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Some are free to sign up for a listing, and have “premium” memberships for prominent placement. And the big names in the legal business can charge you hundreds or thousands of dollars a month just to be listed.

But no one ever tells you what these listings will specifically do for your law firm. How many referrals or contacts would you estimate I might get from your site per month/year?

Silence.

Or maybe, the answer is “well, all you need to do is get one client from our site, and it more than pays for your listing!” Ok, sure, how likely is that?

Or maybe the answer is “we are expanding rapidly, so we can’t give you an estimate, but we expect to be a dominant force in the search engine rankings.” Well, get back to me when you are actually generating measurable value for my membership.

Frankly, the whole business is disappointing. I want one of these offers to give a real and measurable benefit. It doesn’t seem like it should be so difficult. I would sign up clients in a heartbeat if they could answer these questions, and demonstrate some value.

I really want them to succeed. Sometimes, I even consider taking a flyer on a $195/year listing at some legal directory that at least superficially appears to not be terrible. But there are just too many of them, and it is both highly speculative, and a hassle to sort out if it was actually worth it.

The Direct Leads Alternative

That’s what I love about the direct leads business. It’s simple and easy to measure. You either get leads, or you don’t. The leads either convert to clients, or they don’t. You either make a profit on the leads you paid for, or (wait for it…) you don’t.

You never have to guess what is going on, and whether you are getting anything for your money. It’s perfectly obvious very quickly.

It works for attorneys, and it works for me. And I don’t have to hustle and scam people on speculative offers and promises. I just have to do a good job generating the leads, and the rest works itself out.

The most important metric for any advertising, is whether you are making a decent ROI & profit on your spending from each advertising source. Assuming you have the capacity to handle the business and there isn’t a opportunity cost limitation, why wouldn’t you continue to invest in something that is making you money?

As is smartly pointed out over at the Keyword Advisors Home Improvement Leads blog, it makes sense to own as much of the search results real estate as you can, for brand name searches as well as other keyword searches. Just a few of the benefits of your site appearing on both the organic and paid search parts of the screen are are:

• Make your site seem like the inevitable & best choice. If someone sees your site or product in multiple places on the screen, it can have a “These must be the best guys” effect on the person searching, and can help you pre-sell and convert.
• Block out competitors. If you don’t have an ad there, someone else will. Why cede the click if you don’t have to? (especially a profitable one!)
• Better control over your sales pitch. With organic search engine results, it can be tough to tailor you message exactly how you want. The search engines ultimately decide what text to display in most cases. With an ad, you can precisely test and customize your message based on those specific keywords. Having both an “objective” search result listing as well as a targeted ad on the same page can be a powerful combination.

As with any online marketing or lead generation strategy, the proof is in the numbers. Test and measure whatever you can. There are countless online marketing companies that want to take your money with no real assurance that it is going to bring you business. But if you can advertise or list your law firm anywhere that brings you clients at a positive and measurable net profit, then it’s an easy decision to make.

• There was a controversy about Findlaw selling something (unethically?) to help sites with search engine marketing
• What search engine optimization is
• How search engines calculate page importance
• A page of SEO jargon
• 5 tips for search engine success

Ok, I actually didn’t learn anything, at least nothing very useful or actionable. But it’s not because there isn’t any good information written here, there really is. But the information barely scratched the surface on any of these topics.

This article has no clear point, focus, or objective, and it’s not clear who the audience is for this article. It was as if the intro paragraphs to 5 or 6 different articles were just pasted together.

The title of the article is “Getting Search Engine Optimization Right”, and I don’t think it helps anyone do that.

Ok, So What’s Your Point?

A good article or page for your web site must have a clear purpose for a known audience. It should answer a specific question, or offer actionable tips on an area of interest.

• Simple tips to improve your website conversions.
• What could happen to me after a shoplifting charge in Texas?
• How do I know if I am getting my money’s worth from my online marketing firm?

An article with real focus will connect with your audience, and help you accomplish your goals online. Those goals may be clients, sales, newsletter sign-ups, links, or just credibility as a subject matter expert.

Always Imagine what the reader will take away from what you are offering.

And don’t try to do too much. The author in the above article had the seeds of many good articles, but failed to produce one.

The problem is that this is a clear violation of Google’s policy against search engine spam, and these links will almost certainly be devalued when reported. (Google’s top cop, Matt Cutts has already taken note and commented in the thread at oilman’s site, so it appears to already be a done deal).

So now it’s just a question of whether Findlaw will stick with the deal and deceptively sell these links that will no longer have any search engine rankings enhancement value.

Why are Paid Links a Bad Thing?

Links themselves are a key element of how the search engine algorithms rank sites. Links are like votes, and the sites with the most authority, or PageRank, have the most value, especially when topically related. So it would make sense that links from Findlaw would be extremely valuable to any site in the legal space.

However, a link that is paid for is not considered an honest and unbiased vote. Therefore, when discovered, either by the algorithm or manually, paid links are discounted by google and other search engines, and given no weight in rankings.

It will be interested to see what results from this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some big legal players do pay the monthly link fees, and never realize that they are getting nothing for their 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.

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.

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.

Clients seeking criminal defense representation often don’t do a lot of comparison shopping for lawyers. They may call a few different defense attorneys, but generally the person who they hire is the attorney they directly speak with first, and who provides them with the answers and help that they need.

