Yet another marketing spam:
Hello.Boy, lawyers must have a reputation for being a bunch of rubes.
Have you been to Google lately to see if a listing of your law firm‚s website appears on the first page of search results? If it is not there, you may be losing a lot of business to your competitors.
To check it, go to google.com and enter the name of your town and the word „attorney.‰
If it is not listed, we can list it on the first page of search results within 24 hours. We have done this for hundreds of professionals like you.
We charge monthly for this service. There is no contract. In most cases, the cost is $49.95 per month. To learn how much it would cost in your city, please visit the website at the address below:
http://www.attorneyweblinks.com
Sincerely,
Joseph F. Alward, PhD
Spectrum Web Design and Advertising
2524 Bonniebrook Drive
Stockton CA 95207-1304
(209) 473-8423
(800) 506-5866
For most people, having your law firm pop up under such a generic search term is worthless. If you handle bankruptcy cases, you need qualified leads, not just random people searching for attorneys in your town. (And what about people searching for "lawyers" instead of "attorneys"?)
Worse, from following the link, all this site is doing is offering to purchase you AdWords ads under that generic search term. I doubt many people are using that search term for your town. Also, this type of flat fee deal creates a perverse disincentive for the marketing company, in that it is selling "pay per click" ads and will make more money if your ad is sufficiently unappealing that it doesn't generate many clicks.
If you want to find out how much it actually costs to set up an ad campaign like this for your town, open a free AdWords account, set up an ad, and see how much they project as the cost. You can even authorize a maximum monthly budget of $49.95.
Also, make sure you're registered with local search - it's free, and may get you a link next to a map at or near the top of the first Google search results page.
It's true that anyone can set up their own AdWords account and create their own listing on Google. Often, the cost to have your listing appear for a search phrase such as "YourCity attorney" will be less than $49.95 per month, provided you're satisfied with a listing near the bottom of the page, where it might go unnoticed.
ReplyDeleteIf you wish to have your listing appear at the top left, or top right, the cost might be much greater than $49.95 per month. If you wanted "Dallas attorney" to cause your listing to appear at the top left, you would end up paying Google hundreds of dollars per month. We try to make a profit on our advertising, but we understand that if the client doesn't get a fair return on his investment, we will soon lose him as a client. We want there to be lots of visitors to the site to maximize the client's profit, but not so many vistitors that the cost to us is greater than what we charge the client. It often is a delicate balancing act.
The client can do the advertising himself, but it takes time to ensure that the listing doesn't fall off the first page, and he is paying us for our expertise in determining the optimum ad text and placement, and the time we spend doing this.
Joseph F. Alward
Spectrum Web Design
Yes, I covered how ineffective, unappealing AdWords campaigns can be run for less than $49.95 per month. I didn't discuss that it's possible to pay more for higher placement, as I wasn't giving a tutorial about the AdWords bidding process but yes - if you want an appealing ad campaign in the legal services, or if you want top placement for desirable keywords, to put it mildly you'll have a hard time doing that for less than $49.95 per month.
ReplyDeleteAs you know, it's easy to guarantee yourself a profit in this equation - you simply stop the spend after what? $25 or $30? And you show your client a log sheet demonstrating that you got them X visits at Y/click - and without conversion tracking or special landing pages they don't have a clue whether that translated into any new business. But it's a small amount of money, so perhaps they'll keep renewing, right?