Martindale-Hubbell TV ads for lawyers.com : Will they work?
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Wow! Watching the election results this evening I caught a commercial for Martindale-Hubbell's lawyers.com. Traditional lawyer talking with screen shots of the lawyers.com website.
No question such ads will draw traffic to the website. It will put a lot of wind in the sails of LexisNexis Martindale's salespeople calling on lawyers to retain their listings in Martindale-Hubbell, a requirement to be listed in lawyers.com, Martindale's consumer and small business law website. Also puts FindLaw in a difficult position as there's no way FindLaw is going to be running ads on its revenues which are far less than Martindale's.
Something strikes me as odd about the ads though. It would be like Google advertising for people to come to their online directory to do searches so Google could earn more money from ads.
Martindale is selling ads at lawyers.com in the form of directory listings and banner ads on directory pages. Martindale is now buying ads so they can get lawyers to buy ads.
Martindale may have already proven buying ads to sell ads is not a formula for success. Martindale used to do big buys at Google for lawyers.com so that when people searched for a lawyer a large lawyers.com link would display above the organic search results. Martindale appears to have abandoned that ad campaign.
Martindale may be better served by getting its directory of all lawyers indexed in Google, lawyer by lawyer, and do so with a search engine optimization wallop that only Martindale could bring. Lawyers would be lined up to pay Martindale for a listing then. But Martindale, as best as any one can tell, does not allow Google to index all the lawyer bio's and firm profiles that Martindale has.
Martindale has a huge asset. Its lawyer directory is the best in the industry when combining the number of lawyers and detailed biographical information on those lawyers.
At the same time, far more people go to Google for search than lawyers.com. Google perfects its search regularly to better provide what people are looking for, lawyers included. Lawyers.com is an outmoded directory using limited search fields as opposed to a full text search.
Rather than compete with Google (we've seen a lot of losers) why not leverage your asset in conjunction with Google's strength? Wouldn't Martindale be better off using the latest technology to get their lawyers' profiles fully indexed at Google? Wouldn't that be a win/win for Martindale and its lawyer customers?
What say you guys at Martindale?
I don't know about the Lawyer.Com/Google battle, but I do know one thing: Real lawyers have blogs. I love this site. Excuse me, I need to go tell all of my family members that if they want to continue to practice law, they better jump into the blogosphere.
Flattery will get you everywhere Ashley, even a compliment of your business ethics website and accompanying blog. Looks like you do an excellent job in the area.
I'm by no means an expert on this, but I think lawyers.com profiles are being indexed.
Google indexes all pages by default, and after looking at a few profiles this afternoon, I see no evidence of any meta tags asking search engines not to index them. Only bits and pieces of noindex tags in the html around specific stylistic elements.
That said, they are using antiquated table-based coding in their directory. If they made some effort to separate the form/style of their web directory from its content, I bet it would go a long way with the search engines.
Thanks for the comment David. There are portions of Martindale's directory and parts that are not, at least of last fall. Martindale dodged responding then.
You point out one problem, that being the possible use of outmoded web technology.
Another problem is on the pages that are indexed, they are being indexed by the lawyer's names, as opposed to what the lawyer does. It's the area of practice and location that people search for on Google as opposed to the lawyer's name.
But indexing to benefit individual lawyers may be contrary to Martindale's goals of it getting its own directory the best Google results. It's also good marketing spin to tell a lawyer most of their traffic comes from lawyers.com directly without telling the lawyer you have set things up to work that way. If the pages were indexed by what the lawyer did and their location most of the lawyer's traffic would come from Google.
If LexBlog indexed lawyer's blogs by the lawyer's name as opposed to what they do and where they are located our lawyers would not be experiencing the success they are. Plus Id feel we were slighting lawyers who are paying us to do our best.
That's a very good point and something I hadn't considered. If true, it's also pure evil.
If Martindale was smart, they would have bought LexBlog a long time ago. Or maybe they've already tried?
Glad to see you noticed our Lawyers.com commercial on day 3 of our campaign. We're quite happy with early results and our TV partner, Spot Runner, who developed the creative and media plan. We view television advertising as a strong complement, not a replacement, to our search engine marketing efforts. The "buying ads to sell ads" model you mention is not new and has proven to be very successful for other listings businesses, just look at career vertical leaders such as Careerbuilder and Monster.
Regarding Google's indexing of our listings, a simple "site:www.lawyers.com" or "site:www.martindale.com" entered into Google's search box will reveal millions of pages indexed. A relatively new feature on Martindale.com allows you to see which large firms are being viewed most often on our site (http://www.martindale.com/top-10-law-firm-lists/firm-visibility-country-usa.htm). If you type any of these firm names into Google, you'll see the Martindale profile on search results page 1 on most occurrences.
In addition, we were the first legal partner with Google Local (now called Maps) over 2 years ago - an alliance that hands Google every Martindale-Hubbell subscriber on a monthly basis to ensure accurate indexing for our customers. This alliance was so successful for Google, Martindale and our customers, they issued a case study: http://www.lawyers.com/pdc/pressroom/Google_CaseStudy.pdf.
Nicholas Karrat
Senior Director, Marketing & Alliances
LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell
Nicholas, you are dodging the question. Is Martindale indexing at Google all of the lawyer bio's it is charging law firms for? The answer is no.
I don't know if you are doing this intentionally or if it is sloppy IT work. If I were making millions of dollars from lawyers like MH, I could not sleep if I were not getting lawyer bio's indexed at Google, the leading place where people look for everything.