Location, Location, Location: The Surprising Insights to Online Marketing for Personal Injury Law Firms (Sponsored)

This post shines a light on a key trend that our team at Lawyer Marketing Score has revealed through an analysis of the top 5 personal injury firms in ranking for traffic from Google as well as from popular directory services like Avvo and Findlaw among others. In both analyses, we’ve learned that if your online strategies are making assumptions that don’t take local knowledge and data into account, they will fail. Take heed from the surfer mentality – local knowledge helps you swim not sink.

Recently Dan Weeks posted this guest post on The National Trial Lawyer Association blog and the findings outlined some surprises resulting from the top 5 markets’ personal injury  law firms. You can drill down into each market in the graphic below:

This week I published a follow up post on the traffic derived from directory services like Avvo and, Findlaw. The data revealed some surprises we’ll outline later in this post. Here is an overview:

Here you can see the value driven to individual firms’ sites based on directory services and the value of traffic to directory services based on the top 5 metro areas through analysis of the top 20 personal injury keywords. Surprised?

We were too. These insights are exactly the kind that should be a wake up call to the industry – great SEO or directory service listings aren’t enough – it’s the thorough analysis that only a benchmark derived from data in context of location can provide – giving an overview of online marketing efficiency versus a firm’s local competition that can help firms raise the bar and optimize their visibility. Here’s a closer look at how the top 5 markets for personal injury law scored in the directory service sector:

Actionable Surprises:

• The bottom line is that what works in one market may not work in another. This was revealed both in our traffic analysis from Google and our look at traffic from directory services.

• For ranked keywords, there is a significant drop off in clicks for google – the difference between number 1 and 10 is significant. For the firm at number 20, visibility and findability is essentially zero.

• The same keywords don’t perform effectively for different markets.  Consider the terms used locally in top markets Houston and New York City – one (Houston) is a trucker heavy, “big rig” city, while New York has its own vernacular to describe car accidents and virtually no references in high ranking keywords for bigger vehicles or trucks

• The assumption that traditional legal directory services are a “silver bullet” solution should be revisited – although paid and free directory services like Avvo, Findlaw, Justia and YP can be effective, they should be analyzed in the context of an overall mix of SEO and directory service usage and always considered in context with the local competition.

• Consider the top market for personal injury law – Los Angeles. Even the savviest online marketer might not know, and have no way to determine that Yelp was the top driver for directory traffic in that market. And unicorn startup Thumbtack scored 3rd in Chicago and 5th overall in Los Angeles. We are relying on data alone – data that can’t lie but tells the real story of how searcher intent is driving traffic – enabling benchmarks like Lawyer Marketing Score to give unprecedented vision into how to best market your firm.

For the first time ever, personal injury lawyers can get a transparent point of view into their online marketing efforts and use  Lawyer Marketing Score as a tool to adjust and realign these efforts to drive new leads in one of the most competitive professional services sectors where location and the competitor down the street are in a battle for business. We aim to lift the fog of war and transform the way online marketing is done for personal injury law firms.

Lawyer Marketing Score is my latest endeavor and aims to provide high level transparency to the online marketing efforts on behalf of personal injury firms. We are now vetting firms to participate in our Private Beta Preview. We invite interested firms to register at Lawyer Marketing Score.

What we do:

• We are a “FICO”(R) like score for personal injury law firms’ online marketing efforts and their competitors.
• We  provide an easy to understand way to learn how your online marketing efforts stack up against the local competition.
• We give lawyers insight into the value of their online marketing efforts and their competitors
• We are the only score that provides a data-based score that reveals results in the local context of your competition.
• We are a neutral source of information – we separate the doers from the talkers in online marketing through data.

About Dan Weeks, Founder and CEO

Dan Weeks is the founder of Internet Marketing Fiduciaries (IMF) and its debut product Lawyer Marketing Score (LMS). Weeks spent 25 years at Hewlett-Packard in engineering and engineering management putting his computer science degree to use in being granted five patents. He left HP to create his first data and analytics and benchmarking company, BrightScope.com, an “Avvo” for financial advisors. BrightScope currently has over 90 employees and generates half a million website visitors every month. Dan is now bringing his data and analysis innovation to LMS, which is poised to change the way lawyers market themselves online focused at benchmarking online marketing results. Dan also serves as Entrepreneur in Residence at the SLO Hothouse, an incubator for startups in San Luis Obispo. Dan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

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Location, Location, Location: The Surprising Insights to Online Marketing for Personal Injury Law Firms (Sponsored) was originally published on Lawyerist.