By Dan Weeks
Lawyers will expect that familiar directories like FindLaw, Avvo and Lawyers.com are among the top lawyer directories, ranked by Google traffic, for personal injury lawyers. What comes as a surprise is that changing consumer behavior has put Yelp and Thumbtack among the top directories.
Recent updates in Google search algorithms have made “find a lawyer” directories much more important for personal injury lawyers to consider as a source of traffic to their websites.
My research identifies the top five personal injury directory services in the largest five metro areas for personal injury lawyers -- Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Houston and Dallas Ft. Worth -- ranked by website traffic.
There is a wide array of directory services available for lawyers, some of which have free directories and optional advertising, and others that offer only paid advertising. More traffic doesn’t always equate to high-value traffic, so these differences are important to consider.
The results are filled with valuable insights. Note that only the top 20 personal injury keywords for search volume within each metro area were used for this analysis. Click to see the four-step process that was used to generate the top five lists.
The top five directory services based on estimated traffic for the highest value keywords regardless of metro area in this analysis are:
Drilling into each market uncovers compelling trends and surprises that may cause you to change which directories you choose to be listed in. Below is the detailed list of every directory service in each of the five metro areas that made the list.
The click-through rate percentages presented here are based on high quality research presented in the FindLaw white paper, The Futility of Chasing Silver Bullets. If you would like access to the detailed keyword click analysis for each of the five metro areas please email me at and I will be happy to provide the spreadsheet. I welcome any feedback on the calculations or how they were derived.
Dan Weeks is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lawyer Marketing Score in San Luis Obispo, California, which is currently accepting qualified personal injury firms for its private beta.
Providing a FICO© Score for online marketing, Lawyer Marketing Score at www.LawyerMarketingScore.com, currently in private beta, provides small personal injury law firms with a neutral benchmark for measuring the efficacy of their online marketing efforts in context with their local competitors. Products specific to criminal defense and DUI practices will follow in the near horizon.
LMS provides a welcome source of accountability and transparency. Many law firms find their current vendor is doing a great job but others may find the opposite. LMS accounts for traffic data from both Google and “Find a Lawyer” directory services - data unavailable anywhere else.
LMS is a free service powered by Internet Marketing Fiduciaries, a digital marketing information company that brings transparency and accountability to online marketing efforts through big data benchmarking with a vision to disrupt and transform other verticals in the professional services sector.