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Patrick Tighe is a lawyer with a secret, and he’d prefer that it didn’t get out. That secret is search engine marketing, and Tighe feels it’s given him a big advantage over competitors when it comes to generating leads for his personal-injury legal practice in Palm Beach Gardens, FL.

Tighe feels he’s in the forefront of his peers in adopting the Web as a promotional tool. “I value the Internet and see it as the wave of the future in terms of marketing, and I wanted to make a big splash on it,” he says. He set up his Web site, www.mylawyerpat.com, in July of 2002. But that in itself didn’t provide enough of an advantage; lots of lawyers have Web sites. So about eight months after hanging out his shingle in cyberspace, Tighe began doing some research of his own to find out how to get more exposure for his site, including from search engines.

That research led him to search marketing and optimization firm MoreVisibility, whose initial attraction was their headquarters just down the road in Boca Raton, FL. “Being a lawyer, I’m very skeptical about everything, and especially everything to do with the Internet,” Tighe says. “So I liked the fact that they were local because I wanted to get a look at their facilities—to make sure that they actually had a few desks.”

They did, and they also showed him the potential benefits of the pay-per-click performance model, which impressed him favorably. SEM on a cost-per-click basis “made them my partner, and not a salaried marketing firm, so they earned instant credibility there,” Tighe says.

Once potential clients click through Tighe’s search ads to his Web site, they encounter a qualifying questionnaire that asks for the date, nature and geographic location of their injury, whether the police were called, and whether they were hospitalized as a result. Applicants can cut and paste this form into an e-mail and send it to Tighe’s inbox.

One reason many small enterprises shy away from search engine marketing and even from the Internet itself is that their effective markets are relatively small and local. A roofer or remodeling company, for example, won’t necessarily benefit from the Web’s universal reach if that company only wants to operate within a fifty-mile radius of its main office. But Tighe draws clients from around southern Florida, and in fact from further afield, since the region draws visitors from around the nation. MoreVisbility was able to help him target his keyword bids to tap into just the appropriate geographic markets and no further.

“Again, that’s a nice little secret,” Tighe says. “They did an excellent job of pinpointing and focusing my campaign to just people who can use my services.”

MoreVisbility takes cares of making the keyword bids on about 50 terms for Tighe, tracking the resulting clicks, and tweaking the overall performance of the SEM strategy. As a solo practitioner with limited time, Tighe appreciates having that burden removed: “I could do it for myself, but I have no interest in doing so,” he says. “I could fix a toilet for myself, but I don’t want to do that either.” He consults on SEM strategy once a month with MoreVisibility and then lets the firm handle execution on its own.

Tighe says that the leads generated by the SEM effort have for the most part been valuable and properly qualified—that about 95% of them are serious and legitimate prospects, and that they result in at least one strong new case per month. That’s a very satisfactory conversion rate. “As a personal injury attorney, I could be happy with one strong case a year,” Tighe says. “So I’m pleased with the result.”

In fact, he says he’s being careful right now not to delve so deeply into SEM that he generates more business than his firm can handle. For that reason, Tighe has no current plans to investigate any of the Internet Yellow Pages sites, despite the fact that many of those local search sites would allow him to list his services for free. “I’m trying to grow at a reasonable pace,” he says. “I don’t want to open up the floodgates and then get drowned by the business.”

Tighe may feel that SEM is his unique secret weapon against his local competitors, but law firms generally make up a large part of the contingent of small and mid-sized enterprises adopting search marketing tactics, according to MoreVisibility CEO Andrew Wetzler. “Legal firms are excelling in search because the potential value of a single client is so high, compared to the value of a new customer for a pizza parlor or a bicycle shop,” he says. “It also parallels what you see in traditional Yellow Pages advertising. The enterprises that normally would spend a large part of their marketing budgets on directory advertising are now transitioning part or most of that budget online, including into SEM.”

Those same companies are also attracted by the performance model of pay-per-click advertising versus traditional directory listings, which charge the same flat fee regardless of how many potential customers pick up the phone and call, Wetzler says.

Back in Palm Beach, Tighe is counting on his colleagues’ innate skepticism to keep many of them away from SEM, his competitive edge. “There are only four or five law firms in this area that advertise on TV, and yet the firms that do tell me that the cases they get in the first two months of the year pay for the cost of the ads,” he says. “I’m getting all the business I can handle for less than one-tenth the cost of a TV ad campaign.”

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