Lawyers rank 6th, just behind Pizza and Used Auto Parts

Some lawyers may find advertising in yellow pages effective, but it’s hard to believe we went to law school to get edged out by pizza and auto parts on the list of the biggest yellow page advertisers.

That’s the word from an article by Jodi Sokolowski in the Buffalo Law Journal about how law firms are dominating the yellow pages. I don’t know but the article sounds like it’s right out of Yellow Page companies’ play book on how great yellow page ads are.

Heck, when I found the yellow page directory laying in my driveway, I wanted to find the SOB who left it there. I put them back in the street and wondered why a company like DEX, Verizon, or Qwest had the right to throw garbage in my yard. Wouldn’t it be great to get a dump truck with all the unwanted yellow page directories and dump it in Verizon’s parking lot?

This post will draw the usual flack from the yellow page folks. But look at some of the recent commentary on yellow pages and yellowpages.com I’ve seen from lawyers and legal marketing professionals.

• The yellow pages are last century’s marketing. Today, clients find lawyers on the Web. Your clients should ignore the Yellowpages.com salesperson and put their marketing dollars into their website.
• …[I]n the 21st century of websites and blogs, yellow pages are a waste of money. And they are an expensive scam. In my 2-inch thick AT&T Yellow Pages for suburban Illinois (DuPage County), the listings for lawyers run for 43 consecutive pages. I believe this makes it impossible for a law firm to stand out.
• We tried yellowpages.com for a year, and picked three specific listing areas and four markets in the state. We had modest clickthroughs (.15%) but virtually none of the business we were looking for. I had better results with Web site ads on content sites that the clients/prospects were reading at the same or less cost.
• For PI attorneys, the phone book is perfect. For us [general practice], I agree that we are lost in a big mess of incongruent ads and unless we take out a full page, our firm and its members will be hard to locate-by firm name or their own name.
• …I rarely see them in the search engines when doing a search or hear about them unless it is a salesperson trying to sell a listing. …[E]ven if the searcher finds yellowpages.com, the attorney’s probability of being chosen is low unless the attorney buys a top spot.

Please comment with your thoughts. Yellow pages sales guys too.