Our Top 5 Reasons Why FindLaw is a Poor Choice For Your Law Firm Marketing

We get it – We’ve been rather harsh in our analysis of FindLaw and their digital marketing services. We admit to being biased in our observation of their practices. If you feel we’re wrong, by all means, feel free to provide such evidence in a comment below and we will correct our statements of observation.

That being said, the evidence of how they provide their services is very much present:

FindLaw is just like any other business, in terms of wanting to make a profit. Businesses grow when they make profits. We don’t fault them at all for trying to earn money. However, what we struggle with is trying to understand why and how poorly they earn their profit at the expense of their clients.

With such an inflexible marketing service agreement, FindLaw has a history of making clients feel trapped with a contract that they can’t get out of, without it being detrimental to their long-term marketing efforts even when FindLaw is not holding up their end of the bargain.

While there are means to sever ties among their services, it requires a 90-day timeframe which can be cumbersome at best. A 30-day clause like those offered by Scorpion and other competitors would be more in line with market norms.  More troubling is there are minimum guarantees that the site URL and all the content is actually yours to keep and use. This is why we refer to FindLaw and other vendors like them as “rental sites”.  In fact, you may have to confirm who actually owns your website URL. Changing your URL after any length of time is very problematic with regards to SEO and search engine rank.

This could be making your SEO and marketing investment into their services potentially null and void.

With their business practices and organizational setup, we believe they provide sub-par services that even has them flagged in the past by Google for using Black Hat SEO techniques. Whatever content they wrote for your site may be keyword and link stuffed, which not only provides a poor user experience, but also a poor ranking by Google. We have seen this on a mass scale even today. This could be making your SEO and marketing investment into their services potentially null and void – even worse, it could lead to a negative return on your investment. In our experience, we have had to rewrite most, if not all, text sections of former FindLaw websites

Quick Tip: By not hiring individuals with a strong legal background to write content for your firm could lead to a potential litigation. The goal of your digital marketing efforts should provide you with new clients, not lead to potential lawsuits.

Your online marketing footprint is ultimately how people find you. Marketing yourself properly is how you obtain your clients’ and potential clients’ trust. By using multiple techniques that go against Google’s guidelines, it reveals that FindLaw has a history of looking out for their interest, but not their clients.

Our Top 5 Reasons Findlaw is a poor choice for your marketing:

1.  Handcuffing long term contracts that remove your power as a consumer if they do not perform up to expectations.
2. Your Findlaw website cannot be transferred or used on any other hosting platform.
3. Questionable SEO tactics in general almost exclusively relying on their own network which does not have much future value should you leave their services.
4. Poorly written content and blogs that have little SEO value, but a diminished value to your firm and potential clients.
5. Cost – their costs are very high considering the above.

There are some very specific actions that you will want to take if you are considering leaving FindLaw. There are also some services that FindLaw most likely has you contracted for that you will want to continue with, even if you are intending on moving your web marketing away from them. So be careful, what you do when you leave is important and hiring an agency that has experience with that is paramount.

If you are considering or are currently using FindLaw’s marketing services, contact us. We specialize in addressing concerns associated with FindLaw’s digital marketing services, and how to help you with your digital marketing efforts without hassle and inflexible contracts. Contact us today at 877-602-7510.