Local Search Visibility Audit

The new one: AI search

Your Google profile and reviews

Your Google profile lists you as a personal injury attorney at your street address, with your phone number and website in place. Past that, it's thin. There's no business description, while both firms we compared you with have one. You list 4 services. Competitor 1 lists 12, and Competitor 2 has 63 service entries. You handle medical malpractice, car accidents and nursing home neglect, but your list doesn't name them. Your profile also carries no categories beyond personal injury attorney, while Competitor 1 adds 3 and Competitor 2 adds 4.

Your 4.9 matches both firms we compared you with. You have 14 Google reviews at 4.9, 13 of them five stars, and the newest arrived on October 15. Competitor 1 has 113 Google reviews at 4.9 and Competitor 2 has 43 at 4.9. The gap is pace. In the past year you picked up 7 new reviews, against 53 for Competitor 1 and 6 for Competitor 2.

Competitor 1 replies to every review and Competitor 2 to about 6 in 10. You've replied to 2 of your 14, both in October 2020. Your reviewers name your lawyers and staff and describe what the firm did for them, at about 60 words each on average. There just aren't many yet: 14, against Competitor 1's 113. In a 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers, 97% said they read reviews for local businesses and 89% expect the owner to reply to them. Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026.

You're ahead of Competitor 1 on profile photos, with 17 against its 8, though Competitor 2 has 31. Your profile links to your homepage, while both other firms link to a page about their Fort Wayne office. Both also offer online appointments on their profiles, and yours doesn't show that option, as of our September profile record. Your hours read weekdays 8:30 to 5, while both other firms list round-the-clock hours. That only matters if someone actually answers the phone then, so it's a question for you, not a change we'd make blind.

Your website

Your site names 11 practice areas, from wrongful death and vehicle crashes to nursing home neglect and birth injuries. All of them sit on one practice areas page. Truck, motorcycle and pedestrian cases are single paragraphs inside the vehicle crashes section. So none of them has a page of its own. So a search for car accident lawyer Fort Wayne has no car accident page of yours to show. The site also says "Vehicle Crashes" where people type car accident. Competitor 1 has statewide pages for car accident, truck accident, dog bite, slip and fall and workers' compensation cases, plus a Fort Wayne personal injury page.

Inside that page, the services get uneven headings. Wrongful death gets a big one, while dog bites and defective products sit under small ones. Most sections are one long block of text with no subheadings or lists. Your 16-question FAQ is strong material, but it sits on its own page, away from the services it answers. Even so, the shared page is your best result below the map: #8 on a phone for wrongful death lawyer Fort Wayne.

Your phone number is printed on every page we read, as plain text, not a tap-to-call link. So a visitor on a phone can't tap it to call. "Call For A Free Consultation" is plain text too. The homepage form asks for a name, email, subject and message, but not a phone number. The practice areas page has no contact form or call button. The homepage's directions link starts from a fixed point, not from where the visitor is. There's no call-tracking code on the pages we read, and we found nothing that tells website calls apart from profile calls. Google Analytics code is installed, which is a good start.

You have strong credentials to show. One of your lawyers has been named an Indiana Super Lawyer for years, and the site notes a long-standing seat on the board of the state's trial lawyers association. One small fix: the homepage reads "Indiana State Bar Association (ITLA)", but ITLA is the trial lawyers association's short name. Your 14 Google reviews average 4.9, and the practice areas page shows none of them. Before quoting reviews there, it's worth checking Indiana's rules on lawyer advertising, which we haven't reviewed. The site has images labelled with your lawyers' names and the office. Judging by their labels, many other images look like stock photos, and real ones would read better.

Two smaller points, both found at the very bottom of your homepage, are quick to put right. Your homepage has no link to a privacy policy. The copyright line at the bottom of your homepage still says 2024.

Your homepage title already names Fort Wayne personal injury lawyer, and that's right. The homepage's main heading is just the firm name, even though the banner says personal injury. The practice areas page title names no service at all. The homepage's behind-the-scenes code Google reads has no hours and leaves out the suite number. The newest blog post we found is from July 2024.

