If you live in Southern California and need to hire a lawyer where do you go? Most likely you go to Google, search for a practice area and find 1,000,000 results, many of which are national directories that display attorneys that are 100+ miles away. Making this more difficult is the under-represented area of Southern California not located in Los Angeles known as the “Inland Empire”. The Inland Empire is a region just to the East of Los Angeles and Orange Counties regarded loosely as the combination of Riverside County, and San Bernardino County. Although there are numerous reputable law firms that operate in this area, many firms from Los Angeles and Orange County tend to market here driving up the competition and cost of acquiring a new client.
InlandEmpireLawyers.com was developed as a legal directory and informational resource available to “locals only”, meaning that only attorneys located in the Inland Empire are allowed to market there. What’s unique about this value proposition is that an attorney must have an address in San Bernardino or Riverside County that is validated by the California Bar website in order to be considered for inclusion on the website. This limits the pool of advertising lawyers to only those physically located locally to serve the local population. The website creator, Doug Bradley, who is not an attorney, said “after nearly a decade of local legal marketing, I was tired of seeing lawyers from Los Angeles and Orange County scoop up clients who had no idea they were being represented by a law office two hours away”.
Bradley won the URL in an online auction and immediately knew what he was going to do with it, “After I took possession of the URL I knew that I wanted to create a local legal resource, but I had no idea that it would become so popular so quickly”. As of this writing the site now attracts over 5,000 “Unique Visitors” a month and locally competes well against the “Gorillas” in the industry: Lawyers.com, FindLaw and AVVO. “I certainly still have a long way to go and I’m never finished making improvements to the site and my organic rankings, but I feel that if you compare our price and value to the big players we always come out ahead” Bradley said.
Visit InlandEmpireLawyers.com or their Facebook page for more information.
