Im not questioning the lack of value from SEO firms, but you are grossly underestimating the difficulty of adwords.

Yes, spending an afternoon is enough to get you comfortable using the platform, but that is not all it takes to make adwords work.

How do you write headlines and ads that get clicked? You dont need a crazy amount of copywriting knowledge to do OK with this, but it is a crucial part of the process.

When people click your ads, where do they go? If it is not to a dedicated landing page for that offer, then you are spewing money.

So now you need to dive deeper into copywriting to create your landing page and figure out what your offer should be and how you want to capture the lead's information. If you have a product or service that is a commodity and they are just looking for a quote, this part isnt so bad. If they need more selling, then this part requires a ton of planning if you want it to work.

Now that we have the lead, how do we handle them? Do we have a sales process in place to reliably convert these leads to sales?

Ok, so now we have everything in place and it is time to "monitor and tweak" the campaign. We have a locally targeted service, so our ads get 100 clicks a month. How the **** do we have enough data to even consider testing anything?


TLDR: The adwords platform is not that difficult to learn, but if all you think you need to do is figure that out and then you start making money, you are crazy.

Have you quantified yet how much business this could bring in? The SEO firm was ripping your boss off, sure, but you said the $3-5k/mo was a drop in the bucket. Were the rankings bad? If they were, then sure, spend some time on that if the profit potential makes it worth it. If they werent bad, but not many leads were driven as a result, then fire them and dont waste your time doing it yourself. If they werent bad and they were driving leads, then fire them and hire somebody that knows what they are doing.

Focus your efforts on the areas that can actually generate growth and that cant be easily outsourced.

Well summer is over so it's a slow time and the next few months is finishing projects. The old company used every time someone came to the site and submitted info, that was a lead. But we are spending 30-50,000 a month on other advertising. Radio, magazine, brochures, trade shows, etc...

Building your own link network is definitely time-consuming, but it could be worth it. Buy your domains from domainboy.com and refer to source-wave.com and dripapps.com for advice on setting things up properly if you decide to try it.

I can resell you SEO services through the link network I'm in, but other that I don't know. I did a cursory look and couldn't find much. Posirank.com seems legit but it's geared towards SEO companies that want to outsource a lot of different sites. Source-wave.com used to open up to new clients every once in a while, but they seem closed, I think they're serving higher-end businesses now and selling SEO through webinars. The link network I'm in is closed to new clients because the network is growing fast enough as is (current members reselling SEO or using it own their own sites), and for privacy reasons (it's good to stay off Google's radar as much as possible). Maybe someone else can chime in.

Can someone explain building your own link network?

Private blog network? Yeah, don't do it. Google just wrecked everybody that had PBN's setup. Sites tanked everywhere. The jig is up for some, others are still flying under the radar, for now.

Hey guys, bumping this.

So my dad owns a law firm, and I work for him basically as an office manager. It's a small firm with 2 attorneys and 9 support staff that earns him anywhere from 170k on a down year to 250k on a good year.

At the end of last year he put me in charge of getting a website put up for him. We paid a company $2500 to design a website for us (we are very happy with the way it came out, we do not mind the $2500 design fee even though we probably over paid for it).

The website has been active for about 10 days, and we've already somehow retained a client through it for $3200 which covered the cost of the website design.

They are pushing on us their Advanced SEO services for $790 per month.

Below is what they claim they offer us:

• Advanced Content Customization – Our SEO experts will customize legal content with a high concentration of keywords related to your areas of practice and geographic location(s). We will also manually set all Title tags, H1 tags, H2 tags and Meta Descriptions related to your targeted practice areas.

•Strategic Intra-site Linking – Using the latest in SEO techniques, we will create special links throughout your website to highlight the importance of relevant practice area pages to search engines.

•“Off-site” Search Optimization – We will manually submit your site on a continuous basis to strategic online directories to help establish your website's credibility with search engines. In addition, we will announce the launch of your website with special keyword-rich text links on our blog and social media accounts.

•Social Media Optimization – Creation of social media proƒile pages and regular updates of your accounts upon publication of content we create for your website.

• Dynamic XML Site Maps submitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo.

• 5 pages of unique, highly optimized content written by our attorney content writers.

•Monthly Blog Articles – Search engines prioritize websites that regularly add new, high quality content. To provide fresh,relevant content, we will draft at least 2 monthly blog articles of at least 350 words relevant to area(s) of practice which you are targeting for advanced optimization.

•Annotated News Section – We will draft custom, keyword-rich annotated outbound links to news stories relevant to the targeted area(s) of practice.

• Creation of optimized local listings with Google, Bing and Yahoo.

• Custom proƒile development for each listing.

Can I do all/most of the above myself?

At a quick glance the only thing valuable is creating the content, and I would guess they would suck at that.

Uhh... an SEO firm is going to write high quality legal content? I don't think so.

They will create links within you site? Yawn.

I'm sure Google is going to find an SEO firm blogging about a lawfirm useful.

Most people don't find their lawyers via social media.

Doesn't matter.

If their "attorney content writers" could produce good legal content, they'd be practicing lawyers.

If I were a lawyer, I wouldn't want some idiot SEO firm writing blog posts about the law purporting to be from my law firm.

Yeah... because people love going to their local lawfirm's website for relevant news stories.

Here, do this yourself: http://www.google.com/services/

Whatever that means.


It's a waste of money. If you want to write relevant legal content to attract customers, the lawyers in the firm should be writing it themselves.

It probably wouldn't hurt to have an article or two about one of the key areas of the practice. Like for example, if they specialized in wills, an article might be "Why having a will is important" and have some crap about that. But I wouldn't even say this is for SEO reasons, because it is unlikely any article they write will be high ranking on its own.

People will search for the firm's name, them come to the website. And everything on the website should be marketing as to why this firm is really high quality. Maybe an article will help with that (or maybe not, if you already think the site is high quality enough). But your standard local lawfirm isn't going to become an SEO juggernaut, and there is no way you'd get anything but negative ROI for 10k/year.

I don't disagree that I would not pay these people to do this work.

I do, however, disagree with the notion that a small local lawfirm shouldn't be attempting to become "an SEO juggernaut." I don't know the full breakdown of how these user stories work, but it's simply not true that all people who find a lawyer do it by knowing the firm's name and googling it. There's plenty of people googling "divorce lawyer <location>", and the parallel terms in many legal areas. Weirdly, from what I have heard about this stuff, it's fairly important to get your firm's name attached to the total BS "best firm" lists that basically you pay $50 to get listed on, as many rubes find their lawyers through those paths as well.

Thanks for the responses guys, just confirmed what I thought.