The yellow page salesman is giving you the full court press. He has one top listing left in his online directory and he claims a competitor down the street is just waiting to buy it, if you are foolish enough to pass it up. The listing seems great and you don’t want to let a good opportunity pass you by. What is a busy attorney to do? Even if you had the time to do proper due-dilligence how can you? Well you can and you should. Here are a few ideas;
– Demand traffic figures. Any directory worth its salt will have historical data on the number of impressions and click thrus to expect for each listing. If the sales person says he/she does not have access to those numbers , run! In some cases the traffic is so bad that sales people are never told the true statistics. If they did, they would never sell them. In fact there are some FindLaw listings that I would never sell for that same reason.
– Do the searches yourself. A good salesman will only show you searches in which their directory appears in the results. Do searches in each of the major search engines; Google, Yahoo & MSN. Does the directory show up consistently in local & national searches? If they don’t this is a huge red flag and the directory should be avoided. People do not eschew the search engines and go directly to online yellow pages or online directories. (no matter how much they advertise)
– Contact Me! All FindLaw reps have access to real time website traffic reports from every site we host. Thats 14,000 websites! Chances are we have clients that are currently or have advertised in a legal directory that you are considering. This means we can give you a true measure of what to expect traffic wise from just about any law directory in existance. This is also true of our own FindLaw listings.
– If I am not available there are a number of 3rd party websites that measure the reach of different directories. The one that I use is http://www.quantcast.com/. The site uses an advanced algorithm to rank the popularity of different websites and estimates the monthly national audience. Using Quancast, here is a sanpshot of the results from some different legal directories taken on Jan 18, 2008;
Findlaw 1.9 million (monthy uniques)
Lawyers.com 667,000
Nolo.com 475,000
Lawinfo 165,000
Attorney Pages 126,000
Martindale 89,205
Avvo.com 18,305
Lawcore 18,291
*Online Phonebooks
1. Yellow Book 21 million
2. Superpages 10 million
3. DexKnows 6.5 million
It is particularly important to contact me in regards to phone book directories. Despite all of their advertising- their legal listings are typically terrible. I have had just one client stay with them after reviewing their actual traffic.