New client just forwarded me the breakup email exchange from her previous agency.
We pay for links monthly.
Know what your agency is doing. The reason the firm reached out to us, was because, despite all the money they had invested, search traffic hadn’t changed. And then we go and find out that their agency has been torpedoing SEO efforts through an unsophisticated link purchasing scheme. Now the client is going to need to pay me an extensive sum to undo the efforts of their previous firm – just to get them back to a reasonable starting point. We call this Janitorial SEO – the cleaning up of the messes of others. It’s expensive and unnecessary.
If you don’t know what your agency is doing for you – it’s reasonable to assume they are buying links, torching your site and you are in for a huge headache (and invoice) down the road.
About a month ago I wrote about the strange case of the solo practitioner, Andrew Calcagano who staffed 66 offices across the tri-state area. Here’s the follow up post regarding his agency, Next Level – who according to one of the testimonials on their site….
“They maximize our exposure in a way no one else does.”
Well, at least that part is true.
Let me start with this: Next Level produces amazing, slick, professional quality video. They also spam the hell out of the legal market across the eastern seaboard. And while Next Level pulled all mention of Calcagno from their website after my post… there were plenty more to do a little review on like:
The Law Offices of John W. Tumelty
Solo practitioner with seven “offices” across the bottom tip of NJ.
Proner and Proner Attorneys at Law
Despite their name “& Proner” and “Attorneys at Law”, the only attorney I can find on the website is Mitchell Proner, although he manages to have no fewer than five different locations.
Team Law
Team Law is upfront about their “appointment only” office space (on their website at least).
Lombardi and Lombardi
This 10 lawyer firm manages to spread their attorneys across 6 offices across the Garden State, although their Point Pleasant locations looks like I might get to order some friend popcorn shrimp along with my legal help.
And according to Yelp, 62 Broad Street is really the location of Jack Baker’s Lobster Shanty – to be fair, perhaps this did get turned into a law office once Jack’s shut down.
I did check out more of their clients’ alleged office spaces and in many cases, found some that might have been genuine spots; athlough there was a strange prevalence of law firms sprinkled inside medical office buildings. But…. the pattern remains, small (even solo) firms, pushing 5-66 different locations is simplty Local Spam. And, to reiterate my point from my previous post: faking office space is stealing, not marketing.
Its stealing from clients who want to hire (and think they are hiring) a law firm who is just down the road. Remember 43% of people make their lawyer hiring decision based on proximity – so faking an office location when you are really 100 miles away is lying about the most important hiring factor to prospective clients.
Its stealing from other lawyers – well positioned in their local community – who are losing out to geographically distant firms. (And sometimes not even firms, but marketing agencies scumbags masquerading as law firms who sell local leads to non-local law firms).
Join me this Wednesday, for a webinar to discuss a case study on a State Bar that stepped in (or “stepped up” to deal with rampant local spam. Join us: Local Spam, Lawyers, State Bars and an Ethical Quandary. (And Next Level Marketing people…. if you’d like to join the webinar and defend your tactics, consider this an open invitation…..)
In our lobby, we’ve recently installed The Mockingbird 10 Commandments – a list of simple principals through which we operate our business. Every time anyone enters the office, they are reminded of the way we do business. (And yes, that’s a beer tap in the picture, and yes, I deliberately included it to communicate tech-nerdy, progressive, kind-of-out-there online agency.) One of my favorite commandments is the following:
It May Not Be Our Fault, But It’s Still Our Problem.
We worry about anything and everything online (and frequently offline) that may impact our clients’ business and take ownership of those issues, even if we had nothing to do with them. One awesome example is the uptime monitor we built to ensure all of our clients’ sites are up and running – and we simply get pinged if there’s an issue. I suspect none of our clients actually know that we do this on their behalf, but we do. (It’s also fun to give a heads up to clients who leave us for a cheaper solution when their site goes down, but I digress.)
