Explanation of the Average Rank Consistency (ARC) Score
One way I evaluate ranking performance between firms and SEO companies is through the Average Rank Consistency Score or (ARC). The ARC is simply a ranking snapshot of 8 important keywords, that just about every serious plaintiffs attorney would care about.
To calculate the ARC score, I first look at what page of Google Search Results a particular site comes up on for 8 competitive keywords: (Geo+ Personal Injury Lawyer, Geo+ Car Accident Lawyer, Geo+ Injury Attorney, Geo+ Motorcycle Accident Lawyer, Geo+ Truck Accident Lawyer, Geo+ Wrongful Death Lawyer, Accident Attorney Geo+ and Geo+ Brain Injury Lawyer) . If a site comes up on the 2nd page for a term they score a “2”, if site comes up on 3rd page they score a “3” and so on… If a site shows up in the top 3 on the first page, that would score a 0.30, coming up as #4 and #5 equates to a 0.50 for that particular keyword. A score of 11 means that the site did not come up in the top 10 pages of ranking results.
I then take a weighted average of these ranking scores to come up with the Average Rank Consistency of ARC score. (The 4 Injury and Accident searches are weighted more)
The lower the ARC score the better. An ARC of 3.00 roughly translates to a firm ranking on the 3rd page for the 8 keywords above. I used to do this manually, but today we have built software to calculate these scores. Below is the ARC score for our client Panish Shea & Boyle, followed by the rankings that led to the best ARC score in Los Angeles.
How Should You Use the ARC?
Hiring a legal marketing firm is an important decision. In doing this for close to 15 years, I found that many legal marketing companies claim to be able to get great rankings. The reality is that very few have the proven ability to CONSISTENTLY affect rankings in the super competitive legal market. When selling to law firms, many companies will highlight a few high ranking showcase clients. Often these results are EXTREME outliers. With the ARC scores, I am able to objectively show how legal marketing companies perform accross different markets for all of their websites. If you are interested in knowing your ARC score or you are considering a specific website marketign company, give me a call at 480-889-4216.