Over the past 20 years, a small number of digital marketing agencies have built a significant reputation in legal marketing, and bolstered their market share through aquisitions of highly effective competitors.
Several issues have consistently cropped up in our conversations with former clients of these companies that should raise concerns when you are choosing the best digital marketing company for your law firm.
The primary focus of most high cost legal marketing agencies is Pay Per Click ("PPC") advertising. The minimum contractual requirement is often $48,000+ per year for the PPC ads, and the agency charges for agency administration of the ads than generally runs 25-100% of the PPC budget. In fact, we've even heard of agencies charging $4,000 per month to oversee $1,000 per month in PPC costs!
The benefit of PPC ads is that they can have a quick positive effect. The downside is you are "renting" the traffic and as soon as you quit spending on PPC, the traffic is gone. It is also very expensive traffic. The combination of high-value cases, competition, and Google’s PPC requirements creates a perfect storm of massive costs. Recent data shows:
There are also limitations to what you can pay to advertise.
In many cases a "set it and forget it" approach is taken. The agency finds keywords related to your field of law and then bids on them and lets the campaigns keep going. The campaigns are not checked, stopped, revised to improve efficiency. Usually, the words you don't want, are not disavowed to prevent spending on useless clicks.
Legal PPC is very expensive in the United States. It is also be ineffective. We've been approached by law firms that have spent more than $100,000 on mass tort marketing campaigns and received zero clients.
A minimum budget of $4,000 per month to Google does not include the agency fee, which can run up to $4,000 per month in addition. This is far outside the budget for many smaller law firms.
One of many problems is that without strong content on your web site (another problem discussed below) your Quality Score will not provide you the best position for PPC ads, and backlinks will have far less effect.
As discussed below, unless your agency is also blocking bot traffic, you could be spending a lot of money on click fraud; fraudulent clicks that will never convert to real clients.
TGDM does not believe PPC should be a law firm's primary focus for digital marketing. It is an expensive way to get short term business, with little long term benefit. The fact that large marketing agencies push PPC as the primary method of marketing demonstrates their goal of maximizing their profits without a comprehensive plan to benefit your business. The reality is that long term benefit requires work. Unless you can find an agency like TGDM that is dedicated to providing high quality services that require expertise and hard work, your digital marketing campaigns will never truly deliver the best outcomes possible for your business.
Pay Per Click advertising can be useful in some cases to generate quick results, but PPC is very expensive for law firms seeking high value cases. This is particularly true for cases where case values are high and competition is high such as trucking law, asbestos / mesothelioma, catastrophic injuries, medical malpractice cases, and mass tort cases. In fact, legal keywords in the United States are amongst the most expensive of all PPC campaigns in Google internationally.
Unless there is a compelling reason to start with PPC, we first concentrate on a web site's fundamentals. As discussed in our Complete Guide to Google Ranking, there are many issues that need to be resolved and developed in order to provide Google an understanding of your web site and give the PPC ads something to link to in order to convert a potential client coming from a PPC ad. This will also help your Quality Score to provide you the best position for PPC ads.
When PPC is warranted or needed, our PPC strategists focus on targeted PPC campaigns to minimize costs and maximize business. We narrowly tailer specific ad campaigns for the clients or business you seek and then block words or phrases that might attract clicks that are not viable clients. This maximizes the beneficial effect of PPC while reducing the costs of PPC advertising. Oddly, very few agencies do this. They want you to see they are getting clicks from their work, even when those clicks have no potential of being a client.
There is an additional way we maximize PPC's benefit. Rather than "set it and forget it," as is common at many legal marketing agencies, we create PPC campaigns and then repeatedly analyze the data and change campaigns to optimize performance. This is the way our PPC team learned to efficiently and effectively generate business from Fortune 100 company marketing directors. We have the tools to make this powerful marketing automation move your website to the top of the list.
We offer a user-friendly reporting platform so you can see real-time updates on how your PPC campaign is performing. If it isn't working we discuss why and either make changes to the campaigns, or discontinue PPC.
While some legal marketing agency websites look sleek, they’re built on a proprietary platform owned by that agency. This can make it difficult for you to add or edit content yourself, which can require someone on the agency's team to bill for every change you make to post or edit content on your web site.
The bigger problem with a proprietary platform occurs if the agency fails to perform and you end your contract. If you decide to leave the agency, you can’t take your web site with you. The company holds your web site hostage making transitions difficult and costly.
