Lawyers face exactly the same challenges any business does. In order to get new business they should market their services, i.e., advertise. And lawyers cope with exactly the same marketing and advertising challenge every business does - how exactly to beat the competition. Plus lawyers have to assume that any Internet or non-Internet marketing or advertising they do may produce minimum results for the total amount of time and money they spend -- whatever an outside marketing or advertising advisor may tell the contrary.
Before the Internet the main non-Internet marketing option or advertising choice for any lawyer was to advertise in the yellow pages. Even today the print yellow pages contain plenty of colorful, one page display ads that feature lawyers offering their services, and lawyers pay a lot for these ads. How effective these ads are is anyone's guess -- it's hard for the colored, one page display ad to stand out when you yourself have 20 other lawyers doing the same thing! The yellow pages companies, however, continue to advertise their marketing and advertising philosophy that "bigger is obviously better" and "everything we sell is an opportunity," so they really often present a lawyer with a non-Internet marketing and advertising solution that costs plenty but often produces little.
This distinct thinking, along side the usage of print yellow pages generally speaking, has gone the way of the dinosaur at a really accelerated pace. The yellow pages on the net form had their heyday for many decades, but the population now visits the Internet for the information they seek, so most print directories are collecting dust. A lawyer who advertises in the print yellow pages may get calls, but they'll most be from vendors using the yellow pages as an inexpensive source of leads.
The major paid search providers (pay per click search engines) tend to supply lawyers Internet marketing and advertising solutions in a fashion just like the way the yellow pages do making use of their print directories. "Bigger is obviously better," so rather than realistically discuss with a lawyer a pay per click Internet marketing and advertising campaign that produces financial sense and produces a significant ROI, the pay per click providers will tell the lawyer to go for as numerous top listing keywords (the most expensive) as their budget will permit and bid as high as they can. The lawyer may go broke in the act, but at least they'll get exposure! Many lawyers get into pay per click as a fast way to obtain leads but quickly exit monthly later after spending lots of money for Internet marketing and advertising results that produce nothing but expense.
While pay per click Internet marketing and advertising is the running favorite of Internet marketing advertisers worldwide, pay per click advertising for a lawyer is generally an incredibly expensive proposition for what they get. Simply how much a lawyer is willing to "pay for a lead" assumes an entire new meaning with pay per click lawyer. The cost per click for many lawyer related keywords, e.g., "personal injury lawyer," "criminal defense lawyer," can range between $5.00 to $70.00 per click with respect to the market, and when the conventional lawyer's conversion rate (the amount of clicks it takes to generate a lead) of someone to two percent is factored in, the lawyer can find themselves paying upwards of $500.00 to $7,000.00 per lead, and a lead is not a client.
Part of the problem lawyers face when they work with pay per click (and this translates straight into poor conversion rates) is that (1) they spend short amount of time creating their pay per click ads and (2) the ads direct traffic to the lawyer's website. Any Internet marketing professional who knows something about pay per click knows you never send pay per click traffic to a website. Instead you create special pages, i.e., "landing pages" for pay per click traffic to be directed to. The landing pages perform the work of convincing traffic to do what the lawyer requires, which can be normally to contact the lawyer via e-mail or by phone.
Legal Internet directories and portals provide the lawyer a potential Internet marketing and advertising option for their popularity and enhanced Internet visibility. How effective a listing in a legal Internet directory or portal could be for a lawyer with regards to marketing, advertising and Internet exposure will depend upon the particular attributes of the legal Internet directory or portal in question. Everything being equal, legal Internet directories or portals that charge a fee to be listed inside them make more sense being an Internet marketing and advertising choice than similar sites offering listings for free. The lawyer needs to be particularly careful, however, when they consider advertising in legal Internet directories and portals that "look" like they offer a lot -- and an amount to opt for it -- but for whatever reasons simply do not produce enough leads for the total amount of Internet marketing and advertising money the lawyer must spend.
Many legal Internet directories and portals exist that have a quite strong Internet presence, and they're excellent resource centers for lawyers, but this doesn't automatically cause them to become good places to advertise. With Internet legal portals especially it's not how many lawyers the portal attracts but how many people the Internet legal portal attracts who are trying to find legal services. People have paid a large number of dollars for advertising in Internet legal portals that have produced nothing in the manner of Internet marketing and advertising results. A really wise idea for almost any lawyer who considers advertising in an Internet legal portal is to obtain some very accurate user demographics on what type of specific traffic the Internet legal portal is in fact attracting.
What's a lawyer supposed to do? Everywhere the lawyer looks, whether the marketing and advertising media is Internet or non-Internet, considerable financial risk is involved, and a guarantee that the lawyer can get good, solid results for the total amount of money they spend is usually hard to achieve.
Ultimately the best way for a lawyer to opt for Internet marketing and advertising - the way that may ultimately get them the best long term results for the cash they spend -- is to concentrate on getting their website to rank high in organic search results. When all things are thought, people on the Internet who search for goods and services mainly search for websites to locate their answers. They could look to legal Internet directories and portals, and when they don't find what they want they might turn to pay per click listings as a last resource (only about 30% to 40% of users work with pay per click) but ultimately individuals who search the Internet are seeking websites that provide them with the answers they seek.
If your lawyer is looking for an Internet marketing and advertising solution that doesn't require being the main pay per click crowd, the lawyer might want to consider pay per call programs. Pay per call is similar to pay per click, however the lawyer doesn't pay for a phone unless they receive one. And the costs for pay per call are normally substantially less that what the lawyer can pay for a click in many cases. An intelligent lawyer may even desire to consider getting associated with several pay per call providers with the idea that involving the providers the lawyer will receive enough leads in the aggregate to make involvement with these programs worth it.
