The BEST Return for YOUR Law Firm’s Advertising Dollars! By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2003 Promotions Unlimited All rights reserved. This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorized use, copying or mirroring is prohibited. If you are reading this and think that the Internet is just a passing fad, stop reading now…this article is not meant to change your mind but to show the huge potential for moving your practice to the ‘next level’ through prudent use of the Internet.
All our clients have their own firm websites. Because the Internet and search engines, the gate keepers to the Internet, are not organized alphabetically, they have joined our many city specific legal directories. Thus they are able to take advantage of the potential search engine page one placement for a city specific legal phrase, that directly relates to their practice areas. Yes, the key is page one placement of specific targeted legal phrases that a potential client is would enter into a search engine to find your firm. Generic phrases and single words are a waste of time in this regard. It’s not the general traffic you want but the targeted visitor that produces real returns. With that said, our experience in the legal Internet field shows that it takes quite a few targeted visitors to equal one paying client! Now look at the ROI for the Internet vs. the phone book. The competition for phone book ads is competitive. Unless your are prepared to spend thousands per month on a multi-page color ad, your chances of getting noticed, and called, greatly diminish. Our clients tell us, due to the huge costs involved, the ROI is in almost all cases substantially less than what is being achieved through the Internet. We have one very successful client attorney who has now dropped not only phone book advertising, but all print advertising, in favor of the Internet! We have also had a couple of clients, whom after a year in our directories were not sure if they were effective for generating new business. Both of these clients were back with us after just a few months when they became aware of the decrease in inquires and real clients. In truth, one of these clients even increased their firm’s ad with us by 300%! I’m not saying make a drastic move, though I would love it, but think about ROI and the low cost to have your city specific legal phrase on page one of Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL, etc. Our flagship San Diego legal directory www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com had 4,970 unique visitors in March ’04! Rather than take a search phrase from this directory, let’s look at a much smaller directory for Los Angeles Orange Countylawyersdirectory Look at the very competitive legal phrase: Los Angeles civil litigation lawyers The five major search engines below, all show that our directory attained a page one, position one result as of 4-4-04. AltaVista, AOL Web Sites, Google, MSN, Netscape. To get the real potential from the Internet, your website must achieve page one placement for your specific practice area key word phrases. With directories like Google returning only ten sites per page, to say that any one firm could achieve more than one page-one placement, would be most unlikely. This is where search engine optimized legal directories can provide the lynch-pin to maximizing your firm’s Internet potential. Copyright 2004 Promotions Unlimited - search engine optimization - All rights reserved. |
