I developed the Average Rank Consistency Score or ARC to track the ranking consistency of both individual websites and the web design companies that build and optimize them. I have taken snapshots of over 120 markets in the United States.
Scoring System:
In every market, I manually perform 8 distinct searches in Google:
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
Geo + Brain Injury Lawyer
I do these searches in the same order every time. For each search I go to the tenth page. I manually record all of the websites that meet my criteria for addition to the database. I then manually record the rank of each site for each search. If a site appears on the 2nd page of Google results they score a 2, 3rd page a 3, 4th page a 4 etc…. if a site does not appear in the top 10 pages the site scores an 11 for that search. If a site appears in the top 3 map position or top 3 organic, the site scores a 0.3. I then weight the results, giving double weight to the first three most competitive searches (Personal Injury, Car Accident and Injury Attorney). I then average the 11 results to create the Average Rank Consistency Score or ARC. This process usually takes 3-3.5 hours for a Tier 1 city. It can take as little as an hour for a Tier 4 or Tier 5 metro.
Who Cares?
There are a lot of companies that sell websites to personal injury lawyers. Because of the high stakes involved with a personal injury case, personal injury is one of the most competitive areas in the country for search engine optimization. As of 1/10/17 I have 4427 personal injury websites in my database. This represents 551 different website companies. It also includes over 900 sites that are not branded. This is a lot to keep track of. Making the right decision when it comes to an SEO provider is indeed quite important. The problem is that most SEO companies are able to sell websites and SEO services based on outliers. Almost every single company in my database has a showcase client – for which they use to sell new clients, and sometimes those high rankings have nothing to do with the current SEO company. The ARC helps to identify companies that CONSISTENTLY get great rankings for many important keywords and many markets.
For example lets look at the legal seo company Majux. They manage one of the best performing websites in any of Tier 1 markets – www.reiffandbily.com with an ACR of 0.90. But when you look at the other sites Majux has in Tier 1 or Tier 2 markets, the performance drops off dramatically.
Then when you look at the history of ReiffandBilly – you see that their two previous SEO companies are two of the best in the business (ilawyermarketing and SLS Consulting) you begin to wonder if they had anything to do with their current ranking in the first place.
Besides tracking ranking performance of companies, I can also use this database to track retention as I can compare the baseline snapshot with how many of their sites are still with them 6 months from now or a year.
Finally, it can be used to track ongoing performance. As imperfect this process may be, I do have a baseline snapshot of ranking data that I can compare current ranking with. For example I performed this analysis on Birmingham a month ago. Already I can see that www.mitchell-lawfirm.com has jumped significantly – climbing to the first page for most of the keywords.
Non Branded Sites:
In the database I identify any non-branded site as “Unknown”. I am always a little suspect of companies that choose not to identify their websites. Are they not proud of their work? Are they hiding black hat SEO strategies? Or are they simply not proud of their site’s performance? I am doubly skeptical of companies that show their branding on some sites and not others. Since I now have a massive database of non-branded PI sites, I can now use the shared IP address of all the Unknown sites to identify these shadow companies.