Beyond this, some agencies will not build your law firm a new web site unless you agree to $48,000+ per year advertising budget for a minimum of two years.
At Trial Guides Digital Marketing you can pay for a custom built law firm web site on a standard platform, either hosted on the web hosting company of your choice, or hosted on our world class, highly secure Content Distribution Network (CDN). We do not use a proprietary web site back end that requires an ongoing marketing services contract with us.
If you leave Trial Guides Digital Marketing, you own your web site. We simply hand over the keys and you get to run it yourself or with another agency. This is part of our company's 20+ year mission to provide lawyers highly effective solutions at a reasonable price.
You can choose to continue hosting with our hosting company (and paying for the hosting each year), or you can move the web site to another host of your choice.
We do not require a multi-year advertising contract with a minimal advertising budget to build your law firm web site. If all you want is the web site, that is all you need to pay for. If you leave, you own the web site and all of the architecture and content you purchased.
High quality content is the most important factor in web site ranking. The problem for most legal marketing agencies is that creating high quality legal content isn't simple. Particularly writing legal content in language that is simple enough to rank highly on Google.
Many law firms report not having access to detailed data about which keywords are driving conversions and bringing in their best cases from their large legal marketing agency. This lack of transparency makes it challenging if not impossible to optimize your marketing effectively, or decide how to expand your digital marketing to increase your business.
One of the unique things about working with Trial Guides Digital Marketing is that we've been in legal publishing for over 20 years, and have a deep understanding of legal content that is relevant to potential clients as well as referring lawyers. We are one of few legal marketing agencies that provide web site content writing services that are directly relevant to your practice areas and topics of greatest interest to potential clients and referral sources. This is one example of how our high quality content has lead to significant cases for our clients.
Trial Guides uses leading web analytics programs and SEO audits to understand and report how web site users are finding you. We offer a user-friendly reporting platform so you can see real-time updates on how your web site, digital marketing, email and social media are each performing. We have monthly meetings with our customers to discuss what is happening with our joint digital advertising efforts. We also seek feedback from our customers regarding our focus for the following months.
We also track news on particular legal topics. In the event an important news story pertaining to your area of legal practice hits the news, we may contact you to move quickly on an emerging story that will either lead to increased web site traffic, or give you the chace to obtain new clients from the newsworthy event.
The primary focus of high cost legal marketing agencies is high priced paid advertising. While they may offer some SEO services, many firms find these to be basic or rudimentary compared to agencies specializing in organic search.
As discussed above, Pay Per Click advertising can be useful in some cases, but PPC is very expensive for law firms seeking high value cases.
Trial Guides Digital Marketing concentrates first on all aspects of SEO for law firms. As discussed in our Complete Guide to Google Ranking, there are many aspects of a web site that need to be developed and perfected in order to achieve a high Google ranking. Content is a major part of Google ranking and the creation of legal web sites is one part of our SEO services. Technical issues including web site load speed, headline tagging, and other site architecture issues can significantly impact potential clients finding you online.
The reality is that creating a web site for long term benefit requires work. Unless you can find an agency like TGDM that is dedicated to providing high quality services that require expertise and hard work, your digital marketing campaigns will never truly deliver the best outcomes possible for your business. You will not get long term benefit from an agency that only focuses on PPC ads that are easy for them to run and highly profitable for the legal marketing agency, while being very expensive for you.
Large legal marketing agencies often require long-term commitments of two years or more. Even after the first two year contract is completed, it can be difficult to break away from one of these legal marketing agencies if you’re unsatisfied with the results. As discussed above, it can also be very difficult to leave because they own the platform upon which your web site is built.
At Trial Guides Digital Marketing you can pay for the services you want. If you discontinue our services, you own your web site. We simply hand over the login information and you get to run it yourself or with another agency. This is part of our company's 20+ year mission to provide lawyers highly effective solutions at a reasonable price. You can choose to continue hosting with our hosting company (and paying for the hosting each year), or you can move the web site to another host of your choice.
If we do work for your law firm such as developing new web site architecture, new or revised practice area pages, blog posts or other assets for email or social media, you also own the work created for you during your contract.
We do not require a multi-year marketing contract with a minimal advertising budget. If all you want is the web site, we will provide you a quote and that is the cost. That is all you need to pay for. It does not come with a requirement for an additional $100,000 in Pay Per Click advertising, for which the agency will also charge you another $100,000 for servicing those ads.
