How to Identify Spam from Law Firm “Marketing Agencies”
By Alex on February 27, 2024 in Internet Marketing Legal Industry News and Tips Ultimate Guides & Best Practices
Spam has been around since email was invented. The first spam marketing was bulk lists with the same message. Now AI is taking over. These messages are a bit more crafty and targeted. They are technically one-to-one emails that are personalized for each law firm.
We have seen a large uptick of law firms getting unsolicited emails. These “marketers” are aggressively reaching out to firms via cold outreach programs.
The issue with the emails are threefold:
- Waste time – They simply waste time and resources to review.
- Inaccurate – The emails are often inaccurate with reports of false positives.
- Tracking – Even unsubscribing to the email or interacting with them, alerts that you are a viable target.
As an example let’s explain how their outreach works by breaking down one of these many emails we have seen. We are removing client information. To show how formulaic the approach of these canned emails are, we will put “[inserted information]” in all the parts of their email, to demonstrate how this can then be easily applied for any scenario:
“Hi [Client name],
Even with your great track record with [quantity number of Reviews] [star rating]-star reviews, you aren’t showing up in Google Maps for any of the [practice area] searches we checked, but [list competitors] are:
[a screenshot is included]
That’s a lot of missed cases and ultimately lost revenue YOU should be getting.
With my 18 years of professional SEO experience (10+ specifically with law firms), I can help you capture that lost revenue.
My focus is always to make you significantly more money than you spend on my services.
I’m reaching out to a few select, highly-rated [practice area] firms in [location]. I work exclusively with just one firm per area, so as not to work with competing firms, making this opportunity limited to the first to secure my services.
You can learn more about me, my results, and book a call “
At first glance – like any con artist – this email seems pretty compelling. A con wouldn’t be a con if everyone caught on to how it works. Well, allow us to help clear this up and provide guidance. We will now break this down further, line by line, to explain how unscrupulous these emails are:
- “Even with your great track record with [quantity number of Reviews] [star rating]-star reviews, you aren’t showing up in Google Maps for any of the [practice area] searches we checked, but [list competitors] are:”
- Start off with the attractive compliment; then grab a quick review of a firm’s Star Rating; then prompt doubt by cherry-picking a random phrase that you want to work for your objective; then allow your google search to list their top competitors
2. That’s a lot of missed cases and ultimately lost revenue YOU should be getting.
- Really start hammering home the doubt…
3. With my 18 years of professional SEO experience (10+ specifically with law firms), I can help you capture that lost revenue.
- ALL marketing firms want firms to capture lost revenue. That’s, almost verbatim, the point in our jobs. Also, interesting to list years of professional experience. We, at PaperStreet, have 26 years of professional SEO experience (23 specifically with law firms) but we would not be so crass to put that in an unsolicited email…
4. My focus is always to make you significantly more money than you spend on my services.
- 🙂 Again, ALL marketing firms have this same objective.
5. I’m reaching out to a few select, highly-rated [practice area] firms in [location].
- …mmhmm…sure…
6. I work exclusively with just one firm per area, so as not to work with competing firms, making this opportunity limited to the first to secure my services.
- 🙂 Again, any reputable marketing firm would do the same. It is a direct conflict of interest to not honor. Rhetorical question but how would you get a client and their direct competitor ranked in the same location? It’s a defining principle most marketers hold.
Organic SEO is, well, organic. This means – just like stock prices – rankings fluctuate. You should have a positive progression over time, but campaigns move up and campaigns can move down in the short term.
SEO is also a marathon, not a sprint. It is a long term investment. Yet, as a principle goal, as long as the overall trendline of rankings continues to climb higher and higher – and most importantly, the campaign is yielding a substantive return on investment – it is of value.
To these points, these spammy outreaches have the following implications:
- The accomplishments that you and your client (collectively) have made to get their campaign the current position now are negated. It is undermining what you and your client have set as overall goals for the entire campaign.
- These firms do not know the collective objectives, goals, decisions, etc yet they presume that there is inherently “an issue”.
- As the ultimate “back-handed compliment”, they FOUND the firm’s listing and are trying to swoop in at the finish line “move the firm up”; again choosing to negate how the firm may have been 5 pages back on Google and you have moved your client to not only the first page of Google, but now they presume to be the solution to “win the race”.
- They are cherry-picking “one phrase” as the main objective for your marketing. What about the 50+ other phrases that they are not showing and focusing on? This simple selection of a single phrase completely negates and does not mention all that your healthy campaign does rank for in the first, second, and third positions of Google for and the additional objectives of the firm and directives to focus on.
The recent influx of cold, aggressive, sly outreaches reminded us of a notification that Google themselves posted on their own website warning of this.
The top two items Google writes from their Helpful Guidelines:
- Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that email you out of the blue.
- No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
In conclusion:
- These spam “marketers” are precisely who tarnish the name of digital marketing.
- They are the ones who mislead clients (presumably most of whom they have stolen) and give valid marketing techniques like SEO – the term of “snake oil”.
- They are the antithesis of those that are good and moral and upstanding and transparent marketing firms.
- They downgrade the value of all the work that we truly do.
Find an agency that has a history of using real data, real analysis, and real ethics. This will help your firm long term.
We hope you’ll choose PaperStreet, but even if you don’t, we truly do not want to see law firms fooled by these types of spam outreach.
