Law Firm And Attorney SEO and
Internet Marketing
by Foster Web Marketing

Scare tactics by another SEO “firm” by Foster Web Marketing

We all at Foster Web Marketing got word late yesterday that another company in the SEO world was contacting all of our clients and informing them that we practiced black-hat link building for our clients and that their sites would be “black-listed” from Google in the next three days unless they switched to their company for web design and SEO efforts. Here are a few excerpts from an e-mail that was sent to one of our clients. We won’t post the entire e-mail itself because it will be part of our legal actions moving forward.

I don’t have a real tight grip on this myself, however I do know that by Google’s standards, it is illegal and anyone tied in with this marketing company will be penalized. Unfortunately, once this happens, Google basically “sand boxes” your site and it is dramatically devalued causing you to lose your rankings. I’m not exactly sure how Google goes about this, but I do know that Mr. Foster was submitted today you will probably see your site begin to slip sooner than later. However, once it does happen there won’t be anything that our company or any other SEO company can do about it; you will end up having to redesign a whole new website which takes time and money.  
Highest Regards,

Melissa Packard
www.webopts.com

Anyone that has worked with Foster Web Marketing in the past knows that we build all of our websites based on one thing (and THE most important for building authority with search engines): CONTENT. We have a linking structure in place that is white-hat and up-to-date with Google’s standards, but luckily we don’t rely on this structure as the basis of our clients ranking so well (unlike a lot of SEO companies whose sole efforts in life is to “build links” for their clients, sometimes losing the main focus).

It’s pretty obvious that Melissa has no idea what she is talking about in regards to SEO or anything else related to Internet marketing. She read a few Wikipedia pages and thought that she had enough information to justify making false allegations towards our company in an attempt to manipulate our clients into second-guessing an effective network that works and has been built for close to ten years.

So, we decided to do some research on the company that she represents and their clients, and, as usual, they are the ones with the dirty laundry. I’ve been in the SEO industry for long enough now and it’s individuals like these that make it harder and harder to know who to trust.

They’ve made claims in response to a number of complaints about pushy sales calls and harrasment by Melissa (the other “sales reps” responsible for calling our clients are Tim Robbins and Clarence Ford, more on them to come) that they have three clients on the front page of Google for “criminal attorney”.

Of course, this is nothing but a “trophy” keyword that they use in an attempt to show results to prospective clients, but the fact is, who is using the search term “criminal attorney” to find a lawyer?

So they do, in fact, have three clients in the top three. They are:

http://www.criminallaw.com/
http://www.hgilbertlaw.com/

Let’s take a look at some of their link building efforts and see if it is up to the Webopts code of ethics.

Up first: http://www.seattleduidefense.com/. Here are just a few of their inbound links:

Chruchblessings.com? Completely legal-related of course. Next:

If you’re having trouble reading that text I’ll go ahead and paste it, can anyone translate for us?

“Zoekmachine Voelspriet: zoektips, zoekhulp en gratis research”

Of course the rest of the links are all from reciprocal linking and non-authority directory sites. Up next is http://www.criminallaw.com/

Again, anyone care to translate? Is that chinese font I see in the last one? Interesting, those seem completely relevant. Oh, and another one:

Translation anyone?

There are plenty more from websites in other languages, religious sites, gaming sites, and other sites completely irrelevant to anything law-related. Yes, a few are law-related, but all of them are low-authority directory sites and obvious link-exchange programs. Let’s move on. Last one:

http://www.hgilbertlaw.com/

This is our favorite:

We could go on about how their questionable link-building techniques, their improper sales calls, immoral business practices, etc.

(By the way, check out that our good friend Ben Glass, one of the most influential legal marketing masterminds in the country, a client, and very good friend of ours has to say in response if you’d like to find out more about their company, like their misleading website content and testimonials. They actually have one from the Cochran Firm [no, not THAT Cochran firm, although you'd be lead to believe that, of course]).

There are a lot of people in the SEO world that will make a lot of false promises and allegations in an effort to get a client in a tough economic time and a market that is becoming more and more saturated with competition that includes cheaper off-shore options (don’t get me started), immoral and corner-cutting “consultants” looking to make a quick easy buck, and those who simply don’t know what they’re doing and think that reading a few blog posts and Wikipedia pages justifies them as experts.

As a client, you really do have to be careful of who you take advice from when it comes to SEO because there is a lot of inaccurate information out there, as well as plenty of people ready to tell you whatever you want to hear to reach into your pockets.

This is more of a warning to anyone else who handles multiple clients for SEO or any other type of Internet marketing.

Don’t get too caught up in work for clients.

Make sure that you have your Google alerts set so that you’re aware of what is being said about your company and employees.

Monitor Twitter and other influential social media sites.

You already know that you need to stay up-to-date on modern Internet marketing tactics, methods, and competition, but the most important thing you can do: keep constant communication with your clients.

Train them whenever you can and show them what you’re doing to make them successful. Because, when it comes down to it, they do indeed care about seeing results and a return on investment, but they also need to be assured that they can trust that you’re obtaining these results without breaking the rules or cutting corners, and the best way to do that is to communicate with them and keep building the business relationship.

-George

About the author

George Murphy

George Murphy is the Web Marketing manager for Foster Web Marketing, the leader in website design for attorneys and attorney web marketing. To find out more visit http://www.fosterwebmarketing.com