Top Ten Online Marketing Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap)

Online marketing is a great way to generate a lot of new customers for your law firm. Unfortunately, it is also an opportunity for nefarious competitors to try to take advantage of your company. This month, we look at ten ways that bad people can try to use the Internet for an unfair marketing advantage over your law firm.

1. Is someone advertising on your copyrighted keyword?
If your firm has a well-known brand, its possible that other, lesser known firms are trying to siphon away customers by actually advertising on searches for your name. So, for example, if someone types in “XYZ Law Firm” on Google, your competitor’s ad may appear. How do you stop this? First, you can write the offending law firm directly. Its possible

2. Beware of eZula, HotBar, and Gator.
Though these Web companies have silly names, they can drive a lot of traffic away from your Web site. Here’s how they work: your competitor buys advertising every time a person types in your company’s Web address. Then, when a person goes to your firm Web site, an ad pop-up on the screen encouraging them to go to your competitor’s Web site. In some instances, a full-screen pop-up advertising appears, completely covering your homepage. The legality of this sort of advertising is still being debated, but if you write your competitor or the company serving the ad, you may end up being more trouble than you are worth, and the ad campaign could be pulled.

3. Have you checked the .net or .biz for your name?
Another sneaky trick is to buy a domain name very similar to your corporate Web site. The easiest way to do this is to buy a .net or .biz domain name, or to buy a domain name with a slightly misspelled URL. Again, you can fight this by either writing your competitor directly, or taking legal action. To find out whether someone has purchased a name similar to yours, go to http://register.com/.

4. Is your name showing up in a competitor’s search engine optimization?
One of the most powerful ways to get a lot of traffic to your Web site is through search engine optimization (also known as SEO). SEO usually consists of altering the title tag, meta-description, and content of your site to make it more search engine-friendly (you can read more about SEO in a past column: http://practice.findlaw.com/archives/top10_0303.html). Again, if you have a well-known law firm name, a competitor might actually put your name in their SEO in the hopes of increasing their ranking on the search engines.

5. Are your competitors using SEO cheats?
If you’ve worked hard at getting high rankings in the search engines but can never seem to pass a competitor, its possible that underhanded tactics may be involved. There are a variety of methods that unethical companies can use to (temporarily) get higher rankings in a search engine. Keep in mind, however, that this is also a risky strategy. If a search engine finds out that a firm has been cheating its way to the top, that firm could be banned entirely from the search results.

6. Is someone stealing your content and using it as their own?
It is always a good idea to develop original and helpful content for your Web site. Unfortunately, the better your content, the more likely it is that someone will want to “borrow” it for their site. And it is very difficult to uncover this plagiarism. My best advice is to do a few searches on a search engine for a phrase or sentence in an article that you’ve written. For example, if you wrote an article about toxic tort law, you could pull out a sentence like “toxic torts in Minnesota are often attributed to malfeasance” and see if it comes up more than once in the results. If it does, you may have found a copier.

7. Beware of Usenet group defamation.
There are thousands of Internet discussion boards on a myriad of diverse topics. Dozens of these discussion boards revolve around legal issues, like divorce, finding a lawyer, or criminal law. Because it is very easy to create an anonymous identity on these discussion boards, some people use this medium as a way to slander and defame competitors. You should keep an eye on these boards to make sure that this isn’t happening to your firm. One of the biggest aggregations of Usenet boards is available on Google at http://groups.google.com.

8. Are your competitors clicking on your ads?
In addition to your successful marketing on the West Legal Directory, you may also be dabbling in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Overture and Google. One of the problems with these sorts of campaigns is that it is very easy for a competitor to click on your ad and cost you a lot of money - especially if you are paying several dollars per click. To combat this behavior, you have two choices - to track your PPC campaigns very carefully, or to contact the PPC search engine with your concerns. I recommend both. Use a program like GoToast (www.gotoast.com) and show the results to the search engine once you have proof of unusual click-through’s.

9. Beware of RealNames Duplicators.
A few years ago, a company called RealNames had a deal with Microsoft through which a user could simply type a keyword into the browser bar on Internet Explorer and the user would be sent directly to a Web site. For example, you could type in “law” and perhaps get sent to FindLaw. When Microsoft ended its relationship with RealNames, RealNames went out of business. In the last year or so, several companies have claimed to take the place of RealNames. The one I hear about the most often is “iGetNet.” These companies call you and claim that you can “be the exclusive owner of keywords” in the browser bar (I’ve also gotten a lot of spam with the proclamation “the search engine myth is over!”). What they don’t tell you is that a user needs to download their software before your ad shows up in the browser bar. On top of that, they don’t tell you that most of the “downloads” of their software are through spyware - systems that secretly download to a user’s computer without the user’s knowledge. I could go on about this scam for a long time, but my bottom-line personal opinion - avoid this at all costs.

 10. Are competitors violating rules of professional responsibility on their site?
You can’t spend all of your time policing your competitors, but an occasional review of competitive Web sites may reveal egregious violations of your state’s rules of professional responsibility - violations that may give your competitor an unfair advantage over your online marketing efforts. When this happens, you have to decide whether to “take the higher ground” and send a letter directly to the law firm, or go strai

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