Attorney Marketing News

Posts Tagged ‘findlaw’

Link Outsourcing – A Great Way to Give Your Law Firm a Bad Reputation

If you allow your SEM company to “market” your law firm by outsourcing link development your good name can be ruined. Some companies hire cheap labor pools that create fake email names and simply spam forums and social sites with cheap one-line ads about your law firm to try and get you inbound links. Others do the majority of their “marketing” by publishing (and republishing) poorly written articles [FindLaw Content Writing Complaints] on websites they control and free vanity self-publishing websites.

Does your contract state:

FindLaw will submit Subscriber’s website listing to third-party sites including web directories and social bookmarks which may allow bloggers and others to comment positively or negatively about Subscriber’s firm or attorneys. Subscriber consents to such submissions and understands that FindLaw does not control these sites and will not be able to remove comments or listings once they have been published.

The above allows total control over how and where your website will be marketed.  If you feel you can trust your SEM company, great.  But I would ask for a list of who will be getting the links, how they will be doing it, and a list of sites the links will come from.

Read the fine print on any contract you sign with an attorney marketing company – especially if you are purchasing attorney website marketing services that include link development. If you are not careful, you could be signing away your rights to control how and where your site is marketed and your rights to restitution if your reputation is damaged by spam tactics used to get inferior inbound links.

Were you promised these attorney marketing services in your contract?

• Directory Submissions
• Content Development and Syndication
• Other exposure, at West’s discretion, intended to increase traffic performance.

Before you get excited about all the above marketing possibilities, read the disclaimer in the contract:

Disclaimer: Note that if you are participating on one or more of the following activities, you may not receive optimal results from your FirmSite Visibility Premium package: multiple websites (hosted at FindLaw or outside of FindLaw), Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, black listed website with Google or other Search Engines.

An increasing number of attorneys have more than one domain name (Google “Bisnar Chase” and see how many domains they own.)  Posting on your own blog would count as “participating,” and so could having a linked-in account, or engaging in some sort of online networking (and sometimes even social networks.) “Participating” in any of these things could technically be used as an excuse why the lawyer marketing services you paid for did not produce results.

Oversubmitting to directories is also a bad idea. Your law firms’ website should only be submitted to carefully chosen directories that specifically relate to lawyers and most of these sites charge for inclusion.

Content syndication is also a potential area of wasted money. Be sure to ask where these articles are being submitted and ask to review all articles prior to their publication.  FindLaw recently has been getting a lot of bad PR from attorneys for creating artificial blog sites and submitting content on behalf of attorneys that contained inaccurate information about the law.

Check Your Inbound Links

Check the inbound links you are getting from anyone doing your link development for you.  Checking links can be time consuming and a little difficult for laypeople so ask your SEO company for a list of the links to your website. If links are coming from websites and blogs owned or controlled by your SEO company consider this:  anyone can give you a link to their own site.  And links via vanity submission sites you are not getting what you paid for – you could submit your own articles for free to these same sites (but we do not recommend it because they are low value.)  Finally, if  link developers getting links for you are from a far away land with ISP addresses in Thailand, Indian, and other places Google knows these posters are not really interested in your U.S. law practice and can catch on that you are artificially building links.

Google is smart enough to spot paid link development schemes and specifically cautions you not to do it or risk penalties:

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

The bottom line is this: before you sign on for services, understand what you are buying and what bad link development could really cost you — your reputation.

I have discussed (and will continue to discuss) some of the down sides to consider before signing up with FindLaw.  However, I think it only fair that I also mention some of the upsides.

First, FindLaw builds really beautiful, highly customized websites.  Whatever you want – they have the talent to deliver.   (Just be sure you know the down sides of using a lot of Flash features on your website before you get too fancy – not only is Flash a turnoff for visitors and search engines, but it is usually very expensive.) Read the rest of this entry »