Where you show up when people search

Start with personal injury, your main practice. On October 19 we checked the map at 49 spots, from your office out to 6 miles in each direction. For personal injury lawyer, you show up at all 49 of them. You're in the top 3 at 1, the spot at your office, and just below the top 3 at 10 more. At the other 38 you show up, but practically invisible, at #11 or lower. Personal injury attorney looks about the same: you show up at all 49 spots, in the top 3 at 1 and just below the top 3 at 8 more. For that search, Competitor 1 is in the top 3 at 34 spots and in the top 10 at 48. Competitor 2 is in the top 3 at 1, like you, and in the top 10 at 44.

Our August map check named the town. For personal injury lawyer Fort Wayne, you showed up at all 49 spots but reached the top 3 at none, and were just below the top 3 at 4. Competitor 1 was #1 at 11 of 49 spots and in the top 3 at 38. In the regular results below the map on a phone, neither personal injury lawyer Fort Wayne nor personal injury attorney Fort Wayne shows your site in the first 20.

The other practice areas are mixed. Medical malpractice is your closest map result, though still outside the top 3: in October you were in the top 3 at none of the 49 spots and just below it at all 49, best #5, while Competitor 2 was #1 at 23 of them. For nursing home neglect you were not in the map's top 20 at any spot in October without the town. With Fort Wayne in the search in August, you were in the top 3 at none of the 49 spots and just below it at 25. Your best result below the map is wrongful death, where your site sits at #8 on a phone for wrongful death lawyer Fort Wayne. None of the three firms we tracked was in the map results for that search, and the October wrongful death map scan failed.

We tracked 32 searches in October and 2 civil litigation searches in August. Across the 15 services your site offers, you show up well enough to count for 3: wrongful death, medical malpractice and nursing home neglect, all through the regular results on a phone when Fort Wayne is in the search, at #8, #19 and #14. Construction accident, truck, motorcycle, pedestrian, dog bite and slip and fall cases sit around #7 to #10 on the map at the one spot we checked, with nothing in the first 20 regular results on a phone, so they don't count yet. When 47 local search specialists scored what moves the map results in 2026, the top of the list was the main profile category, distance from the searcher, a real address in the city, being open when people search, a high Google rating and the number of Google reviews. Source: Whitespark, 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors.

Every service, one search each

We checked one search for each of the 15 services your site offers: personal injury as a whole, the 11 practice areas, and the truck, motorcycle and pedestrian cases inside your vehicle crashes section. A service counts as visible when you're in Google's top 3 map results in our search check for it. For your four main services, being in the first 20 regular results on a phone when Fort Wayne is in the search also counts.

Demand is a band based on how many times people search for each service each month. It is not a count of local searches. A blank band means we had no search figure for that wording.

The search page, search by search

Here's where you stand on each search from the one spot we checked, personal injury wordings first. This is a single check, so its map numbers can differ from the 49-spot scan above. Regular results are what a phone shows. On searches with no town name we show the map only.

We didn't record whether Google showed an AI answer, an answer box or a list of related questions on these searches this time. That part is unknown, not a no.

Where your business is listed online

You're listed on Apple Maps and on Bing. Both show the Fort Wayne law firm at your street address with your phone number, matching your Google profile, and Bing includes the suite number as well. The Apple place card we read shows your street address with no suite number. It's a small thing, but worth tidying so every listing reads the same.

We tried to open your firm's Facebook page, but Facebook asked for a login, so we couldn't see it. The Yelp pages that came up in our search were not yours, so we did not check your own Yelp page. A MapQuest page came up when we searched your phone number. We did not open it, so we can't say what details it shows.

We searched OpenStreetMap for your firm's name near your office and found no entry, though one name search can miss one. We did not check Foursquare. Both are worth checking, and adding the firm if it isn't there.

Legal directories came up often in the AI answers. When we asked four AI tools about injury lawyers in Fort Wayne, all four drew on Super Lawyers, and ChatGPT used Avvo in all 6 of its answers. A search of your firm's name turned up a Super Lawyers page for the firm and one for one of its lawyers, and Avvo pages for two of its lawyers. We opened both Super Lawyers pages and one of the Avvo pages, and all three loaded. We did not open the other Avvo page. We did not check every detail on these pages. That's worth doing in the deeper review.