The Secrets to Increasing Your Avvo Rating to 10
How to increase your Avvo rating
70% of people go online when looking for legal services. That’s the reason why you need to have a good online reputation. Avvo is an online directory of and for attorneys that rates them based on their profile information.
What is the Avvo Rating?
Avvo ratings range from 1 to 10 and are given to attorneys based on their profile information and information gathered on the internet from different sources. If the profile is enriched by awards, speaking engagements, and other attorney’s recommendations it will increase the rating.
It is worth noting that in our research we struggled to find anyone with less than a “7 star “Very Good “ rating. For this reason, we recommend working to get your rating to at least a superb or 9+ star rating.
An Avvo rating is meant to give insight to prospective clients when looking for attorneys online. Each range has a designation about the attorney’s reliability and goes from “Extreme Caution” to “Superb”.
Why is it important to have a high Avvo rating?
Avvo ratings are often picked up by other sources including Search Engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing – where it is viewed as an authoritative source – The attorneys’ page, and score, are displayed as a result when people search for their names.
Being present where your potential clients are and giving them a good impression there can increase the number of calls you receive. Working on your Avvo profile will help you create a good first impression by providing all the needed information to a system that uses the profile completeness as a basis for your score.
Avvo will also help you be found by people looking for attorneys in your practice area and your city. Which could increase the number of calls from potential clients.
How is the Avvo rating calculated?
The rating is calculated based on the information provided by the attorney about his experience, speaking engagements, awards, and recommendations given by other lawyers. Avvo only considers the information provided on the profile.
Step by step to increase your Avvo rating
1. Claim your profile
Start by signing up and claiming your profile. You can do that by using your LinkedIn, email, phone number, or Facebook. Then fill out your profile until it is at least 95% complete. To have it fully completed you will have to add an Avvo badge to your website. You are able to get a 10.0 rating either by having your profile 95% or 100% completed.
When filling out your practice areas, be specific about them. Be sure to complete not just the primary practice area, but other related areas as well. For example, if you are a personal injury lawyer do not fill your practice as “car accident”. If you do so, you will show up as a result only for car accident searches. However, if you take the time to go through all your car accident cases and see how many of them are wrongful death or truck accidents then use this information to diversify your listing in as many applicable ways as possible. People looking for these other categories are also finding you.
Another way to increase your Avvo rating is to add any other state bar license. It can increase your rating by a full point unless you have been disciplined by this other state bar, which would considerably decrease your rating.
2. List your work experience
Besides including the practice areas, Avvo will also allow you to add your work experience. You can add the positions you occupied and the start and end dates.
3. List any awards you have won
If you have any awards you must add them to your Avvo profile. It is critical to achieving a perfect rating. Make sure to add the date of the award, since Avvo gives higher points to more recent awards and assumes the oldest date possible for them when you do not provide the correct date.
4. Add cases to your portfolio
Adding cases to your portfolio will help people better understand your work and help you continuously increase your Avvo rating.
5. List the legal and business organizations that you are associated with
If you are associated with any business or legal organizations, listing them and including the time frame and the position you occupied will increase your rating.
6. List any publications you have written or contributed to
If you have been published in your state or voluntary bar journal, as a book writer, as a contributor to someone else’s blog, or an opinion piece on your own blog or website you can also list them in your Avvo profile.
7. List speaking engagements
Speaking engagements are also helpful to increase your rating. You can list them and add a link to a page that has information about the event and mentions you as a speaker. This may increase your Avvo rating by +0.1 for each speaking engagement you list.
8. Get peer endorsements
If other lawyers endorse your profile, it will considerably increase your Avvo rating. They will be asked two questions “How do you know this lawyer?” and “For which practice area are you endorsing this lawyer?”. The first question is important and has some options,
- “Worked together on a matter” and
- “Opposing counsel on a matter”
If they are able to answer yes to either of these options it may increase your rating up to 3x more than the other options.
Usually, peer endorsements increase your rating until you have around 15. When your Avvo profile has more than 15 endorsements, additional endorsements do not have the same impact on the rating. But, this does not mean you should stop requesting them.
Things that do not increase your Avvo rating
Now that we’ve covered the things that will increase your rating it’s worth mention some practices that won’t increase your Avvo rating:
Answering questions, for instance, won’t increase your rating but can help you showcase your expertise. For this purpose, we recommend answering questions of creating legal guides. Legal guides require a lot of work, and many are already written, which means it will be difficult to stand out in this crowded field If you are interested in writing legal guides, you could write them on your own website or some other site that will rank in search.
Client reviews will not increase your Avvo rating, although you may want to have some of them to increase your credibility when someone goes to your profile looking for a lawyer.
It’s worth mentioning that the overall contributor level does not increase your rating either.
Conclusion
Following the steps above is sure to be your path to a better Avvo rating. It will provide a boost whether you are a first-year attorney or if your rating has decreased recently due to changing law firms. It is also worth mentioning that paid advertising will not increase your Avvo rating and as a general rule, we don’t recommend paid Avvo ads as a way of boosting your profile.
