Five years ago I developed a metric called the Average Rank Consistency Score or (ARC). The ARC gives a point in time snapshot of how a personal injury firm ranks for 8 important keywords in a given market. I developed the ARC because I wanted a uniform way of comparing websites and website companies across multiple markets and multiple keywords. I chose the keywords based on a few factors. The main one was search volume, as keywords like personal injury lawyer, accident attorney, car accident lawyer, and injury attorney are the most searches and therefore most competitive. Besides the most important keywords, I also wanted to track some 2nd and 3rd level keywords as well. This is because how internal pages rank in Google is a good indicator of overall SEO health.
Picking these 2nd and third level keywords was tricky. I needed to pick practice areas that just about every personal injury lawyer would accept. Not all attorneys will take a dog bite or slip and fall case for example. Same with nursing home abuse and medical malpractice. So early on I decided on Motorcycle Accident, Truck Accident, Wrongful Death and Brain Injury.
The Formula
Having decided on the keywords I then developed a formula to evaluate organic rankings. The idea was to conduct these 8 searches in each market using incognito search , where I would chronicle each website and mark the page of Google search results I found each website. Thus if I searched Chicago Wrongful Death Lawyer, every site that appeared on the 5th page of Google results would get a “5”, 6th page a “6” and so on. The exception was if someone appeared in the first 5 organic results, they would score a “0.5” in recognition that placing in the top 5 in Google was appreciably better than being on the bottom of the first page. (I had originally used 0.3 for the top 3 but have since adjusted the formula). Finally if a website did not show up in the first 10 pages of Google search results they would score an “11”. To get the ARC, I double weight the 4 main keywords (injury lawyer, personal injury lawyer, accident lawyer, and car accident lawyer), and then add the 8 results and divide by 12.
Here is a snippet from a recent ARC analysis I did in Chicago. The numbers going Left to Right correlate to the page of Google results I found the site on for the following 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) .
Again the above is a snippet from the analysis I did on September 28th. In total I reviewed and scored 401 sites that marketed PI in Chicago that day. Since I do the ARC analysis all of the time, I am quite efficient at it, but even then, this took over 10 hours to complete. I was curious about Chicago since iLawyermarketing had not had a client there and would soon be launching a new site for CliffordLaw.com (The last ARC score listed above). I am happy to report that Clifford’s ARC has dropped to 2.00 since launching his new iLawyermarketing website.
The Chicago analysis pales in comparison to what I set out to do in late 2016. Back then I was interested in testing the ARC in the 5 most competitive markets, in order to better evaluate the best performing sites and SEO companies. But I soon became interested in comparing ARC scores in less competitive markets and my obsessive personality disorder took over. Over the course of 3.5 months I had finished the ARC analysis for 250 markets. While I barely avoided divorce, the upside is I now have historical ranking data for most of the personal injury websites in the country. The work also led me to start tracking new designs and retention for every PI website company in the country. For example you can view all the new personal injury designs released in 2017 and 2018. Today I have a database that includes close to 60,000 legal websites.
I will often update the ARC of a single market like I did here for Michigan and New Jersey but it is more common that I perform the analysis of a singular site. Even doing the ARC for a single site is a 10-15 minute process, as I need to conduct 8 searches and then find and record their position. Besides the intensive time commitment, doing this manually led to an unavoidable error rate. When I do the an ARC analysis I will print out the actual SERP results beforehand so I can test my error rate which has averaged around 2%. For a market with 200 sites, a 2% error rate equates to 32 errors. Now I would catch most of the significant errors by reviewing outliers. My most common error was missing a result, so most of my errors would be marked as an 11. If a site was on the first page for every keyword but was not in the top 10 pages for truck accident, I would flag that result and recheck.
Automated ARC Tool
So you can imagine my relief when our owner Mike Perez unveiled an automated ARC checker. Spurned on by the fact that one of his sales consultant was wasting so much time, Mike developed this fantastic tool, where you simply enter a URL and location….
Ad then spits out both the ARC score and where the website ranks for the 8 keywords.
The score is then entered into my database which I can use to track rankings over time. Here you can see we launched this new website in early June 2017. You can see the progress we have made using the ARC
So if you are personal injury attorney and you are interested in knowing how your rankings compare in your market give me a call. Besides letting you know where you stand today, there is a good chance I have older ranking data for your site I can share. The other thing I can help with is evaluating other SEO companies. If you are in a tier 3 market and you are considering a SEO company whose average ARC score for tier 3 markets is 3.80 you may want to reconsider using that company. I look forward to hearing from you. I have a lot more time to speak with attorneys now!
Thanks for reading,
Alex Morris
National Sales Director
iLawyermarketing
480-889-4216
alex@ilawyermarketing.com