“Your profile listing has generated excellent traffic to your website, etc. That typically translates into contacts for firms. As you know, when someone is deciding on a firm to go with, they research it first. Your online profile is making that happen!”

Understanding which profile site has ORGANIC ranking, in your GEO and FOR your practice area, is the first step to determine WHICH online pay-to-play schemes are worth  little of your time and money.   If you search for “[Practice Area] lawyer in [Your GEO]” after replacing the [ ]  with the terms relative to your business, and you DO NOT SEE the site on the first page of Google, don’t waste your money or time.  MOST TIMES they are using Google Ads to have a result on ‘page one’ but why do you want to pay for their campaigns to get traffic. Don’t pay for their ad campaigns, pay for your own!

“People whom DO NOT click to call you on the FindLaw profile listing are the people who click thru to your website and if they contact you, call you on the phone number listed there.  We lose track of these people since we don’t manage your site.”

The biggest warning I would like to raise is when they use one of the lines above to try and sell you, “managing your website”.  Putting your firm’s website in the control and ownership to manage by FindLaw, Justia or AVVO can be some of the worst decisions I have ever seen a law firm make with their marketing.  Not only do they not own their site, and continue to pay ridiculously high prices, but they lose the best benefit of owning your own website, reaping the future reward of today’s labor.  Management fees of over $1k+/month will rarely be cost effective unless they are putting in the work to drive future results.

“How many people have called the office and when you asked how they heard about you they replied “the internet”?  Most people don’t know what FindLaw is – they got to you thru Google, so it is likely these say the internet or Google as the source.”

 From experience, I have never seen a law firm with more than 10% of their total lead sources coming from any given profile site; EVER.   There is a large subset of searchers that look for ‘3rd party verification’ which the directory sites give the impression of providing.  

Some of these sites can charge upwards of $1200/year for a premium listing.   Not only this but they will also try to sell some type of “advertising package”, which most likely can not be tracked, quantified OR optimized!