Baltimore is a very populated city, and in particular, it’s a hub. Many people live in the suburbs surrounding Baltimore, and often commute in and out of it every day. Much like NYC, or Los Angeles, it’s a city that is densely populated with a wide array of socio-economic parties.
Today, we’re going to look at Baltimore personal injury lawyers, and in specific, identify the Baltimore personal injury lawyers with the best site design, and in addition – review their SEO rankings (if any).
When we conducted this study, our goal was to identify if their was a correlation between site quality(which should lead to a better user experience), and site SEO rankings.
Personal injury is one of the most competitive SEO verticals. Many law firm’s literally dump ten’s of thousands of dollars each month, in SEO. Many dump hundred’s of thousands for PPC.
As a result of the large marketing budgets that personal injury lawyers can have, the work done on behalf of them by legal web designers/seo companies is greater. You are expected to provide a superior product, because the process of hiring a personal injury lawyer isn’t a trivial process.
Many personal injury lawyer websites we have seen often fail due to the fact they fail to properly impress upon a potential client, WHY they should hire the personal injury law firm. With new design methods, such as parallax design, etc, web design for lawyers is only getting more and more “busy,” with often nonsense design elements.
When a client visits a personal injury lawyers website, he wants to be told the following things.
1. Can you get me a large settlement for my case/Can you handle my case?
For example, someone who has suffered a car accident related injury visiting a website with multi-million dollar settlements relating to drug/product defects, and medical malpractice, will likely not convert.
Why? Because he probably won’t feel convinced that you: handle his type of case, or have experience handling his case.
2. WHY should I hire you?
This is a subliminal question, which is present. There’s no right answer, but it must be answered. Each law firm has it’s own selling points. For example, “providing service,” etc. You have to tell a client why they should pick you, and support it with evidence.
The top 3 positions in Baltimore for personal injury are taken up by: Avvo, FindLaw, and Thumbtack. These are all large directories.
Followed by them, law firms with proprietary websites rank:
These 3 law firms seem to rank universally in both Google places and Google organics consistently.
Out of the three, the best website design seems to be that of YostLaw.com
Out of the three top Google ranking law firms, this firm has the most compelling website. Their color scheme of blue and white works really well for them. In addition, their 1-800 number is in the top right, and prominent placed, which is a great call to action. They also have a “contact form” on the sidebar, which places it in a prominent location for prospective clients to call. In addition, they have great bold text in the first slide of the slideshow. There are about 6 slides in the slideshow, and each slide is better than the next!
How big is the site:Â YostLaw is 182 pages big. Many of these pages seem to be “practice area,” pages. Many of the other pages are “news,” pages – such as blog posts about recent mass recalls, etc.
Backlinks: The firm has about 1041 backlinks. In the context of personal injury, many law firms in competitive cities have a large number of backlinks. Having said that, I wouldn’t get scared about this large number. While there may be 1041 backlinks, they are coming from 147 referring domains. Typically, most websites have a 1:1 ratio between backlinks and referring domains. When there are more backlinks vs referring domains, it means that the firm is getting multiple backlinks from the SAME domain name.
Here’s a breakdown of the EXACT domains giving the firm backlinks. As you can see, Page1Solutions.com (possibly the SEO vendor?), is giving it’s own client 253 backlinks, which is almost 20% of the firms total backlinks.
Another directory, the-injury-lawyer-directory.com, is providing 128 backlinks. Google generally ignores/devalues instances when a domain is giving more than 1 backlink to the same website. In this case, even though there are 1041 backlinks, you can – for Google’s purposes – that in reality the firm only has about 147 backlinks. The other duplicate links coming from the same domain (Page1Solutions.com,), are ignored/devalued in Google’s eyes
Out of the three law firms we analyzed as the top ranking, this law firm definitely has the least friendly / cosmetically appealing website. While it is very clean, it simply offers no substance to a potential client, and provides no value. This is a site designed by FindLaw, which is a very large legal marketing agency. While I am usually happy with their work – this law firm’s website is a total let down.
Simply put: why should a consumer feel convinced this firm can represent their interests?
While the firm has their toll free number in the top right corner, which is a good thing for lead generation purposes, everything else falls apart.
As you continue to scroll on the homepage, there’s a lot of “text” but very little substance to support it.
MISSING THINGS WHICH WOULD HELP
While the firm has adopted a minimalistic style, it lacks the essential things which a consumer looks for when making a choice. Even if you scroll through the inner pages of the site, they lack any real substance.
SO WHY ARE THEY RANKING?
Million dollar question we hope to answer, why is the firm ranking?
Well, for starters, the firm has consolidated MANY practice areas onto their site. For example, they have criminal defense, workers compensation, social security disability, and personal injury. They have a lot of pages with content for all the different practice areas.
Page Count: The firm has almost 557 pages, according to Google. Because they have 4 different legal practice areas merged into the same site, it’s quite easy to understand how the firm has such a big website! It’s Compared to YostLaw, which has 182 pages, this is a huge increase in overall pages. It definitely makes sense why Google is ranking this law firm on page 1.
Backlinks:Â According to MajesticSEO, the firm has approximately 2449 backlinks coming from 410 referring domains. Compared to YostLaw, this is a significant increase in not only backlinks but referring domains.
Even though the site’s design is terrible, it’s clear that it’s playing the SEO game really well and it explains why it’s ranking.
In this situation, many of the links are coming from large lawyer directories, which are giving the firm “multiple links” thereby inflating the external backlinks count. For all intensive purposes, assume that firm has only about 400-500 actual backlinks that are giving it SEO power.
How Can The Firm Grow?
Frankly, the firm seems to be playing the SEO game really well. While their links are low quality, and would probably NOT be effective in a more competitive city like Los Angeles, it certainly is a good way of understanding Baltimore’s competition – or lack thereof!
The best way for this firm to grow is to redo it’s website. At present, the firm’s website is holding it back, and simply put costing it money. With personal injury settlements and verdicts ranging from ten’s of thousands, to millions of dollars, this is a silly and expensive mistake to be making, especially with such great rankings.
Angelos law is another firm that ranks well in both places and organics.
Design: Design wise the firm has a really clean brand associated with it. It’s got it’s toll free number in the top right corner. This is definitely a great example of a firm who may alienate people who have minor/medium accidents, such as rear-end car accident, etc.
Why?
Simple: the firm boasts it’ recovered billions of dollars in compensation.
To an ordinary victim, this projects an image of a sophisticated, yet uber big law firm, that doesn’t care about a victim with small injuries.
Depending on who the law firm is targeting, this is either a good or bad thing. If the firm only handles big sophisticated cases, such as those that result in high millions or billions, then this is a good image. It keeps smaller cases away, and specifically attracts the types of cases they want to handle.
Page Count: The website is about 182 pages big. Nothing to talk about here. It’s not too small, and not too big.
Backlinks: According to MajesticSEO the firm has approximately 2000 backlinks. Again, nothing to talk about here. The reason the firm does well, is because of where the links are coming from. Here is a small subset of some of the top links.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Angelos
http://charlesstreet.org/board
Upon analyzing the top 3 ranking Baltimore personal injury law firms, it definitely seems that the firms that do rank are doing an ok job. Some are doing better than others.
Out of all the firms we looked at, AngelosLaw definitely seems to be the best
