Luke Ciciliano did a post for Seo-for-lawyers.com on why he thinks .attorney and .lawyer will hold significance for lawyers in their marketing efforts. In the article he references a Dallas related name being used and showing in the search results, he also mentioned some lawyers he spoke with did not see the point of the new law related domains and did not want to bother with them, until they started showing in the search results.
Luke has written a series of articles on why these new tlds will help with marketing results.
Well the new .attorney and .lawyer extensions are going to greatly impact law firm marketing for reasons I’ve been discussing in this series (such as how new TLD’s will assist Google by making search less ambiguous)
Not surprising that established firms want to see results first imo, there are also a lot of law related extensions, so it can become pretty expensive.
From the article:
This post continues my discussion on why .attorney and .lawyer domains will be important to the marketing of your law firm. This post will be a break from our regularly scheduled programming so that we can discuss something I saw on social media yesterday – the fact that .attorney domains are now appearing in search results. I wanted to take a minute to discuss this as it addresses some questions I’ve been asked about the new domains.
It was brought up to me yesterday that a .attorney domain is now ranking for auto accident cases in the Dallas, Texas area. I did a search this morning, in an incognito browser so that I received “clean” search results, and found the following:
Read the full article on SEO-For-Lawyers
I like .ATTORNEY and .LAWYER. But what snack isn’t better with a grain of salt?
It’s only fair to point out that, right next to the article being cited, sits a gigantic ad promoting the 2 new TLDs for sale. They’re expensive; so affiliate earnings would tempt anybody.
Luke Ciciliano’s argument seems to be based on 2 points:
#1. .LAWYER and .ATTORNEY can only be owned by accredited persons.
Does it really matter if a law firm’s website is registered by a lawyer as opposed to a lead gen firm with a lawyer as a client? Is the internet really full of fraudulent lawyers operating websites as if they had credentials and paying steep AdWords costs? I doubt it. Actual lawyers would sue them just to get the charlatans out of the way.
#2. Google needs extra help figuring out which sites are really about law firms.
Google’s algorithm is sophisticated enough that it can recognize the word “lawyer” in NewYorkLawyer.com without the help of the dot.
Mr. Ciciliano worries that if we search for “I need a lawyer for my child custody case” today, we might end up at a website belonging to a paralegal and not find the law firms we’re truly seeking. Well, go ahead. Test that assumption! Search for the very phrase he considers problematic and ambiguous. Do you have any difficulty spotting law firms? I thought not.
I think .ATTORNEY and .LAWYER can be helpful in branding and marketing, but I don’t buy his arguments.
Exactly.
Besides, the author also mentions an “impossible” problem, how to determine user intent for the query “boxer”, without looking up the person’s history, cookies etc. However, the new gtlds won’t solve this problem either.
And if .lawyer can solve the “problem”, then why does .attorney exist as well ?
Another thing that looks fishy to me is how come a 30-day website got indexed AND ranked so fast ? Most websites take months just to get indexed.
As opposed to .law .attorney and .lawyer can be held by those not licensed to practice law.
They are some “restrictions” but really not much
Nothing like .law will have
@Berkens,
are you suggesting Search Engines treat .law differently than .attorney and .lawyer ?
In the face of .lawyer .attorney .law I don’t know what else there is, let this be a Seo-for-lawyers.com is a top tier