No agency, no account managers, no sales team. When you call, you get me. Here is the short version of how I got here and why I only work with one DUI firm per market.
My name is Frank McKee. I build, host, and run websites for businesses, and I have done it as a family owned company for over two decades. Today I host more than 200 business websites on my own server, and for a smaller group of clients I also run their search marketing month after month, year after year.
Most of my career was spent serving one of the most competitive industries on the internet: financial services. When every competitor is spending real money to outrank you, you learn what actually moves a site up and what is just noise. I have been pointing that same skill at DUI defense since 2012.
In 2012 a former prosecutor in New York named Jonathan Kaye became my client. I built his site, put it in front of the people searching after an arrest, and I have hosted and looked after it every month since. His practice has run on that website the whole time.
Fourteen years on, that site is still up there for the searches that matter in his boroughs and out on the Island. That is the part I am proudest of. Not that it ranked once, but that it has held, year after year, through every change Google has thrown at it. A site you own does that. Anything you rent stops the day you stop paying.
A new client gets a different version of me, and should. Year one is heavy: the build, the charge pages, the county pages, the climbing, and me checking in regularly because there is a lot moving. Year fourteen is a client who calls to say keep doing what you are doing. Those are two different jobs, and getting a client from the first to the second is the whole point of the work.
When we started he was doing what most defense lawyers do. A little of everything that came through the door, DWI among it, and pricing every case the way everybody prices every case: it depends.
I told him to put a flat fee on a first offense and put the number on the front of the site.
He laughed at me. Then he thought about it, and he did it. He set the number, added the qualifier about who it applies to, and put it where somebody searching would see it before he ever clicked.
Think about who is doing that searching. He was arrested Friday night, he is scared, and what he wants to know is what this is going to cost and whether he is going to be all right. Everyone else on the page was offering him a free consultation. Kaye was the only one answering the question he actually had.
It did more than bring in cases. It narrowed a mixed bag of defense work into an exclusive DWI practice, which is what he had wanted in the first place.
I am not promising I will hand you a business model. I am telling you what I actually do, which is pay attention to how people are shopping for you and then say so out loud, even when it is not my lane and even when the client laughs.
Early on I got a referral for a website. The customer was a mortgage broker. I built him a site, nothing fancy, and he liked it well enough, mostly because it was cheap to set up and cheap to keep running. Then he did me a favor I have never forgotten. He told me I should specialize in mortgage websites, and he pointed me at the companies already doing it.
I looked them up. They were good. Live rate quoting, applications that fed straight into the lender software, every bell and whistle, and prices to match. I showed my wife, who had joined the business and was still learning the work, and I was grinning the whole time. She looked at the screen, then at me, and her face said it plainly: these people are miles ahead of us, so what exactly is funny?
What was funny was that everybody had built for the same customer. The broker who wanted all of it and would pay for all of it. Nobody had built anything for the broker who did not want any of it, who just needed a website because he was supposed to have one, and wanted it cheap and done. We could not be the best. We could absolutely be the cheapest.
We built a mortgage template in a couple of days. I put together a list of about a thousand brokers and emailed all of them. Ninety-nine dollars to set up, $12.95 a month. In a week we had a hundred and twenty clients, and we had it down to about fifteen minutes to get somebody live. For years after that we were signing twenty or thirty a month, and every year the product got better.
As the sites improved, the price went up. For new clients only. I have never raised the monthly rate on somebody who was already with me, except in a couple of extreme cases, and I am talking about more than two decades of chances to do it. There are still a handful of people paying me $12.95 a month because that is what they signed up at.
There was a point where I could have tripled it and they would not have found better if they went looking. It did not feel right. I thought about a polite ten percent instead and realized I would be arguing with a loyal client over a dollar thirty. Here is the real reason though. When I get a price increase notice from a company, I do not think about the extra money. I think, well, I guess I should go see what else is out there. I am not going to hand my own clients that thought.
We kept building. Eventually we had the live rate engine and the application handoff, the same features that had made those industry leaders look untouchable, and we still cost less than companies that did not have them. For a stretch of years we were the only mortgage website company offering live pricing at all, because the biggest one had sold out before the crash.
I was on a sales call one afternoon, running through our features, and I brought that up. Said the man who built the biggest mortgage website company in the country got out at the right time and is probably on a beach somewhere with a drink.
The voice on the other end started laughing. He said no he is not. He said, I am that guy. He had gone back to being a mortgage broker, the company that bought his business was not what it used to be, and he needed a website. He told me he had looked around at what was out there, and mine were the best.
He built the company I had been trying to catch for a decade, and he called me. That is still the best day I have had in this business.
Lending has cooled, and I have spent twenty-four years getting good at one thing: making a small business show up when somebody nearby is looking for exactly what it does. Almost nowhere does that matter more than a DUI practice, where the client is searching within a day of being released and will never need you again after. I already had the one firm, since 2012. So I am opening a small number of DUI markets, one firm per market, and doing it properly.
Two clients are worth looking up. selectcommercial.com holds a top three position nationally for "commercial mortgage rates", competing against banks. nydwi-lawyer.com has held the front page for New York drunk driving searches since 2012. One is a national money term, the other is local defense work. Same job, different scale. If you want to see the tracking behind either of those, ask me on a call and I will screen share it.
One more thing, since you are probably reading this because of an email I sent you. I built this entire business the first time by emailing a list of strangers. It is how I found those first hundred and twenty clients, and it is why you are on this page. I would rather tell you that than pretend you found me by accident.
Simple: I cannot push two DUI firms up the same search results and look either of them in the eye. When you hire me, your market is closed. Competitors who inquire after you get told no, and I tell them exactly why. Your exclusivity is the product. New York has been closed since 2012.
Because I should not need one. The companies that lock you into 12 months do it because they know what their results look like by month 3. My longest clients have been with me 10, 15, 20 years and counting, and my very first one is still here after 24, all month to month, all free to leave at any time. Retention is the only honest scoreboard in this business, and it is the one I am proudest of.
I am not a lawyer, I do not give legal advice, and I am not a referral service. I do not take a piece of a case and I would not be allowed to. You pay me a flat monthly fee for a website and the work to make it rank, the same fee whether you sign one client that month or thirty. Everything I write goes to you for approval before it goes live, because your bar card is the one on the line.
Want proof for your own market? The free site review shows you exactly where you stand: your rankings, your competitors, and what to fix first. If I can help, I will tell you how. If your market is taken, I will tell you that too.