This is an evolving case study and blog post, about the premise of whether bigger websites rank better or not. My goal is to study whether bigger websites rank better in search engines for major keywords. For the purposes of this study, we’re going to look exclusively at personal injury lawyers who rank on page 1 and 2 of Google in the cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, and NYC. As those are the 3 largest cities, it’s assumed you’ll see the most competition in these dense markets.
That means we’re looking at the keywords
-Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer
-Chicago Personal Injury Lawyer
-NYC Personal Injury Lawyer
For the sake of time, it’s assumed that if someone is ranking for NYC Personal Injury Lawyer, they are probably ranking for other similar keywords (NYC Personal Injury Attorney, etc). That’s why we’re limiting our analysis to just those 3, representative keywords.
As marketers, we believe passionately that content is king. We preach to our clients that adding more content will result in more search engine rewards. The question is, if two websites have equal backlinks, will the website who has more content rank better?
Is content useful, for the sake of acting as a magnet for backlinks? orIs content (# of pages a website has) a variable that influences overall rankings
Below is a list of the players who rank on page 1/2, and the # of pages their websites have. The # of pages was determined by doing a site:domain.com query in google. It’s possible this number is incorrect, but at the end of the day the only thing that matters is what Google sees/indexes. All i’m doing is Googling the term, and then in whatever order the lawyers are ranked – listing them below, and their page count.
www.fararlawgroup.com: 624 pages
# of backlinks(MajesticSEO): 4013
www.wilshirelawfirm.com: 624 pages
# of backlinks(MajesticSEO): 2265
www.geraldmarcuslaw.com: 460 pages
# of backlinks(MajesticSEO): 5319
www.mcgeelerer.com: 48 pages
# of backlinks(MajesticSEO): 131
www.ellisinjurylaw.com: 731 pages
# of backlinks(MajesticSEO): 438
www.epersonalinjurylawyers.com: 922 pages
# of backlinks(MajesticSEO): 4319
The conclusion from reviewing the results of Los Angeles are that the larger websites definitely seem to be ranking well. There are some clear outliers though. CMPCC and PSBLAW both have several thousand pages, yet are on page 1. Websites with substantially less content seem to be ranking on page 1 of Google. What’s equally interesting, though, is that many all of the websites on page 1 of Google for this keywords have content in the mid, or high, hundreds of pages.