If all you want is web site work, that is all you will pay for. If you want content written that is what you will pay for. If you leave, you own the web site and all of the architecture and content you purchased.
All this said, the less you do, the less likely it is that you will succeed. A web site alone won't get you much business if any. We require a one year minimum for marketing services because it takes time to achieve results, particularly without PPC. But, the services covered during that one year period are determined after we meet with you to create a marketing plan that is focused on providing the best outcome for the budget you provide. We do not require minimum PPC budgets.
Without a minimum duration of one year, you might believe that the web site structure and content work we are providing does not work, when our experience demonstrates it will with a sufficient joint effort between your law firm and our agency.
Clients often feel they’re paying too much without seeing a return on investment.
This issue goes back to large legal marketing agencies' prioritizing PPC for law firms so that the agency's work is minimal and they can charge a high administration fee based upon the law firm's advertising spend with Google.
As discussed above, PPC is an easy but expensive solution that only works as long as you continue to pay for clicks. Putting most or all of your marketing money into PPC and PPC administration costs is a poor choice because you aren't building any equity in your online presence and reputation. As soon as you stop spending, the traffic is gone.
Given the high expense, and the likelihood of click fraud, many well respected lawyers do not buy any PPC for their practice area. It is simply too expensive to provide a positive return on investment. But, if you are willing to give a large legal marketing agency money to run PPC ads, they will be happy to charge you 25-100%+ for an administration fee.
We recommend a multifaceted approach that provides law firms a larger long term return on investment for their advertising budget. The type of legal marketing work we do takes more work for our agency than administrating PPC campaigns. But, we recommend this approach because it is more effective for our customers.
A law firm's active participation can multiply the benefit of our work, thereby maximizing the law firm's marketing ROI. An example is what happened for this lawyer, who as a solo lawyer achieved web traffic of over 1,000,000 views per month and obtained multiple $1,000,000+ cases from our combined efforts. His total payments for all marketing are $3,000 per month. The law firm does no PPC marketing.
As discussed below, you are competing against law firms that spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on marketing. Morgan & Morgan has a massive internal marketing team and thousands of administrative workers to communicate with potential clients 24 hours a day. Law firms can only hope to compete by thoroughly optomizing their web site and hitting multiple other marketing channels to drive traffic to their law firm.
As a small law firm you can also get good cases without a large marketing budget, but you need to actively work with a high quality legal marketer such as TGDM to identify your area of practice and develop a plan of how to attract those clients to your practice.
Large legal marketing agencies count irrelevant leads and clicks as valid, inflating lead numbers.
These inflated numbers generally result from one of the three following problems:
Each of these is discussed below.
When PPC is warranted or needed, our PPC strategists focus on targeted PPC campaigns to minimize costs and maximize business.
This method is used by marketers at Fortune 100 companies, and maximizes the beneficial effect of PPC while reducing the costs of PPC advertising.
Oddly, very few legal marketing agencies do this even when most of their business is focused on PPC. They want you to see they are getting clicks from their work, even when those clicks have no potential of being a client.
Bots have been engaged in click fraud for many years. AI has made this even more problematic. 47% of all web traffic is from bots. Other sources suggest that once AI bots are added, the figure rises to 80% of all web traffic.
These bots can click on your PPC ads, creating significant costs with no potential for return on your investment. It is estimated that companies lost $238.7 billion in 2024 from bots clicking on ads.
Trial Guides Digital Marketing uses methods to block and minimize bot traffic that impacts your PPC ads, improving your return on investment for high cost PPC ads.
Sadly, some competitors will engage in "black hat" conduct that results in clicks to spend your ad revenue. This can take a variety of different forms including attempts to black list your web site, add honeypot or spamtrap emails to your email list, and employ bots to click your PPC ads and spend your ad budget.
While it can be difficult to trace, Trial Guides Digital Marketing uses methods to block and minimize bot traffic that impacts your PPC ads, improving your return on investment for high cost PPC ads.
(We also have experience reviving damaged law firm domains that have sustained significant reputation damage due to web site attacks and phishing emails from a law firm domain, and turned it around to help the law firm receive a high domain authority score and over 1,000,000 visits per month.)
