What is a Lawyer Domain Worth? I was recently approached about buying a domain. It is a pretty good, narrowly targeted domain name. But what is it worth? This is a difficult question to answer, and it depends on a number of factors.

Open Market Value

There is a huge market in domain names. They are bought and sold on specialized sites like sedo.com and even on ebay. Domain name traders generally value them based on two factors:

Investment Value

Domain names are considered "internet real estate", and this real estate market is booming. Only one person can own "lawyer.com", and the millions of other valuable names. There is considerable speculation in this market about what domains are worth, now and in the future.

Parked Income Value

A domain is "parked" if there isn't a real site behind it. It could be redirected to another site, or it could be parked in a way that generates a page of links that are ads. Most people have seen these sites. You are essentially given nothing to do but click on a link that generates Pay Per Click advertising income for the owner.

For domains that get a lot of referral traffic (a click through from another site) or type in traffic (many people really do just type in "shoes.com" instead of searching for shoes), a good domain name can be a money machine, and is worth some multiple of income value based on standard business ROI metrics.

End User/Developer Value

Domains are generally most valuable to a person who wants to develop a site, and can directly monetize the traffic generated. The two main reasons you may develop a domain are:

Branding

This is fairly obvious. You may want your company or product name in you domain if that brand has marketing value to you. But this can get tricky and expensive if your brand also has significant keyword domain value - you may be competing against people who want the domain possibly for a different market altogether.

Keyword Value

Your keyword is a valuable brand in itself, particularly when it appears in search engine results for that keyword search. If you have search keywords in your domain, it is considered a big advantage. Many people believe that the domain name alone will help you rank for those terms. But regardless of how much it may boost you in the rankings, it is indisputable that when your domain does appear, it will help you in branding, credibility, and click through rates.
A domain with the exact keywords that a person searched for pops out in google search results pages, because the keywords are automatically bolded.
Secondly, when a searcher sees the domain of those keywords, it tends to give you an instant credibility boost - "This is what I am searching for". Of course, you still have to deliver on that promise with your landing page to get anywhere - but that's a separate topic altogether.

So, what's a lawyer domain worth again?

Back to the original question. So any domain has some base value that domain collectors and speculators think it is worth.

However, in most cases a developed site is worth more than a parked site that relies on pure click through ad revenue. That only makes sense - if the site owner is the ultimate destination of those keyword clicks/searches anyway, then you are cutting out possibly several layers of ad delivering middlemen.

In the case of lawyer domains, if you are a New York Immigration Law Firm, then NewYorkImmigrationLawyers.com (just an example) is probably more valuable to you then the average internet domain buyer. But this may be true only if you are in a position to take advantage of the value of the domain. You need to have a site behind it that generates business inquiries (leads) in a cost effective manner, than you are in a position to efficiently monetize.

So, a to a law firm, a keyword rich domain is worth:

(open market value) + (a premium based on the efficiency gained in picking up that traffic) - (the time and effort to actually make that happen).

Labels: domains, keywords, metrics

 

posted by Dave Matson at 12:50 PM  (0) comments

  News Flash: Lawyer PPC avertising is expensive, part 54 Interesting discussion in the Austin criminal defense blogging community about PPC (Pay Per Click) and online advertising budgets. The cost and value of leads is something I spend a lot of time analyzing.

While PPC can certainly be a great way to market your services, it is also very easy to spend it poorly. I suspect that many firms who get in bidding wars for the top keywords slots quickly burn through advertising dollars at a big loss, if they aren't paying careful attention to ROI.

There is more to successful online lawyer advertising than:

1. Buy $20-$50 PPC ads for "top local DUI Lawyer"
2. Pass marketing expenses on to clients
3. Profit!

What Does Your PPC Ad Buy?

Unlike buying yellow pages ads (where you can also easily spend $5000+/month), there is an intermediate step from someone seeing your ad to generating a lead.

When someone clicks on your ad, all you are buying is someone's attention for a very limited time. Most people click away within 3 seconds if a web site doesn't grab there attention, or give them something they were looking for.

So when that searcher clicks on your ad and goes to your web site (your "landing page"), you need to have to have something both compelling and relevant to what they are looking for. It really has to deliver on the promise of the ad that made them click.

How Often Does A PPC Click Become a Real Live Contact (Lead)?

In most industries including legal, 5%-10% is a very strong conversion rate from a PPC ad to a lead. Keep in mind that many people who are searching are not your target customers. It could be that a person finds out his cousin was arrested for DWI, and it curious what might happen to him. Or if someone famous gets arrested, that can often increase curiosity traffic.

So at a 10% conversion for a $50 click (or a 5% conversion on a $25 click), you are spending $500 just to get someone to call or email you.