And when things go down – we’re the ones who deliver the news – which brings me to Commandment #4:
Proactively Deliver Bad News
So when our client (who is still on a third party
host – yet another reason to work with WPEngine, but I digress again) had their site go down at 4:28am this morning, we got pinged. And we got on it. And we are solving his problem – we found his hosting provider, notified them of the problem (turns out a bunch of their sites went down and they were unaware). We’re working on getting his back up relaunched asap.
Even though it wasn’t our fault… it’s still our problem.
Let me start by saying that I’m calling out a single lawyer here, simply as an example. There are thousands of law firms engaging in these spammy tactics either in-house or through their “agency” or marketing “expert”. And let me also reiterate the point of my latest post:
Faking office locations is NOT marketing – its stealing.
Its stealing from clients who want to hire (and think they are hiring) a law firm who is just down the road. Remember 43% of people make their lawyer hiring decision based on proximity – so faking an office location when you are really 100 miles away is lying about the most important hiring factor to prospective clients.
Its stealing from other lawyers – well positioned in their local community – who are losing out to geographically distant firms. (And sometimes not even firms, but marketing agencies scumbags masquerading as law firms who sell local leads to non-local law firms).
Which brings me to an example of local spam, albeit an extreme one – Solo practitioner Andrew Calcagno who has more offices across my home state of New Jersey than toll booths. In fact…. according to his Google listings, Calcagno staffs no fewer than 66 different locations…
Fortunately, at the Elizabeth Office you can get your acupuncture done while waiting for your lawyer, or your acrylic nails buffed at the Bayonne office.
Hurt on the beach? Try Calcagano’s “office” just one block from the sand, that looks suspiciously like my Aunt Doris might live there during the summer.
And nothing says success like swanky office space at 460 Park Avenue in the heart of New York City…. Except of course, the 17th floor of the building is entirely occupied by Dermatologist, Dr. Steven Victor. How do I know this? Because the very nice receptionist there told me so.
Need a McMansion Litigation Lawyer? Try their “office” on Agress Road in Millstone, NJ
And at least Google won’t get fooled by the Regus office in Hamilton Township…
And it seems that Walmart (or women’s clothing chain, Joyce Leslie) has started offering DWI Legal services as well at their 100 Enterprise Drive in Dover, NJ locations.
Although, double check your car door is locked at the Passaic office….
I could go on and on. Suffice to say I think its highly unlikely an attorney could plead ignorance of an overly aggressive agency creating all of these “offices.” Besides, his website lists about 20 of them directly:
But speaking of overly aggressive agencies, I wondered who might behind all of these listings – afterall a single attorney probably doesn’t have the time to create and maintain 60+ “offices” – regardless of how virtual they may be. So digging just a little further, I uncovered…. post coming tomorrow. 🙂
So…. Since starting Mockingbird, we’ve never proactively sought business. For the most part it has come to us. BUT…. I’m now proactively looking for more immigration attorneys to add to our client list. Over the past two years, we have locked down online marketing for a handful of immigration attorneys. And at the risk of making this sound like I’m selling a set of steak knives or a used Ford Taurus – its an easy, repeatable, fool-proof system that has delivered stupendous results.
I’m writing this this morning after coming out of a conversation with one of our immigration clients that sounded something like this:
“Please turn down the efforts – we’re turning away business – I don’t even bother to reply to half of the voicemails.”
Here’s the inbound traffic growth this client has experienced since we took over his account (from a big box Legal Marketing “Expert”) – he’s now driving 9 times the traffic than prior to our engagement:
Here’s another situation – where we’re driving close to 10 calls per day to a small immigration firm.
Why Immigration? The answer is twofold threefold:
We’ve spent a large amount of time (and money) learning what works and what doesn’t in Immigration.