Unless your law firm marketing agency is also blocking bot traffic, you could be spending a lot of money on click fraud; fraudulent clicks that will never convert to real clients.
We implement technology that tracks what calls and online leads come from the web site, or our marketing campaigns. That way you have transparency in terms of where leads are coming from and what types of marketing are providing the best return on investment.
Clients report a high volume of unqualified leads that don’t convert into cases.
By prioritizing PPC ads over content, results in bad quality leads. Whether potential clients view your web site from PPC ads, organic traffic, or as a source of confirmation of your quality after a personal referral, your web site needs to confirm that you are the best lawyer for that person.
Running PPC ads to an undeveloped web site that doesn't convey value, will lead to only poor quality clients hiring your firm.
We develop high value content on law firm web sites to ensure that regardless of the way people get to your web site, they find high quality content there that assures them that your law firm is the best firm for their needs.
Getting a high volume of leads is much easier than getting a low volume of high quality cases in a specific area of law. You simply go for the largest audience in an unrestricted way. For law firms wanting significant volume this can result in some lower quality contacts.
The much larger challenge is getting only the highest quality cases in a narrow area of legal practice. But, this is where our background as a legal publisher with over 20 years of experience in law is most helpful. We understand the difference between high volume - low litigation law firms and low volume-high litigation firms.
We've been retained by leading litigation firms that are seeking only high value cases in specific fields of law. We've created specific methods for these firms.
There is an additional problem with law firm marketing agencies that prioritize PPC for personal injury law firms that specialize in catastrophic injury cases. Google will not allow PPC advertising for certain topics that are graphic or that involve serious injuries. As a result, unless you have content on your web site that will get organic traffic from a high Google ranking, personal injury law firms will not get the most severe injury cases using PPC advertising.
Similarly for sexual abuse law firms, it is unlikely that you will be able to advertise for these cases via Google PPC as these ads are similarly prohibitive as exploitive or potentially impacting a vulnerable person. As a result, your web site must address these cases to get organic traffic from a high Google ranking, as it is highly unlikely you will get them from a law firm marketing agency that prioritizes PPC advertising.
Websites frequently rank low in search results despite marketing efforts.
There can be a number of problems with content from large law firm marketing agencies. One aspect is there may not be any meaningful content. As discussed in our extensive overview of Google ranking factors, the quality of content is key to web site ranking. Instead some of the large legal marketing agencies post content that provides no unique insights or calls to action for potential clients to contact your law firm.
The content can be too short. Large law firm marketing agencies often post content with under 300 words, when we know the Google is most likely to rank content with substantially more content.
The content posted by large legal marketing agencies often has no headings or images. It’s simply a few paragraphs of worthless content.
Another key issue is that large law firms often post content that is only tangentially related to your practice field and is not intended to result in new client calls. Look through your blog posts and ask "How will getting traffic from people searching for this topic help our firm get more clients?" The answer often is, it won’t. (Ask your marketing company for their rationale as sometimes there are reasons for posting something that seems unrelated to getting clients, but helps your site's authority score. In which case the end effect is that you will get new clients as a result.) Unless there is justification, this type of content simply does not justify the several thousands of dollars per month it’s costing this firm.
In some cases, customers that have been paying $36,000+ per year for marketing services, only are getting $100 of organic traffic per month. That is a horrible outcome.
As discussed above, large law firm marketing agencies's preference for PPC advertising doesn't build value in your law firm web site. As soon as you stop paying for PPC traffic, it is gone. Your web site won't rank high in Google because the agency doesn't prioritize long term value from organic traffic.
Trial Guides Digital Marketing concentrates first on all aspects of SEO for law firms. As discussed in our Complete Guide to Google Ranking, there are over 250 aspects of a web site that need to be developed and perfected in order to achieve a high Google ranking. Content is a major part of Google ranking and the creation of legal web sites is one part of our SEO services. Technical issues including web site load speed, headline tagging, and other site architecture issues can significantly impact potential clients finding you online. If your law firm marketing agency isn't prioritizing these, then the only traffic you will get is PPC that you pay for. As discussed above, much of your advertising budget on PPC can be used by click fraud caused by bot traffic.
By contrast, our law firm marketing agency helps law firms obtain long term free organic traffic in specific areas or subspecialities of law by optimizing your web site. That way you continue to get free clicks from organic traffic even if you decide to not pay for Pay per Click ads.