Leads to Clients

An attorney who knows what he or she is doing, and who knows how to sell his services can probably convert between 10-20% of leads into clients.

So, at that original PPC rate, you are spending $2500-$5000 in client acquisition costs.

Most marketing experts state that businesses with any significant overhead need to return 3-1 on marketing dollars to make a decent profit.

Now you have to charge you clients as much as $15,000 just to make a decent profit, to cover your time, overhead, expenses.

There are probably only a handful of criminal defense attorneys in any given advertising market who get paid 5 figure fees for a DWI charge.

(I'm not even counting whoever the NFL player hires, or Senator or CEO calls when his son gets busted. Those people aren't searching online, so it doesn't matter how much you spend on advertising, you aren't getting that call.)

And if your fees are that high, your probably can't realistically convert nearly that many leads to clients, since you are pricing yourself out of what most of the market can afford. Especially when most of your competition is charging fees that are a fraction of that.

The bottom line is for a criminal law firm to successfully monetize some of the astronomical PPC rates people pay for the most competitive terms, they have to be at the very top of their game at every level.

I personally believe that most of these firms who continue spending at those rates simply aren't paying enough attention to the ROI. Maybe the firms are successful enough overall that they don't notice the thousands of dollars per month they are wasting. (Why not consider buying criminal leads?)

But I'm sure Google stockholders are appreciative. 

posted by Dave Matson at 1:23 PM  (2) comments

  Criminal Defense Lawyer Lead Generation Since I'm primarily focused on the end result of generating leads, and not so much the tactic of SEO/SEM these days, I put up a new page about lead generation for criminal defense lawyers. I talk about what kind of lawyer or law firm is a good candidate for buying leads directly.

The basic point is that if you already have the infrastructure and overhead to manage more client inquiries and handle more clients, it makes perfect sense to buy any leads for which you can generate a return on investment. This certainly would apply to any small business, but the law field is where I'm focused, and most criminal defense law firms are small firms with just a few lawyers, or sole practitioners.

I don't think analyzing ROI is some brilliant insight, but I am constantly amazed how many people I talk to can easily lose sight of the big picture.

Especially when practically everyone in business is spammed with emails about "getting you on the top of google..", etc. As everyone in the internet marketing business knows, virtually all of these are scams or empty promises.

Buying leads is a relatively low risk opportunity as long as you aren't locked into a long term contract. Calculating ROI is as simple as can be, and you'll know within a month or two, and often much sooner, whether the leads you are buying make any financial sense.

For new clients, we even give them at least two weeks of free leads, so they can determine for themselves the quality and value of the service we provide, with no risk.

Labels: law marketing leads

 

posted by Dave Matson at 3:15 PM  (0) comments

  Choosing a Domain Name for a Lawyer Site I largely agree with what David Ward says on the topic of law firm domain names, but he goes off the rails at the end.

If one of your goals is brand building, and for most attorneys it should be, that you want as simple and memorable as possible. That generally means still with .com only, and don't use any hyphens, since no one will remember them if they try to type it in.

I very much like keyword based domains, like kansasimmigrationlawyer.com, but good names like that are often unavailable. Incorporating your firm name or initials will usually net you an available domain, so if your initials are NJF, NJFimmigrationlaw.com is a workable domain. A well targeted keyword in your domain helps it stand out on a page of search results.

For most people, I would not recommend multiple domain names pointing to the same site. There are many ways for this to be done incorrectly that can hurt you in search engine rankings, if they aren't configured properly as a permanent 301 redirect.

There many be a few good reasons to have multiple domains for a Pay Per Click advertising campaign, but that also strikes me as a very advanced strategy where you can easily go wrong.

And adding misspellings as keywords in a PPC campaign is fine, but is crazy for domain names, unless you are in an extremely rarefied and highly competitive area. 

posted by Dave Matson at 11:15 AM  (0) comments

  Lawyers in Search of Leads - Go Make a Deal One alternative or adjunct to the hard work and expense of generating law firm leads online is to find attorneys or web sites that may be generating leads that they don't want, or are more valuable to you, and make a deal for them.

There are real untapped opportunities for off the beaten path regional leads, as well as many narrow specialties.

For example, if you are a criminal defense lawyer in Western Virginia / Roanoke area, I've got a site that generates at least a few leads a month for Reckless Driving and other criminal charges.

I'm basically throwing those leads away since I don't have the time it would take me to find a good local affiliate attorney to handle the relatively small number of inquiries for that area.

I would bet the situation is the same for many of the top ranked sites for "Virginia Reckless Driving lawyer". So if I were an attorney in one of those less populous areas, I'd be contacting all those sites and try to cut a deal for the leads that are too far out for those attorneys to handle. There are probably enough overflow leads to keep an attorney quite busy.