For that reason, the value of a criminal defense lead or potential client contact is largely based on it’s timeliness. Certainly, as an attorney you have to give the person the right answers, and provide them with the comfort and confidence that you are the right person to help them through a difficult matter. But if you don’t speak with them quickly, you will never get that chance.

How do I make sure I get client sales calls quickly?

1. Make sure leads go through as few filters as possible. If you are buying leads, they need to get into your hands, or those of the person who does your client intakes as quickly as possible. For this reason, the value of criminal lawyer leads that are resold multiple times can be significantly diminished.
2. Take action to close at every step of the sales process. Have your assistant or the person who answers your phone take steps to pre-sell and pre-qualify leads (see below). It is usually easy to tell the people who are most likely to hire you. And obviously, the quicker you can talk to and sign a client up, the better.

What are Some Helpful Pre-Sales Techniques to Streamline and Accelerate the Process?

Generally, non-lawyers can give factual answers to questions that aren’t considered legal advice These answers can be very helpful and build trust with a client. Some examples of information a non-lawyer can typically provide are:

1. Common and most likely outcomes for certain charges
2. What benefits a lawyer provides in court
3. Advice on non-legal driver’s license & DMV issues

Your assistant can also provide  a “3rd party endorsement” which adds value to the sales process. Simply saying “We help people in situations like yours all the time” and “Attorney X really knows the law and has a strong record of successful outcomes in cases just like yours” can really make a difference.

How We Help You Get and Close Leads

1. Leads go directly to your office. Our site leads go direct from the person to you. A person who calls our web site gets instantly forwarded to your office. Email leads go directly from the site to your mailbox. We get the information to you instantly. The rest is up to you.
2. Our site is the first step in the “Pre-sell”. We strive to provide helpful information to those looking for criminal defense representation. Our site provides information about the criminal court process, likely outcomes, possible defenses, and more. And we put your name, photo, and bio information right on the site, so you get the credit and goodwill. We make every effort to create a positive impression of you before the person even contacts you.

If your law firm would benefit from more inquiries from people looking to hire criminal defense attorneys in your state, please contact us for more information on how you can buy qualified criminal defense leads directly from us.

And the reason why, is that sadly, they work. That is to say, they work at separating lawyers from their money, but most often not at actually getting you clients.

The factors at play are:

1. Lawyer leads are valuable. Acquiring a client is worth hundreds, and in many cases thousands of dollars.
2. There are many lawyers out there competing for business. There are countless lawyers competing for the same business. Some are desperate and willing to try anything to bring in more business.

How Can you Know Who Can Deliver the Goods?

Try before you buy.

Some directory or lead services will offer you a free listing or free leads for a period of time. That way you have an opportunity to find out what value is being delivered. find out if you really getting calls, and hopefully, clients.

Talk to Other Lawyers or Unbiased Lawyer Marketing Experts.

For a service that may have high setup costs, or simple won’t offer a sampling period, you need to tread very carefully. If you know any other attorneys using their marketing services, find out if they think it is valuable, and they are getting their money’s worth.

Try to talk to lawyers who have a similar practice to yours, but in a different region.

Measure Everything Possible

If you are on a trial period for any legal marketing service, it is very important to track where your calls, emails, and clients are coming from. You need to be able to assess and re-evaluate your marketing programs all the time. You can do it as simply or as elaborately as works for you, from a sheet of paper, to an excel spreadsheet, or a complex lead tracking database.

But the important thing is that you always ask the question: How did you find us?

But the fact is, if these people could provide a real service that could help you, there is no way they would be spamming you to get your business. There are certainly people out there who provide a genuinely valuable service. However, internet marketers and SEO specialists who know what they are doing are swamped with business. They get all the referrals they need from delighted clients.

Here is a sample of a recent spam I got from one of my client sites:

I visited your website and had a question

I was looking at websites under the keyword "keywords"
and came across your site yourwebsite.com.
I see that you're ranked 35 on page 4.

I didn't send this email out to thousands
of people but I am currently
reaching out to a list of your "keyword competitors"
as well. But you're my favorite and you are the one
I really favor and the one I see can monetize the
targeted website traffic this can deliver.
...

Additional smoke blowing continues, but you get the idea. I am particularly pleased to be the “favorite” among the anonymous people spammed.

The amusing thing is that, this is a top ranked site that does very well. It is #1 for many of the most desirable search terms in that market. But they did manage to find some particular keyword combo that apparently I rank on page 4. (Actually didn’t even check, since it hardly seemed important. ) And obviously, you can’t be top ranked for every imaginable keyword combination. At some point there are diminishing returns to chasing too many specific keywords in terms of overall breadth of scope and quality and quantity of traffic.

There are a number of ways these scams plays out.

1. If they claim they can get you the “top ranking” for anything instantly, it is either:
   1. the top ranking is an ad (which you will probably pay an arm and a leg for, but it is not magic)
   2. the top ranking is in a website frame that no one will actually see
2. If they promise “first page rankings for hundreds of keywords”, you need to know exactly what those keywords are, and how many searches are actually made for those keywords. For example, if the list of keywords search phrases includes things like “Criminal Defense Lawyer Jane Attorney of Beaumont Texas”, you can assume that a) this is not a competitive or difficult term to rank for, and b) almost no one is likely to be searching for it, so the value is negligible.

The bottom line is, ignore unsolicited spam emails with claims that seem too good to be true. Particularly those with significant upfront costs.