag, so it’s basically a freebie.
3. The term probably has no search value beyond the specific traffic to the firm’s official site. Are they such a big firm that they are a widely sought brand, and other firms might try to poach traffic from someone looking for their competition? Very unlikely.

So, that’s a bust. Let’s move on to the next benefit of this legal directory listing.

Rankings Benefit

Here is something that could be of clear value: rankings for decent search terms, that could result in traffic to your site, and ultimately more business. The offer gives specific examples of rankings achieved by this site for a client firm for searches for “asbestos lawyer in alemeda ca” and “asbestos lawyer in oakland ca”.

We will stipulate for the moment that these phrases have some significant search traffic that will could translate into valuable clients for a firm. (Many SEO scammers claim results for search phrases that have little real world value). For a real client, I would want to research how many searches are done on these phrases or similar phrases, but we will assume that they are decent, and have some value.

Google Search Result: "asbestos lawyers in alemeda ca"

So how does the benefit offer match reality? My search for asbestos lawyer in alemeda ca resulted in no hits for this firm’s AttorneysDelivered.com profile page as suggested. However, it did find their “lawyer pitch” page. Interesting, and probably fluky because of the specific word order, and prominent placement of their lawyer solicitation page on their site. Actual lawyer profiles are deeper in the site navigation, and may not rank as well.

But even if this particular page stays in the rankings for this one specific phrase, it would not be a typical example of expected results for similar searches.

Google Search Result: "asbestos lawyers in oakland ca"

The next search is for asbestos lawyer in oakland ca. The results are more interesting, and more promising. The AttorneysDelivered page for Steven Kazan is the #3 listing, and the client’s actual site (KazanLaw.com) is the #1 ranked site. There is something going on here. But why is the firm site outranking the AttorneysDelivered page that is supposedly creating this valuable rankings benefit?

A quick analysis of kazanlaw.com shows that it is an old site (registered in 1999), has a bunch of old backlinks, including valuable, trusted links from dmoz.org & the Yahoo directory.  AttorneysDelivered.com is less than 1 year old, with a much smaller number of links to it. So from this (very) superficial analysis, it makes sense that the kazanlaw.com site is more highly ranked.

And here’s the real kicker: if you look on the bottom of the home page of kazanlaw.com, you will notice a graphic and link to their AttorneyDelivered profile page. It would appear that the folks behind kazanlaw.com are either partners or benefactors of AttorneysDelivered.com.

This is clearly a case of the tail wagging the dog. A valuable home page link from a well ranked, authoritative law firm site is driving the rankings of their own marketed profile page! And they are trying to sell it as if it’s the reverse.

The Verdict on AttorneysDelivered.com

There is no question that AttorneysDelivered is making a deliberately deceptive pitch here. They are claiming benefits to their listings that does not exist.

It’s always possible that there may be traffic value for a law firm listing on this site, but given the evidence established here, I would not trust the people behind this at all. To be avoided.

UPDATE: Attorney Ben Glass believes attorneysdelivered.com might be violating ethics rules for lawyer advertising. Yet another reason to avoid this offer.

UPDATE2: A week later, I’m still getting this identical spam email, complete with broken embedded links which I didn’t even mention before. But they did at least fix the spelling error on the sample profile page.

Derek at CapeCodSEO writes about the dangers of “free advice” in the SEO world. People tend to obsess over minor details and narrow tactics about what they think their site needs to rank competitively. If you give a tip on one of these tactics, you may be inadvertently misdirecting them to focus on a trivial point to the exclusion of the larger goals. And when it all comes crashing down, you may face blame for that failure.

This should be obvious to criminal defense lawyers if you consider the following analogy: Would you give legal advice to someone about a DUI charge, based only on their interpretation of the events? Of course not.

Criminal defense attorneys know that a client’s notion of what happened when they were arrested is often grossly misleading, and ultimately not relevant to the goal of a proper legal defense. You need to review the police report and any other evidence before you can hope to offer useful legal advice. Clients who focus on how a cop was “mean” to them need to understand that aggressively taking on a police officer in court is usually not going to win your case.

Expert Advice Depends on Asking the Right Questions and Understanding Your Goals

SEO itself is only a tactic to get web traffic in service to the goal of getting more business. Yet, I’ve seen a lot of smart attorneys who know a little bit about SEO techniques do some absolutely crazy and dangerous things with their web sites.

Some criminal lawyer sites use on-page tactics that even if they work for rankings improvement, are almost certainly killing conversions and self defeating. And it’s no surprise when the site traffic and rankings plummet.

The bottom line is find an expert you trust, in law or SEO, to do a comprehensive assessment of your situation, and understands your goals for big picture.