Do you get a ton of referrals from prior clients? Not a few, not some, but a ton?

Most lawyers don’t. Oh sure, they get some referrals and think they’re doing great. My consulting clients brag to me that they get 5 or 10 referrals every month. That’s great, if you’re only doing 20 cases a month.

Referrals are the best marketing, period. But there’s a secret to getting those referrals, a hidden gem of wisdom that most lawyers don’t exploit on a daily basis.

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You’ve seen them time and time again; those little ads that populate the top and the right side of your Google search results. You’ve been tempted to start advertising on AdWords – hey, it’s real inexpensive, right? – but can’t figure out the system.

The big boys (and girls) of the consumer bankruptcy field are on AdWords, and they seem to be doing pretty well. Heck, there are companies who do nothing but advertise on AdWords and sell the leads to other lawyers.

But here’s the nasty secret about pay-per-click advertising – it simply doesn’t work as well as you may think.

There’s, I’ve said it. If you don’t hear from me again, check for an unmarked grave at Google headquarters.

But seriously, why would I say that Google’s cash cow is a red herring? Because according to a newly released eyetracking study by usability guru Jakob Nielsen, banner blindness is real.

What is banner blindness? According to our friends at Wikipedia, it is “a usability phenomenon in which a website visitor completely overlooks a banner. Such a banner may either be an advertising banner from an external site, or a banner that the serving site intends to use to promote content or a navigation link.”

In other words, users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad.

And if the ad is placed where ads are usually found, it registers as an ad.

The study incorporated hundreds of pages and showed conclusively that users didn’t fixate on ads. The heatmaps shown below cover a range of user engagement with the content: quick scanning, partial reading, and thorough reading. Scanning is more common than reading, but users will sometimes dig into an article if they really care about it.

On all of the above levels of user engagement, the finding is the same regarding banners (outlined with green boxes in the above illustration): almost no fixations within advertisements.Even when there was a fixation within a banner, users typically didn’t engage with the advertisement. Often, users didn’t even see the advertiser’s logo or name, even when they glanced at one or two design elements elsewhere inside an ad.

So here’s the bottom line: people simply don’t pay much attention to paid ads. Sure, you may get a small percent of people who will pay attention, and a portion of them may click on your ad, but you’re doing nothing more than splitting up a slice of a great big pie.

What’s the alternative? Optimize your web site using tried-and-true techniques for getting noticed. Write compelling copy for your site, and give the reader what he or she wants. Your content is king, and your site structure is queen. The paid ads? They’re nothing but pawns in a big game of getting into your wallet.