Lawyers are well versed in the business of referrals, so it only makes sense to seek out those referrals where you can find them.



---
Note: this is part of my new year effort to work, think (and post) more about general marketing issues and insights, and not just pure Search Engine Marketing.

Labels: law marketing leads

 

posted by Dave Matson at 11:24 AM  (0) comments

  News Flash: Lawyer Pay Per Click Advertising is expensive Typical article in the New York Times about what everyone in the online lawyer marketing world already knows - many PPC search terms are expensive.

There was much bemusement that personal injury terms and particularly the phrase "mesothelioma attorney" can go for over $50/click. The implications are that there was something unsavory and/or strange about this fact.

The tone of the article clearly suggested that the writer didn't understand much about lawyers or search engine marketing. Or maybe even business.

The bottom line is that if you can acquire customers at a certain rate, and profitably earn back a reasonable margin, then obviously you do that.

No doubt at $50 just to get someone's attention, you either need to be converting a high percentage of these inquiries, or converting a smaller number of them for an extremely high ROI for it all to balance out.

But that's just an issue of successful execution, the core of any successful business. 

posted by Dave Matson at 8:57 PM  (1) comments

  Question of the Week - How Does Google Rank a Site?

Q: For purposes of a websites organic listing, is it only the content and relevancy of the landing page or does google look at the content and relevancy of the entire website? Do I need to just build out my homepage or do I need to build out the entire website in order to increase my organic ranking?

A: Search engines rank pages, not entire websites as a whole.

The reason many home pages tend to be the best ranked pages on a site is because the authority and pagerank that its gets from the links to it, both external links from other sites, and internal links via the navigation of your own site. So putting aside the (critical) issue of the outside links in to your site, the value you can create by building out other pages on your site is tremendous. You have the benefit of complete control over your internal links, so how you choose to link to other pages in your site via the structure of your navigation, and the link text you use is very important.

Also, you can't expect one page to rank for a large set of diverse keywords. No one page can be the best for every search. So you'll want to write other good content on other pages that are thematically related. If the search engines decide that it is a quality page, then the value of the links back to your home page and throughout the site increase.

And none of this considers what is best for your sites' visitors, and for the goals of your site beyond rankings.


Future implied question raised: What makes a quality page?
How should I link throughout my site?
...to be continued in a future Question of the Week. 

posted by Dave Matson at 8:49 PM  (0) comments

  Google Conspiracy Theories I recently had a conversation with someone who expressed a view that there are magical, secret techniques for getting top google rankings. Big companies allegedly pay millions of dollars a year for this information and access. And some SEO firms who are "in the know" can also make this happen.

One piece of evidence was that in one particular relatively competitive niche, "site a" outranked "site b", even though "site b" was clearly "better". Of course "site a" was operated by one of these sneaky SEO firms who had the secret.

Apparently, a number of people in this self-reinforcing circle of Google outsiders agreed that "site b" was much better, and that there was no good ascertainable reason why it was being thrashed by "site a". (Site b wasn't just being thrashed by site a, but by everyone. It was nearly invisible. But I'll address that separately.)

As a Google outsider myself who is vastly skeptical of grand conspiracies (though if someone wants to bring me inside, I'm all for it... email me, I won't tell!), I decided to take up the challenge of looking at both sites and seeing if there might be a simpler explanation.

As it turns out, at least part of the story was true. I agree that "site b" is better than "site a". It has better and broader content, and overall seemed more compelling to me. In fact, site a seemed singularly unimpressive, and in my initial thoughts, it did seem somewhat odd to me that it should rank so highly.

But then a did a little digging. Neither site was all that old, site a went up in 2004, site b in 2005. Site a did have more backlinks than site b, but it was not a huge number, or a massive difference, either.

But after taking a closer look at the backlinks, as it turns out, site a had several extremely strong links from the home page of a very old, extremely authoritative, and topically related site (we'll call it "site x"). Bingo! A quick look at the wayback machine showed that those links had been on that home page for 2 years. Those killer links had been there longer than site b had been in existence! Case closed!

Conspiracy theory? Well, other than the fact that site a and site x were controlled by the same SEO firm, and that the home page links from site x to site a were invisible (no anchor text! - apparently that works if your site has enough trustrank? - slimy, but successful) it all seemed quite cut and dried.

I'll even leave out of the story all the massive problems that site b has (canonical domain issues - some pages in in index as www, some not - lots of pages in the supplemental index - no unique title tags - no meta descriptions tags - possible duplicate content problems - and more), since even if all those problems were fixed, it wouldn't beat site a for the highest traffic keywords, though it would at least get in the ball game.



Ockham, you magnificent bastard, you did it again.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:57 PM  (0) comments