Clients don’t own their websites, which are built on an agency's proprietary platform, creating difficulties in switching providers.
At Trial Guides Digital Marketing you can pay for a custom built law firm web site on a standard platform, either hosted on the web hosting company of your choice, or hosted on our world class, highly secure Content Distribution Network (CDN). You own your web site.
This means that if you leave Trial Guides Digital Marketing, you get to run it yourself or with another agency. You can choose to continue hosting with our hosting company (and paying for the hosting each year), or you can move the web site to another host of your choice.
Clients find it hard to make changes to their website content without going through some of the large legal marketing agencies. You do not want to go through your marketing agency for every post or edit you want to make on your web site because it will be costly and result in delays to time dependent news related to your field of law.
The difference of a day in posting content can make a notable difference in your firm's ability to rank for a news story or emerging case.
Trial Guides Digital Marketing believes that an optimal law firm marketing relationship involves participation by the law firm and our agency. One or more designated people at the law firm should have access to the law firm web site and have the ability to post content that may be technical or require the specialized knowledge of an experienced lawyer in your state.
In other cases, you may want to do a quick blog post on a new case law ruling or news story that you believe is pertinent to your practice.
We've had particular success mixing blog posts that are optimized for Google ranking with lawyer's highly technical and detailed content that satisfies Google's desire for thorough content on a particular query.
Law firms want a web site that is accesible to both law firm staff and the firm's legal marketing agency. You do not want to go through your marketing agency for every post or edit you want to make on your web site because it will be costly and result in delays that can cause problems ranking.
We build law firm web sites that are based upon your budget and business goals. Content is a major part of Google ranking and the creation of legal web sites is one part of our SEO services.
Creating a web site for long term benefit requires cooperative work of both the law firm and the law firm marketing agency. Unless you can find an agency like TGDM that is dedicated to providing high quality services that require expertise and hard work, and you can actively participate in your web site content, your digital marketing campaigns will never truly deliver the best outcomes possible for your business.
Difficulty reaching knowledgeable representatives, often only speaking with the assigned account manager.
When you become a client of our law firm marketing agency, you meet with one or more of our directors. Every month after that, you will have a meeting with one or more directors of the agency.
Every employee and contractor of Trial Guides Digital Marketing is vetted and trained before starting on client accounts. While you may be assigned an account manager for issues that arise throughout a month, you will continue to have access to our directors if there is a problem.
Concerns about being assigned junior account managers with little experience.
Having an inexperienced account representative assigned to your account is a common problem at all marketing agencies, including at large law firm marketing agencies. This is particularly true if you are spending less than other customers of the law firm marketing agency. We've experienced this in our parent company, Trial Guides, which has worked with large outside marketing agencies, who assigned us inexperienced account representatives that were less knowledgeable than our in-house marketing team.
As a result of these negative experiences, Trial Guides Digital Marketing, works differently. The marketing work on all accounts is overseen by one of our directors, who create the plans for each client and then oversee the work of other marketing staff. We are committed to ensuring every client gets highly experienced legal marketing services regardless of your monthly marketing budget.
Complaints about delayed responses to urgent or time-sensitive case opportunities.
You do not want to go through your marketing agency for every post or edit you want to make on your web site because it will result in delays to time dependent news related to your field of law. Quick posts on breaking news or mass casualty events will be given preferential treatment in Google ranking. This is particularly true if your web site is already well developed and considered authoritative.
The difference of a day in posting content can make a notable difference in your firm's ability to rank for a news story or emerging case.
Law firms want a web site that is accesible to both law firm staff and the firm's legal marketing agency. You do not want to go through your marketing agency for every post or edit you want to make on your web site because it will be costly and result in delays that can cause problems ranking for cases that you want.
Some customers of large law firm marketing agencies are unclear on how ad spend is managed and where the money is going.
Trial Guides uses leading web analytics programs and SEO audits to understand and report how web site users are finding you. We offer a user-friendly reporting platform so you can see real-time updates on how your web site, digital marketing, email and social media are each performing. We can implement technology to track phone calls and on site client intake forms.
Beyond your ability to view these on an ongoing basis, we have monthly meetings with our customers to discuss what is happening with our joint digital advertising efforts, how money is being spent and the outcome of that marketing spend. If a particular campaign is working, we can push that method harder. By contrast, if a particular type of marketing isn't working we will make ongoing changes or discontinue spending on that type of marketing so that we can maximize your marketing return on investment.
