Directory Listings for Law Firms – Cool Research Data

By Peter Boyd on February 5, 2010 in Internet Marketing 

We recently ran some numbers for directories of law firms. We tracked statistics from Compete.com, Alexa, Open Site Explorer and Yahoo Site Explorer. ” With this data we can rank legal directories based on estimated traffic. ” We can also estimate out the SEO value of having a link from each directory.

You can see the full MS Excel report here:

PaperStreet Research – Directory Lists for Law Firms

Wow that is a lot of data, so what does all this mean?”  Let’s break down a few sections:

TRAFFIC ESTIMATES

Most Traffic in December from Compete.com Metrics (top 5)

1. Business.com (3,300,000 visitors)
2. Yahoo Directory – (1,700,000 visitors)
3. DMOZ.org (779,000) – Ditto – big general directory.
4. Avvo.com (652,000)
5. Lawyers.com (600,000)

We realize that Compete.com is not completely accurate, but it is a guideline into shear size of the directories and approximate traffic volumes. It allows us to see simply who gets more traffic in general.

Note that the top three sites are general directories, so the data is skewed towards all types on inquiries, not just legal. The legal traffic would be much less.

Also note that Avvo has 2 million client visits per month listed on their site. If this is the case, this bumps them up substantially. Thanks for the quick link to the data on the site. I”  wish all sites were that easy to find info.

Finally, this is from Compete – “Compete has developed a unique methodology created by experts in the fields of mathematics, statistics and the data sciences to aggregate, transform, enhance and normalize data in order to estimate U.S. Internet traffic.”

Biggest Percent Change in Traffic Month to Month with Compete.com Data

This is the percent change from the previous report.

1. Avvo.com (Up 62%)
2. HG.org (Up 45%)
3. Martindale.com (Up 26%)
4. Lawyers.com (Up 18%)
5. Findlaw.com (Up 10%)

SEO ESTIMATES

Google Page Rank

This is the PageRank of the various directories. It is a 1 to 10 scale and higher is better. PageRank is a great quick indicator of the value of having a link to your site.

1. Yahoo Directory – PR 8
2. Findlaw – PR 8
3. DMOZ.org – PR 8
4. A lot tied for 7 PR
5. Only two have a PR 6 and none are lower

Yahoo Links

Using Site Explorer, the number of links into the domain”  – ex: linkdomain:lawyers.com -site:lawyers.com. This tells us how many people link to each directory. The more links, the better.

1. DMOZ.org – 6,000,000 inbound links.
2. Business.com – 986,000
3. Yahoo Directory – 986,000
4. Lawyers.com – 890,000
5. BOTW.org & Justia – 472,000

Open Site Explorer

This is a great new tool to track inbound links and the overall authority of a page and domain. ” Root Domains is the number of unique root domains (e.g. *.example.com) containing at least one linking page to this URL/domain. ” In short, all of the directories have great domain and page authority. All of them are in the 80’s and even 90’s. This is due a lot to the fact that each site has thousands of root domains linking to their sites.

Page Authority

Page Authority predicts this page’s ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics. Page Authority scores are on a 100-point, logarithmic scale.

1. Yahoo Directory – 98 out of 100
2. Findlaw.com – 93
3. Business.com – 88
4. Justia Directory & Justia.com 88
5. BOTW.org – 88

Domain Authority

Domain Authority predicts this domain’s ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics. Domain Authority scores are on a 100-point, logarithmic scale.

1. Findlaw.com – 93
2. Mardinale – 89
3. Business.com – 88
4. Lawyers.com – 88
5. Yahoo Directory – 87

Conclusion

It all comes down to budgets. ” If a firm has the budget, we would generally recommend obtaining a link from each directory. All of these directories are worthy of getting a link.

DMOZ.org is free, so why not sign up – it just may take forever to get approved. ” Other directories like business.com and Yahoo.com generally cost $299 a year. ” We have a cool$50 off coupon for Business.com here if you decide to sign up.

Other major legal directories such as Hieros Gamos, Findlaw.com, Avvo.com, Justia.com, Martindale.com and Lawyers.com you would need to contact each directory to see the fee schedule. Justia and Avvo are free initially, so why not sign up. The others may be cost prohibitive depending on firm budgets.

However, from an SEO perspective you” cannot go wrong with getting a link from each directory. ” This will increase your inbound links and with the overall authority of each domain pass along a lot of “link juice.”

Final Notes

If anyone wishes to report their traffic to this documents, we can definitely update. We were using free tools available to us to estimate, namely www.compete.com. It is a great tool and we would love to compare real-world numbers with their data in another report. We would also like to update costs so that we have a final chart of expenses for directory listings too.

Thanks!”  Team PaperStreet

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