Much of our effort and experience and learnings are generated from the hypercompetitive markets of Personal Injury, Mass Torts and Criminal Defense. Simply applying the best practices from those aggressive and overcrowded markets to the less competitive and frequently more distributed immigration market is all it takes to make a huge impact.
(And yes, some of this is undeniably due to the xenophobic politics of the day.)
I haven’t crowed too much about Mockingbird’s Premier Google Partner status. (OK – yes that’s uncharacteristic of me, but I digress….)
That picture to the right? That’s Google’s Celena Fergusson, sitting down with Nate Bruns, our Director of Advertising to review our accounts. That means… if we are lucky enough to count you as one of our clients, its not only our eyes, but also some of the best and brightest at Google ensuring that your Adwords spend is working as well as it possibly can.
Worth crowing about – great for me, but even better for our clients.
A month or so ago, I gave an amazing webinar with Local Search nerd and founder of Sterling Sky, Joy Hawkins Frankly, the webinar was awesome because of the subject matter and Joy… this is no humblebrag. Joy and I spent the better part of an hour talking about Local spam…. the underhanded dirty practice of faking office locations as a marketing tactic to artificially expand a law firm’s geographic reach.
During the webinar I made the comment, that this practice is not a marketing tactic, but instead theft… that law firms are stealing business from other lawyers with fake locations. One of the webinar attendees commented, “thank you, thank you, thank you for finally calling this out for what it is.”
So here goes again: Those of you engaged in local spam are stealing, not marketing. And those agencies helping you do so should be shunned.
If there’s any question note this: according to a Google study, 43% of prospects select their law firm based on the proximity of the lawyer – so lawyers faking locations are screwing not only their competitors, but their clients as well.
I’ve seen the devastating impact on the bottom line of many firms who suffer from competitors virtually elbowing their way into a market. In any given month, 10% of our clients’ marketing investment is targeted towards combating those fake listings.
To date we’ve been quiet and private about those firms and agencies marketing with Local Spam caught stealing from our clients. That stops today. More to come….
As a business owner, I’ve mostly eschewed getting political online. That ends now.
Today we announced the candidacy of Jason Rittereiser in his bid to unseat a Republican incumbent in Washington’s 8th Congressional District in the upcoming mid-term elections.
Seventeen years ago, I came to Seattle a die hard, life-long conservative and have found myself slowly leaning towards the center ever since. In 2004, I posted a “Republicans for Kerry” bumper sticker on the back of my VW Jetta. I was thrilled to brush shoulders with Obama at his WA campaign headquarters, which coincidentally was next door to Avvo’s second office. Last year, I notched a protest vote for Jill Stein. I’ve increasingly found myself drawn to what I would have formerly called bleeding heart causes and have often wondered if its a product of the sea air, proximity to Mt. Rainier, or something they put in the chai lattes at Starbucks.
There’s a great line in Inherit the Wind, “maybe it is you who have changed, by standing still.” I’ve come to the conclusion that the shift in political standing isn’t because of my personal changes, but because the conservative landscape has shifted so much underneath the country. I find today’s political miasma nauseating and I look forward to playing a small part in return a semblance of balance to the political system. Thus my deep pride to be working for Jason’s campaign.
I’ll continue to fly my American flag regularly (unlike the majority of Seattleites – seriously you should consider how much it means to people in the service to see those flags flying, but I digress…) and now have a chance to turn Mockingbird’s skills towards the political process. We are providing technical support, design services and of course marketing. I’ve always encouraged Mockingbird’s clients to embrace their true self in their public persona, as I’m 100% certain that people hire people who happen to be lawyers, instead of the other way around. Its past time that I ate my own dogfood….
You can (and should) read more about Jason. More to come (and if you happen to be in the greater Washington area, expect fundraiser invites from yours truly).
my personal changes, but because the conservative landscape has shifted so much underneath the country. I find today’s political miasma nauseating and I look forward to playing a small part in return a semblance of balance to the political system. Thus my deep pride to be working for Jason’s campaign.