Some clients of large law firm marketing agencies don’t feel they are getting sufficient new cases despite the high marketing spend. This can be caused by one of two issues;
Large law firm marketing agencies prioritizing PPC ads over content, often results in poor quality leads. Whether potential clients view your web site from PPC ads, organic traffic, or as a source of confirmation of your quality after a personal referral, your web site needs to confirm that you are the best lawyer for that person.
Running PPC ads that point to web pages that are not directly on point for the ad is problematic. PPC ads that direct users to a web site that is undeveloped that doesn't convey value or instill confidence in potential clients, will lead to only poor quality clients contacting your firm.
We develop high value content on law firm web sites to ensure that regardless of the way people get to your web site, they find high quality content there that assures them that your law firm is the best law firm for their case.
Getting a high volume of leads is much easier than getting a low volume of high quality cases in a specific area of law. It is easy to get the phone to ring if you spend enough money on advertising. You simply go for the largest audience with PPC, which is why a lot of law firm marketing companies spend heavily on PPC. For law firms wanting significant volume this can result in cases of all types of quality - some good and some bad.
The much larger challenge is getting only the highest quality cases in a narrow area of legal practice to call. But, this is where our background as a legal publisher with over 20 years of experience in law is most helpful. We understand the difference between high volume - low litigation law firms, and low volume-high litigation law firms. The way we market these two different segments of the law firm market are drastically different. If your law firm marketing company doesn't understand the difference, and fails to address your marketing differently, you will never achieve your goals.
We've been retained by leading litigation firms that are seeking only high value cases in specific fields of law. We've created specific methods for these firms that reduces the number of calls to primarily those who are seeking a law firm that is aligned with your practice.
Difficulty competing against big firms, like Morgan & Morgan, with large advertising budgets.
According to a Forbes article on John Morgan, Morgan & Morgan spends $350 million in marketing per year. With our parent company Trial Guides being the publishing company for John Morgan and Keith Mitnik, we've interacted with the law firm's marketing department which has over 150 highly capable marketers in digital marketing alone.
Few law firms can compete with the marketing budget of Morgan & Morgan or a number of other large national or international law firms moving into new markets throughout the United States. But, you can capture a valuable part of your local market share with intelligent digital marketing strategies.
TGDM is a law firm marketing agency that helps law firms survive large national law firms moving into your state. For proof, see our case studies, which demonstrate how small law firms can create a very strong reputation in their local area and continue to get great cases. In one of these cases, we even helped a firm get several highly competitive mass tort cases even though we were hired late and solely limited to handling the firm's SEO.
At the end of our fourth month of working together, the client had more than 750 featured snippets through Google search ranking. Solely through our work, their estimated traffic value from Trial Guides' content was more than $20,000 a month. This case demonstrates how we helped this much smaller law firm compete head to head with Morgan & Morgan for the same mass tort cases even though we were hired just a few months before the claim deadline, and were not the company running the law firm's PPC campaigns or any other form of marketing.
Some law firms feel that large law firm marketing agency's strategies are too cookie-cutter and not tailored to their specific needs.
Given our 20+ year history in legal publishing, we understand that no two law firms are alike. Each law firm is different with a different focus on practice, case selection criteria, and goals. These can also change over the life of a law firm.
Some law firms want high volume and do not want to litigate cases. Getting a high volume of leads is much easier than getting a low volume of high value cases in a specific area of law.
Other law firms want fewer clients with higher value cases and are ready to litigate cases.
Other law firms want only a specific type of case in a subspeciality of law.
It is easy to get the phone to ring if you spend enough money on advertising. You simply go for the largest audience with PPC, which is part of why large law firm marketing companies spend heavily on PPC. For law firms wanting significant volume this can result in cases of all types of quality - some good and some bad.
The much larger challenge is getting only the highest quality cases in a narrow area of legal practice to call.
After 20+ years in the legal industry, we understand that law firms have different goals and practice methods. The way we market law firm is different for every firm based upon your practice area, practice method and goals. If your law firm marketing company doesn't understand the difference, and fails to address your marketing differently, you will never achieve your goals.
Black hat SEO is the practice of using spam, and manipulative marketing tactics, to game search engines, and achieve fast (but weak) rankings. Perhaps the best known black hat SEO tactic is paying for links, a practice that violates Google’s Webmaster guidelines.
