Legal marketing is an ultra-competitive field, and personal injury law in particular is the most competitive category on Google in terms of cost per click. Google also holds law firms to especially high standards, and for good reason: for the prospective client, the cost of choosing the wrong lawyer or getting bad information on a legal topic could be catastrophic.
For those reasons, the cost of choosing the wrong marketing agency is just as catastrophic for a law firm.
There are plenty of agencies out there that will gladly take your hard-earned money and promise you the world in response. What’s at stake is more than just your marketing budget: some of these agencies will violate Google’s Terms of Service, and that could stick you with a penalty that will hurt your site for years to come. It’s the digital marketing world equivalent of having to clean up a mess made by an inexperienced attorney or telling a client that their case was unsalvageable.
Here's how you know whether you have the right marketing agency.
Experience is important
Experience matters in any field, of course, but in SEO (search engine optimization) in particular, there is a lot of inaccurate information out there. Search changes frequently, and even an article from a few years ago may be misleading today. That means anyone with a computer can learn just enough to be dangerous – and any marketing agency that can talk a good enough game may be able to convince you they know what they’re doing. Don’t be fooled.
You need a digital marketing agency that actually understands search, and that only comes with experience. If an agency doesn’t have a long track record of results getting sites to Page One, look elsewhere.
At Big Voodoo, we’ve been in digital marketing for nearly two decades, including in some of the most competitive markets. We understand search, and we pay close attention to Google’s Terms of Service and Quality Guidelines to ensure that our clients are always in compliance with their standards.
Legal-specific expertise is even more important
Again, legal services are the most competitive category on Google. Legal marketing is also much more restricted than most other types of marketing. There are certain things lawyers just can’t say because of Bar advertising rules, and Google is very careful with how it displays legal search results and ads because of the sensitive nature of legal issues.
As such, just because a marketer has gotten great results for retail stores or HVAC contractors doesn’t mean they know what to do for a law firm. In fact, some of the search techniques that work in other verticals are actively harmful in legal. Only a marketing agency that understands the legal marketing landscape and has a track record of results for law firms can be trusted with your marketing budget.
Big Voodoo doesn’t just know legal marketing; we’ve been on the forefront of some of the biggest advancements in the field. For instance, we were the first to recognize that law firms can’t have multiple websites or use shared and virtual office locations and still succeed in search.
Ethics are vital
Attorneys understand this principle well: when someone comes to you with a potential case, you have to give an honest evaluation of all the factors that could affect that case, good or bad. Unfortunately, some marketing agencies don’t hold themselves to that standard. Some will take your money even though they know there are aspects of your business that will make it impossible to rank in search. Others just don’t know what they don’t know.
The outcome is the same – potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars down the drain, for no return, and possibly a Google penalty to boot. That’s the long-term cost of a seemingly affordable short-term contract.
Our policy at Big Voodoo is to screen our potential clients carefully and give a full assessment of whether you have the right foundational pieces to succeed in search. If you have underlying issues, such as a shared office with no unique address, we won’t sell you a website that we know won’t work. We’re invested in our clients, and our goal is to secure your long-term success.
We have the tools and resources to get real results for law firms
There’s a reason 98% of Big Voodoo websites are on Page One within 18 months of launch: we build them the right way, with sound SEO principles and in compliance with both Google’s standards and attorney advertising rules. We built our own AI tool, Sherloq with IBM Watson, to optimize attorneys’ paid media campaigns and gain invaluable insight on high-value leads. And we have an exclusive partnership with Law.com, the most authoritative domain in legal, to drive unparalleled authority to our clients’ sites.
Add it all up, and we have driven over $1 billion in case values for our clients around the country. We didn’t do that by gaming the system. We did it the right way. If you’re ready to take your firm’s marketing to the next level, contact us today.
