I recently built a backlink database specifically for law firms.

If you know me, you know I’m cynical about Internet marketing and advertising. Don’t get me wrong: they can be great!

Advertising pays for tons of great content. But, it also pays for anti-vaxxers and clickbait trash.

Marketing introduces users to new experiences. But, it also crowds out authentic experiences.

SEO is sort of the nexus of these two fields. Accordingly, there is a ton of sleaze in the SEO space. So I wasn’t too surprised when the Google Search Console showed that one of the top keywords for our site was lawlytics organic seo. Who are these people, I wondered?

For context, LawLytics is an SEO agency who sell themselves as experts in building and marketing websites for law firms. I assume these searchers are lawyers who are close to pulling the trigger on a contract with LawLytics and are wondering if their claims are true.

On the one hand, I really want to like LawLytics. They are one of the few players who have transparent pricing. That’s a huge breath of fresh air.

On the other hand, their actual SEO seems a bit lacking. If you spot check some of their customers’ websites, you quickly see glaring, basic errors, like homepages without metadesc tags. That’s SEO 101 stuff.

But maybe the value of LawLytics rests in their other offerings – perhaps they’re really good at link-building, for example?

We can use the backlink database to test this hypothesis. There are some caveats. The database is currently only a 12-month sample. Even if it was expanded to the entire several year history of the Common Crawl, it would not be as comprehensive as Ahrefs or Moz. Still, over enough web sites, it’s likely directionally accurate when comparing multiple SEO agencies.

So how did LawLytics stack up? It was better than the average law firm’s website, but far from the best. In fact, in terms of PageRank, its customers ranked last of all the major SEO agencies.

The average website had 8 links from 4 domains, and a PageRank of 2.32. The major law firm SEO agencies, on the other hand:

SEO Agency # of Links # of Domains PageRank
JurisDigital 104 22 3.08
Justia 616 12 2.61
Zola Creative 9 5 2.59
Scorpion 19 7 2.5
FindLaw 9 4 2.47
LawLytics 12 4 2.45

¯\_(ツ)_/¯