The online legal marketing space is one of the most competitive around. Advertising costs for legal-related key phrases commonly exceed $10 per click and can even reach $50-$100. Real estate for organic, or natural, search engine listings is becoming more and more saturated as well. Let's face it, there are only ten organic results on any given Google results page. Combine that with the fact that as much as 90% of organic click traffic goes to the top three listings, and it is clear that the actual competition is even greater than many lawyers may suspect.
Unfortunately, there are many lawyer internet marketing firms that will represent multiple competing law firm clients in a particular practice area and geographic location. In fact, some of these law firm seo firms will take on over 30 competing clients. The simple fact is that some of these companies' clients have to take a back seat to other clients. As previously stated, there is only so much online real estate. Someone has to be relegated to the second, third, and fourth pages, and beyond.
That is why it is so critical to consider exclusive law firm internet marketing agreements. Under an exclusive, or limited-competition, agreement, your lawyer internet marketing consultants are limited in the number of competing law firms they can take on as clients in a give practice area and geographic location. With a limited-competition agreement, you won't find yourself in a bidding war against your competition with the company you are paying to generate business for you online. It's the classic Coke vs. Pepsi situation. Would it make sense for these competitors to hire the same advertising/marketing firm? Obviously not.
Another issue that arises from too much competition is the "watered down" effect. If everyone in your legal services market segment is employing the same company, they're also probably using the same law firm marketing strategies, techniques, and methods. Generally speaking, the more your campaign is the same as your competition's, the less effective it may be.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
