Lawyers face exactly the same challenges any business does. To be able to get new business they need to market their services, i.e., advertise lawyer. And lawyers deal with exactly the same marketing and advertising challenge every business does - how to beat the competition. Plus lawyers need certainly to believe that any Internet or non-Internet marketing or advertising they do may well produce little or no results for the amount of time and money they spend -- regardless of what an outside marketing or advertising advisor may tell the contrary.
Prior to the Internet the main non-Internet marketing option or advertising selection for any lawyer was to promote 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 great deal for these ads. How effective these ads are is anyone's guess -- it's hard for your colored, one page display ad to stick out when you yourself have 20 other lawyers doing the exact same thing! The yellow pages companies, however, continue to market their marketing and advertising philosophy that "bigger is obviously better" and "everything we sell is the opportunity," so they really often present a lawyer with a non-Internet marketing and advertising solution that costs plenty but often produces little.
This type of thinking, along with the use of print yellow pages generally speaking, moved the way in which of the dinosaur at a very accelerated pace. The yellow pages on the net form had their heyday for most decades, but the population now visits the Internet for the data they seek, so most print directories are collecting dust. A lawyer who advertises in the print yellow pages may well get calls, but they'll most likely be from vendors using the yellow pages as a cheap source of leads.
The major paid search providers (pay per click search engines) tend to offer 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 as opposed to realistically discuss with a lawyer a pay per click Internet marketing and advertising campaign that makes financial sense and produces a decent 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 while they can. The lawyer may go broke in the act, but at least they'll get exposure! Many lawyers enter into pay per click as an instant way to obtain leads but quickly exit per month later after spending a lot of money for Internet marketing and advertising results that produce just expense.
While pay per click Internet marketing and advertising could be the running favorite of Internet marketing advertisers worldwide, pay per click advertising for a lawyer is generally an extremely expensive proposition for what they get. Just how much a lawyer is willing to "purchase a lead" assumes a whole new meaning with pay per click. The price per click for most lawyer related keywords, e.g., "personal injury lawyer," "criminal defense lawyer," can vary from $5.00 to $70.00 per click depending on the market, and when the conventional lawyer's conversion rate (the quantity of clicks it takes to generate a lead) of one to two percent is factored in, the lawyer can end up paying well over $500.00 to $7,000.00 per lead, and a lead is not just a client.
The main problem lawyers face when they work with pay per click (and this translates straight into poor conversion rates) is that (1) they spend very little 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 there is a constant 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 accomplish what the lawyer requires, that is normally to get hold of the lawyer via e-mail or by phone.
Legal Internet directories and portals provide the lawyer a possible Internet marketing and advertising option for their popularity and enhanced Internet visibility. How effective a listing in a legal Internet directory or portal may be for a lawyer when it comes to marketing, advertising and Internet exposure will depend upon the specific attributes of the legal Internet directory or portal in question. Things being equal, legal Internet directories or portals that charge a fee to be listed in them make more sense as an Internet marketing and advertising choice than similar sites that provide listings for free. The lawyer must be particularly careful, however, when they consider advertising in legal Internet directories and portals that "look" like they provide a lot -- and an amount to choose it -- but also for whatever reasons simply do not produce enough leads for the 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 does not automatically make them good places to advertise. With Internet legal portals especially it's not just how many lawyers the portal attracts but how many individuals the Internet legal portal attracts that are searching for legal services. Folks have paid tens of thousands of dollars for advertising in Internet legal portals that have produced nothing in the manner of Internet marketing and advertising results. An extremely wise idea for any lawyer who considers advertising in a Internet legal portal is to obtain some very accurate user demographics on what kind of specific traffic the Internet legal portal is in fact attracting.
What's a lawyer supposed to accomplish? 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 amount of money they spend is usually hard to achieve.
Ultimately the best way for a lawyer to choose Internet marketing and advertising - the way in which that'll ultimately have them the most effective long haul results for the cash they spend -- is to focus on getting their website to rank saturated in organic search results. When everything are thought, people on the Internet who seek out goods and services mainly seek out websites to get their answers. They may check out legal Internet directories and portals, and should they don't find what they want they might turn to pay for per click listings as a last resource (only about 30% to 40% of users make use of pay per click) but ultimately those who search the Internet are searching for websites that provide them with the answers they seek.
If your lawyer is trying to find an Internet marketing and advertising solution that doesn't require being area of the pay per click crowd, the lawyer may want to explore pay per telephone call programs. Pay per telephone call is similar to pay per click, nevertheless the lawyer does not purchase a phone unless they receive one. And the expenses for pay per telephone call are normally substantially less that what the lawyer will pay for a press in lots of cases. A good lawyer may even wish to consider getting involved with several pay per telephone call providers with the indisputable fact that between the providers the lawyer will receive enough leads in the aggregate to create involvement with your programs worth it.
