Be Careful . . . Very Careful, when it comes to search engine ranking solicitations

Below is a recent (slightly edited) email solicitation received by one of our attorney clients:

Would you like your website to appear 1, 2, or 3^rd every time San Diego Attorney or San Diego Personal Injury Lawyer was searched?

Our service will provide your company with positioning of your website at the top of the most popular search engines. These include; Yahoo, Lycos, MSN, Hotbot, Alta Vista, Iwon, NBCi, Go, Excite, Metacrawler, Info space, WebCrawler, CNet, Net Zero, All The Web, Search. This placement guarantees your firm's maximum visibility and exposure for your Internet presence for an entire year. We also provide secondary positioning on AOL, Google, Dmoz, Netscape, Teoma, Fast, and Ask Jeeves. We are not a directory service. We have a staff that consistently updates our client's to guarantee 1, 2, or 3^rd placement and a licensing agreement to back up our service.

If you would like to view the positioning yourself, please go to one of the search engines (Yahoo or Lycos) and type in these phrases and you will see the businesses I have positioned in the left hand side of the first page; (Please use professional discretion when viewing these).

edited . xxxxxxxx

edited . xxxxxxxx

edited . xxxxxxxx

Search on AOL or Google for these phrases.

Estate planning lawyer- edited . xxxxxxxx

Asset protection attorney- edited . xxxxxxxx

This should give you a good idea of how your website would be placed.

As you know, being able to find a website is the most important part of website marketing. I hope you can see this as a wonderful way for your website to work for you, by generating new and high volumes of business.

I look forward to meeting your Internet Marketing needs.

We followed their advice in the above email and then sent the reply below to our client on 3-31-03:

If you look at their suggested examples you'll notice all are 'sponsored listings'. These are placed on various search engines by Overture.

They are the largest pay-for-click search engine.

The problem with this approach is:

A. It takes a huge volume of visitors to legal sites to equate to one paying client. We did a little un-scientific study on top real estate terms on pay-per-click search engines. What we found was that almost, without exception, the firms paying for top positions vanished after six to eight weeks. We believe they realized, at a very high cost, that it takes many website visitors to equal one good client!

B. You pay for each visit, whether another attorney or a just curious high school student doing research, etc. Anyone who clicks your listing -----YOU PAY!

C. It has been shown that many web surfers know sponsored/featured listings = paid listings and skip over them for the 'real' listings

returned by the search.

D. For a high traffic, city specific legal keyword, such plans can be VERY costly.

E. If you want to try this type of service you can go 'direct' to www.overture.com and set up an account.

Let's look at today's cost per click for a few San Diego specific legal terms in the first position:

1. San Diego personal injury lawyer - $6.00

2. San Diego accident lawyer - $4.00

3. San Diego auto accident lawyer - $5.52

4. San Diego injury lawyer - $3.72

5. San Diego personal injury attorney - $6.72

_______________________________________________________________________

For our non-San Diego clients, below are some cost per click fees for other city specific legal terms in the first position on Overture on 4-1-03:

	Los Angeles	Orange County	San Francisco	Dallas	Houston	San Antonio
personal injury lawyer	$9.07	$8.51	$35.00	$5.95	$15.00	$5.00
criminal defense lawyer	$13.25	$19.96	$4.00	$5.00	$10.00	$5.00

Below is a chart of our traffic to our Los Angeles/Orange County directory. We have highlighted our monthly unique visitors. Note that in March 2003 we had a record amount of unique visitor traffic. With over 3,200 unique visitors, all visiting from our high search engine standings for city specific legal phrases, and our modest yearly listing cost, our directory listings have to be the most cost effective investment in expanding your Internet new client business.

Summary by Month
Month	Daily Avg				Monthly Totals
Month	Hits	Files	Pages	Visits	Sites	KBytes	Visits	Pages	Files	Hits
Mar 2003	3511	3030	281	105	2399	390027	3261	8718	93949	108851
Feb 2003	3098	2727	237	91	1967	312410	2554	6640	76376	86750
Jan 2003	2654	2318	179	75	2150	283865	2328	5570	71869	82281
Dec 2002	2069	1722	177	63	1845	210145	1966	5513	53400	64159
Nov 2002	2620	2256	239	75	2044	263502	2254	7182	67688	78617
Oct 2002	2200	1898	183	64	1933	227444	1986	5702	58860	68228
Sep 2002	2661	2277	231	77	2078	270863	2321	6953	68334	79840
Aug 2002	3196	2779	226	81	2386	321957	2516	7035	86149	99083
Jul 2002	3565	3171	232	82	2381	344888	2545	7204	98313	110518
Jun 2002	3131	2776	217	75	1893	302311	2271	6535	83281	93936
May 2002	3334	2880	245	78	1996	334880	2426	7609	89306	103373
Totals						3264492	26458	74712	848088	976497

If you have a website be sure to apply for our FREE Lawyer Legal Website Excellence Award .

It will drive traffic to your firm. Click the link below:

Lawyer Legal Excellent Content Award