Rules for Adding Sites:
When I analyze a market not all sites are added. In a large and competitive market (Tier 1 and Tier 2) I will automatically include all the law firm sites that appear on the first two pages of Google results for the first two major searches (Personal Injury Lawyer & Car Accident Lawyer) – regardless of that site’s branding, focus, geography, or SEO intent. After the first two pages of results I use the following set of rules to include sites.
- All branded, focused PI sites. The word ‘branded” here refers to an emblem or logo that appears on the site at the time of the analysis. i.e Scorpion, Foster Web Marketing, Justia, etc… But what about sites that are not doing SEO anymore? or sites that only used the company for design? It does not matter. If a logo appears on a focused PI site, it will appear in the analysis. By taking a snapshot of every market in the same way, this should affect every company the same way. For example when I was doing the analysis in Kansas City, an ilawyermarketing design came up on the ninth page for “Kansas City Personal Injury Lawyer”. The site was launched years ago and we never did SEO on it. Despite that – the site was included in the analysis.
- For sites that market several practice areas, the site needed to have a robust section of PI content with at least 8-10 pages of focused PI content to be included like www.crainlewis.com
- For Unbranded sites or unknown sites that appear past the first two page of results in competitive areas, I use my discretion to include. As a rule I try to incorporate professionally designed sites – in the hopes of later identifying sites from SEO companies that do not brand their sites.
- SEO Intent. To be included for a certain market, I site had to show clear SEO intent. Meaning the title tags of the result needed to incorporate the the keyword or geo in the result. For example despite this site www.donlinlaw.com showing up in some Hartford CT and Connecticut personal injury results, they were not included in the analysis since the title tag on the home page only mentions the smaller town of Hamden CT. Including this site in a Hartford would unfairly hurt Scorpion’s score.In Smaller markets Tier 3, 4 and 5. I will not include every site on the first two pages. Rather I will only include focused PI sites that show SEO intent for that area. Below is a snapshot of a first page result for “Kirkland WA Car Accident Lawyer”. The three yellow shaded results were all included in my analysis of Kirkland.
LizQuick is a branded PI site from DCM Moguls that contains “Kirkland” in the home page title tag so it was included. I included injurytriallawyer.com as it is a branded Foster Web Marketing site that showed clear SEO intent with a Kirkland specific landing page. I included the unbranded Pat Trudell site as it is a professionally designed focused PI site that ranks well. Despite its solid rankings in Kirkland, I did not include the Kornfeld site because it did not contain “Kirkland” in the title tag, it was unbranded, and while it has a professional design that I am interested in tracking, it was already included in my database via my Seattle analysis. - For a secondary geo to be included in the analysis, the site needs to be in the top 10 pages of results for at least 2/3 of the “personal injury Lawyer”, “car accident Lawyer” or “Injury attorney” searches. For example in Escondido CA, I did not include the SLS consulting site BestAttorney.com despite it being on the first page for “Escondido Car Accident Lawyer”. This is because it did not show up in the top 10 for either “Escondido Personal Injury” or Escondido Injury Attorney. *This rule only applies to secondary geos. A secondary geo result, is one where the target geography of that page differs from the home page, or primary geography.
- Focused Sites: For this analysis I do not include focused sites like medical malpractice, workers comp, motorcycle accidents’ etc.. The only exception is if they are also showing up for general PI terms like the NC motorcycle site Karneylaw.com. I track focused sites in a separate database.
As an example. I performed my ARC analysis on Seattle on Monday. I included 76 sites in my analysis which was about average for a Tier 1 city. There were around 26 PI sites that did not meet my standard for inclusion. Here was the scoring for Seattle.
