A High Price to Promote a Law Firm

It’s nice to help others with a scholarship

Many law firms offer scholarships, and they encourage students to visit their websites to apply. Often ranging from $1,000 to $5,000, these opportunities allow students to make a relatively quick application in hopes of winning some much-needed financial aid. In addition to helping students, these scholarships often help the law firms in the following ways:

• Building the law firm’s brand recognition

• Increasing traffic to the firm’s website

• Generating great link value for the law firms

However, while it may be easy to throw a scholarship page on your website and choose a winner twice a year, it takes quite a bit of effort to get colleges and news outlets to notice you. This is where a marketing professional steps in.

Marketers have a plan for your scholarship

As with anything, consistency is key for success in the marketing game. This is very true when it comes to scholarships that are meant to boost the online profile of a law firm. After creating your scholarship, a marketing professional can promote it by:

• Reaching out to colleges - You might think a college would love to post your scholarship on their student financial aid page, but this often is not the case. Colleges are cautious of promoting outside businesses, and the student volunteers at financial aid offices all too often forget to pass scholarships on to whomever it is that can approve its spot on the school’s website.

• Writing for news outlets - A local news outlet may be willing to share information about your scholarship with their followers. However, they will generally expect you to submit content written objectively to inform the reader instead of marketing copy that explicitly promotes your brand or products.

• Keeping it all up to date - Your scholarship program needs to be perpetually renewed each time an award is given out. A marketing firm will have to consistently reach out to colleges and news outlets to let them know about your updated scholarship information.

Marketing professionals are aware that the scholarship program they sell you can be cancelled if you became convinced that it’s not worth the costs. As evidenced by the massive online graveyard of law firm scholarships, it seems as though many of these programs get cancelled after about 12 to 24 months. The marketing agency will do a lot of work to start the program, so they’ll be sure to bill you enough to allow them to have turned a profit once you lose interest in a year or so.

Google also has a plan for your scholarship

Beware of a scheme to create a bunch of strong backlinks via a law firm scholarship program. Search engines such as Google and Bing know that they’ll lose value if their information becomes irrelevant. The manipulation of search rankings by paying for backlink creation has long been identified as a serious threat to these companies. Is a link to your law firm’s scholarship a threat to Google? You may be surprised where this is headed.

Well respected SEO professional Jim Boykin wrote in 2021 about his shock when Google penalized his client for links to a scholarship. In this article he described how the links were deemed as “unnatural inbound links”, and his firm ended up disavowing the links in order to address the problem. It’s unclear if that client intended to pay for backlinks, but it would be too bad if they had been sold on that idea only to have the links deemed “unnatural“ by Google. Either way, Google doesn’t want people gaming the system, and an aggressive scholarship link program could raise some red flags.

Coming Up

You can create and operate your own law firm scholarship, and that’s exactly what we’ll discuss in detail in our upcoming post on Tuesday, February 27. Thanks for reading, and please reply to this email with any questions, thoughts, or criticisms you may have.