FindLaw.com is the No. 1 Consumer Legal Website, Online Lawyer Directory – Again

My company just released a press release touting the findings of a recent comScore study which compared the traffic to of various consumer legal websites like Findlaw, Martindale and Avvo. The findings reaffirm what my clients and I have known for years – that FindLaw is the leading online lawyer directory in the Country.

I personally came to this conclusion long ago since all of my sites have a 3rd party tracking system called hitbox. One of my favorite reports to run is called a “referral domain” report. This report tells me where visitors to a site actually came from. In five years, I have never seen another legal directory get more referrals than FindLaw when they had comparable listings.

This happened today when I went over the traffic of a Phoenix immigration lawyer who had top spot listings in both FindLaw and Lawyers.com for immigration law. Over the last 30 days FindLaw garnered the client 67 clicks as opposed to 27 from Lawyers.com. Now, 27 clicks from a directory is very good so I recommended that he keep that listing. The point is that FindLaw brings in more traffic.

Whether you are a client or not – its a good idea to contact me before purchasing a listing of any kind. Chances are, I will have access to historical click data that will either support or undermine a potential purchase. When click data is not available, I can also check with my clients directly. Today a criminal lawyer wanted to know if he should purchase an online video package from a local TV station. Promising exclusive positioning for hundreds of attorney videos on the station’s website (which is getting 800,000 visitors a month) – the deal seemed to good to be true. Adding to the excitement was the fact that the salesman was “nice” enough to hold it open just for him for another few short hours. (Luckily my client had read my article on dealing with high pressure sales reps and took some important steps:

1. He called other attorneys in other jurisdictions that bought the same product.
2. He called me.
The first alarm bell went off when my client talked to 4 other attorneys in different markets. All were brand new clients who offered luke warm reviews. Importantly, none had attributed any definitive cases to the ‘exclusive’ video product. They were, however, still optimistic that the product would eventually work given time.
When my client called me to discuss, I brought up two points right away, 1) if this is the best reference a sales person can muster for an expensive product like this – be afraid, be very afraid and 2) why would this product work better over time? The answer is that it won’t. When you purchase a listing in a directory – you should do so based on the traffic it generates now. Listings should be instant offense, generating significant amounts of qualified traffic via SEO, Advertising, PPC or in this case 800,000 eyeballs a month. If its not working now, it likely never will.
But having said that, I still wanted to do my own due diligence before dismissing it completely. In reviewing the proposed package, I saw that another client of mine had already purchased the same package in a different practice area. (This client forgot my advice on avoiding high pressure sales reps) So I checked his referral domain report and in the last month the exclusive positioning netted him just 6 click thrus. With many of those likely coming from the attorney himself. Ouch!
I sympathize with lawyers who succumb to high pressure sales tactics. In the hyper competitive world of attorney advertising, the prospect of exclusivity can be very compelling. That said, you should always find the time to do these 3 things….
1. talk to at least 3 attorney references
2. demand traffic and click thru data from the sales rep
3. Using your own computer, verify the directory’s position in the search engines (if a directory is invisible to you in searches it will likely be invisible to your clients as well)

And finally if you have the time, by all means give me a call. I am happy to do this due diligence for any attorney in Arizona. I am glad in this case I was able to prevent my friend from making a $30,000 mistake.