Updated ARC in 2020
Thanks to the Corona virus, I have three kids at home that need to stay busy. Therefore I launched an aggressive goal of updating the Average Rank Consistency (ARC) of every legal website that markets Personal injury, Criminal Defense and Family Law in the top 250 markets – by the end of 2020. While I have been doing this for personal injury in the major markets, the big difference now is that I am adding family law and criminal law and adding Tier 3 suburbs to my ongoing analysis. This easily triples the amount of work required. My recent analysis of the Denver metro Family law market yielded over new 400 data points to my Colorado database alone, meaning there were 400 website pages that intentionally marketed family law/divorce to one of the Denver suburbs.
The Process:
I have been maintaing this database since early 2015 so the first step is always to update and clean up the database. Firms retire, switch URLS, and switch vendors. So the first step is to click and view each site and create a new row for each site. This often means updating the URL since most sites were not secure in 2016. If a lawyer switched vendors, we mark the old results with an x and the color orange. Below is a snippet from my database for Chadwick Calvert, a personal injury lawyer in Denver. You can see he has switched website vendors 4x since 2015. The bolded number to the right is his personal injury ARC score at each point in time.
This process is also how I track new designs. You can view every new PI site released each year by most of the major legal website companies here: 2017, 2018, 2019. This year I have added criminal and family law designs as well.
Once we have updated and cleaned up the database, we then perform keyword searches to find any new sites or sites we may have missed previously. For personal injury, we do this by performing the searches: (GEO + personal injury lawyer) and (GEO + Car Accident Lawyer). For each search result, we go to the 15th page of Google search results – finding and inputing every firm that is intentionally marketing PI in that metro. Finally we go through the Super Lawyers and FindLaw directory to see if we missed anyone else. This as you can imagine is incredibly time consuming. In Miami alone, there are 270 firms that are actively marketing personal injury!
Ranking trends overtime
One of the neat things about my database is that you can spot ranking movement overtime. Here is a PI firm in Denver that I have 7 historical ARC scores. You can see the impact on his rankings after moving to iLawyermarketing from Scorpion. You can see how his rankings dropped (got worse) after leaving us in 2019. He just returned and his rankings are now moving up again.
Why add the suburbs?
In recent years I have seen many more firms becoming more ambitious in terms of their geographic reach. With the Coronvirus, this strategy will likely get more popular, as more people will be less inclined to drive downtown for legal help. Some do it well, most do it poorly though. For example here is a Miami based firm who as geographic landing pages for just about every city in Florida. My rule is that if there is an optimized page targeting an area, they would be added to the database.
Now here is an example of a firm who is targeting multiple geographies successfully, evidenced by the incredibly low ARC scores. (Walkup has been a client of mine since 2018)
What markets do I add?
I group every site into 1 of 4 tiers (Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4). The tiers reflect the level of online competition. Roughly speaking a Tier 1 market will have over 75 sites marketing personal injury. A Tier 2 market will have between 30-75 competitors, A Tier 3 market will have between 10-30 competitors. This allows me to compare the ranking performance of various website companies across similar markets. Here are the markets I just completed in Florida.
Florida
Tier 1 : Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Tampa, Orlando, West Palm Beach
Tier 2 : Boca Raton, Broward County, Clearwater, Hollywood, St. Petersburg, Fort Myers, Fort Walton Beach, Lakeland, Daytona Beach, Gainesville, Tallahassee, Pensacola, Sarasota, Naples, Palm Beach County,
Tier 3 : Altamonte Springs, Aventura, Bartow, Boynton Beach, Bradenton, Brandon, Brevard County, Brooksville, Cape Coral, Coral Gables, Davie, Deerfield Beach, Fort Pierce, Deland, Delray Beach, Deltona, Jupiter, Kendall, Kissimmee, Lake Worth, Longwood, Melbourne, Miramar, Ocala, Ormond Beach, Palm Beach Gardens, Pasco County, Pembroke Pines, New Port Richie, Port St. Lucie, Panama City, Plantation, Pompano Beach, Spring Hill, Sunrise, Stuart, Trinity, Vero Beach, Wellington, Wesley Chapel, Weston, Winter haven, Winter Garden, Zephyrhills
Updating Florida was Herculean task and took almost a month to complete! So if you are a family law, criminal defense or personal injury lawyer in any of the markets above, I have calculated the average rank consistency score for your site and all of your competitors. If we talk I will run the ARC again in real time giving you another data point to compare. I have done a lot of markets. (Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington)
The Competitor Database
Once I finish updating the State database, my son Casey then moves every new site and ARC score to my Competitor database. This is a database that organizes every site and ARC score for every competitor. This is very helpful for an attorney that is performing due dilligence or comparing various website companies. If you are a family lawyer in Clearwater, FL and you are considering a certain legal website company, wouldnt you want to see how that company fares in other Tier 2 markets around the country?
I was talking to a prospect the other day. She was adamant about having narrowed the field to us, and three other companies. The other companies she mentioned were not what I would call real competitors, in fact all three place in the bottom 50th percentile in terms of ARC scores and one was actually in the bottom 10%. When I asked her why she had selected those, she responded by saying that in her market and for her practice area (employment law) these companies represented sites that ranked very well. Through my ARC database I was able to show her that those rankings were outliers. In one case I was able to show here that the great rankings were accomplished by a previous company, and had nothing to do with the current vendor.
In another recent example a prospect called and was concerned by the lack of SEO progress made by his current vendor. Now while you always need to give SEO time, I was able to show him that his current vendor did not have a single personal injury website in any TIer 1 or Tier 2 market with an ARC less than 4.00! This basically means that this “legal SEO company”, which has lots of clients, did not have a single client who was ranking better than the 4th page for the 8 keywords I track.
Why I do this?
People are always asking me why I devote so much time to updating the database. Why dont I outsource the data entry or automate the process with software? While I could, the process of going through all these sites is important to me. The thousands of hours I spend doing this has made me an expert in my field. I can promise you there is no one that knows more about relative website performance in the legal field than me. Off the top of my head I can name 20-30 firms in each major market, name their website vendor and recall their website history and rankings. While this knowledge wont win me any Game Shows, it does make me very good at my job. I have been selling to attorneys for 15+ years and I have found that most attorneys appreciate my analytical approach. Finally since I sell a high end product, not every law firm can afford to work with us. By tracking every website in the country I can make thoughtful recommendations based on budget and ambition.
If you want to discuss your firms’ average rank consistency (ARC) score, give me, a call at 480-889-4216