We don't think you should include links to your web designer / marketing vendor in your footer.
Many web designers / developers / marketing vendors require their clients to include "credits" in their site footers.
There are a variety of reasons that they do this. They might just want to showcase their work. They also might want to "rank" their websites for search queries like, "web design," etc. But some of them actually have a more nefarious reason:
They want to work with your competitors.
Here's what happens in the context of online legal marketing.
Web marketing vendor builds a website for law firm. They add a link back to their website in the law firm's footer.
A competitor of the firm performs searches to see which law firm websites rank in Google. They visit a few of the sites that "rank best." They scroll to the bottom to see the footer link to the firm's web vendor. They figure that if the vendor helped their competition rank, they can probably help them too.
So, the firm who hired the website design company now just assisted their competition. Many web marketing vendors are happy to oblige.
See the problem?
There is so much wrong with this process for all parties (except maybe the web marketing vendor).
It might not strike you that using the same marketing company as your competition is that big of a deal. If that's the case, I can't help you.
But if you see the problem here, I encourage you to call up your designer / developer and demand they remove the footer links. You should also ask them to tell you whether they're working with your competition. If they're reluctant, contact us, we'll tell you.
If you're searching for a web marketing vendor, don't make your choice through competitor footer links.
Instead, ask a lot of questions. Then ask a few more.
Ask friends, who aren't your competitors.
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 […]