Not all links are created equal. Google wants web sites to link to content they find useful as a way of endorsing that content. In this way, links are intended to operate as votes of authority and trustworthiness.
"Link farms" is a term for web sites that provide reciprocal links to and from multiple other web sites. More recently these have been called Private Blog Networks or PBNs.
Some of the largest law firm marketing agencies have provided a quick lift to law firm web site rankings by linking a highly authoritative site (their own with millions of links) and a high Authority Score to the new client's law firm site. Google penalizes "link farms" and quickly after getting the link from the law firm marketing agency, your web site can be penalized.
Google doesn’t want black hat SEOs using networks of spam websites to artificially pass PageRank to websites that have little value. Through a Google algorithm update called Penguin, Google became better, and more aggressive, at punishing webspam including law firm marketing agency link farms. Link schemes, paid links, and spam link building were all hard hit by Penguin.
When Penguin first rolled out Google’s head of webspam at the time, Matt Cutts, wrote a blog post entitled, “Another Step to Reward High Quality Sites.” In that post, Matt advises web site owners to create great sites, rather than trying to game the algorithm:
We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.
It’s no coincidence that certain large law firm marketing companies' clients saw drops in the performance of their websites after Penguin. Penguin has refreshed numerous times since. Many large law firm marketing agency clients are still using penalized domains, unaware of the implications of their agency's link-farm activities.
Worse yet, if you have an increased authority score by being affiliated with one of these large agencies, once you discontinue services and lose all of the high authority backlinks, your web site ranking will plummet. Law firms that have discontinued services with these agencies have seen their ranking drop from page 1 to undiscoverable due to the loss of authority ranking when one or more authoritative sites cut their backlinks to your web page.
We don't engage in any Black hat SEO, including link farm activity. This way, if you discontinue marketing services with us, you will not lose valuable backlinks that will plummet your Google ranking.
A failure to monitor PPC ad campaigns and limit click fraud can result in significant costs with no return.
Click fraud has been a problem for advertisers since the dawn of internet advertising. AI has made this even more problematic. In 2024 47% of all web traffic was from bots. As of mid-2025 some sources suggest that AI bots are adding to this quickly - with bots accounting for 80% of all web traffic.
These bots can click on your PPC ads, creating significant costs with no potential for return on your investment because they are not potential clients. It is estimated that companies lost $238.7 billion in 2024 from bots clicking on ads.
Trial Guides Digital Marketing uses methods to block and minimize bot traffic that impacts your PPC ads, improving your return on investment for high cost PPC ads.
Sadly, some competitors will engage in "black hat" conduct that results in clicks to spend your ad revenue. This can take a variety of different forms including attempts to black list your web site, add honeypot or spamtrap emails to your email list, and employ bots to click your PPC ads and spend your ad budget.
While it can be difficult to trace, Trial Guides Digital Marketing uses methods to block and minimize bot traffic that impacts your PPC ads, improving your return on investment for high cost PPC ads.
Unless your law firm marketing agency is also blocking bot traffic, you could be spending a lot of money on click fraud; fraudulent clicks that will never convert to real clients.
There is an additional way we maximize PPC's return on investment for law firms. Rather than "set it and forget it," as is common at many law firm marketing agencies, we create PPC campaigns and then repeatedly analyze the data and change campaigns to optimize performance. This is the way our PPC team learned to efficiently and effectively generate business from Fortune 100 company marketing directors.
Trial Guides has been a pioneer in digital marketing for over 20 years. TG-DM is the law firm marketing agency division of Trial Guides.
Trial Guides Digital Marketing provides a host of highly effective digital marketing services for law firms. We focus on digital marketing fundamentals to create highly personalized content through web sites, SEO, Pay Per Click advertising, email marketing, social media, and legal video ads that build the reputation of your law firm with the types of potential clients you want most. By implementing these strategies we've helped law firms obtain significant increases in their business.
If you are interested in learning more, contact us to get started.
In digital marketing, four simple metrics often make the biggest difference: clicks, calls, likes, and shares. Each one represents a different type of engagement with your potential clients, and each can be improved through deliberate, targeted strategies.
Over the weekend of September 12, 2025, many SEOs and site owners, particularly in service-based niches such as legal and home services, observed ~50% drops in Google Search Console (GSC) impressions, despite rankings and clicks remaining largely stable.
