Monday, April 25, 2011

SEO for Lawyers?

As an attorney with a website, I get deluged with "experts" who want to help me with my SEO - search engine optimization. Here's excerpts from an e-mail I got today (in italics), with my comments (in regular font):

Hi Warren. I called your office today after seeing your PPC ad on the internet.

We did not get a call. For those who don't know, PPC means Pay-Per-Click - usually ads on Google.

We ... put your practice ahead of your competition ... for just about any way someone can type in a search for your practice areas. Our clients are found organically hundreds of ways right out of the gate. Eventually most are found over a thousand different ways.

I edited out some of the gobbledygook and it still looks like gobbledygook.

Two major things set us apart from any SEO or advertising company with which you’ve spoken or worked. For starters, we only work with a few lawyers per market for particular practice areas.

So you only work with a couple of my competitors? Wonderful.

Second, we have the only automated SEO content manager in the world. When Google makes a change to its rules, we update our content manager and all our clients (we have about 1,300 nationwide) are updated simultaneously.

In other words, they spam Google efficiently.

Please call when you have a few minutes and we’ll see if we are a good fit.

I was going to reply but hit the spam button instead. Here's what I was going to say:

"You have a page titled Search Engine Optimization For Law Firms, so I searched for that phrase. Your website wasn't on the first page. It wasn't on the second page. If you're so good at SEO, you would be on the first page."

Sometimes the e-mail solicitation will say something like: You don't rank on the first page for "new york city personal injury lawyer". Yeah, but I'm not in New York City. I wish these jerks would actually research us before they spam us. But that's life on the internet.

There are some excellent people out there doing SEO work, for lawyers and for other businesses. They don't get their clients through spam e-mails. If you want someone to help you with your SEO, do a search for SEO along with a relevant phrase based on topic ("for lawyers") or geography ("albany ny") or both. Whoever ranks high is probably good at it.

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