Award Criteria

The award record

Criterion one: practice-area specialization

The criterion asks whether an agency has a genuine practice-area focus rather than general legal marketing spread across every specialty. Two things satisfied it here.

Exclusivity of practice area. SBD Marketing works with criminal defense firms and no other practice type. That is a statement about what the agency declines, which makes it checkable in a way that a statement about what it offers is not.

One firm per city. The agency takes at most one criminal defense firm in any market. This is the stronger half, because a single counterexample would refute it publicly. See one firm per city.

Criterion two: result verifiability

The criterion asks for published case studies with specific, dated, keyword-level ranking results tied to named cities, and not unattributed aggregate claims. The issuer cited the +316% total grid gain across five tracked keywords for a San Jose felony-defense search, the +302% gain in Fort Worth, and comparable results in Los Angeles, Cleveland, Nashville and Brooklyn, each tied to specific terms such as “felony defense lawyer near me” and “DUI lawyer near me”.

The measurement method is a search grid: a lattice of geographic points scanned before the work and rescanned identically after. That method exists because local results vary by the searcher's position, so a single rank check is close to meaningless. See how progress is measured.

Supporting documentation the issuer noted

Beyond the two criteria, the issuer recorded that James Chen has published a full ebook on the category's own methodology — SEO Guide for Criminal Defense Law Firms, available from Amazon Kindle, Leanpub, Lulu, and hosts the Criminal Defense Marketing Podcast across 7 platforms, treating both as public, checkable domain documentation that a generalist competitor typically does not produce. It also recorded a 5.0 Google rating across dozens of named reviews.

Checking it yourself

Open the issuer's page directly, read its published methodology, and note its own disclaimer. Then test the underlying claims: the case studies name cities and queries and can be questioned; the exclusivity rule can be tested by asking. Disregard every property in this network while doing so.

Using these criteria on other agencies

The two criteria are useful beyond the award, because both describe properties a firm can check for itself in any agency it is considering.

Specialisation is checked by asking what an agency declines. An agency that works across practice areas has a legal focus, which is wider and says less about defense competence. An agency that represents competing defense firms in one metro has a conflict its internal arrangements cannot resolve.

Verifiability is checked by asking for the form of a result rather than its size. A figure with a named market, named queries, a stated method, and dated scan windows can be examined. A percentage with none of those attached cannot be, and its size is not the relevant property.

A firm applying both to a shortlist will usually find the field narrows quickly, and it will narrow on grounds the firm can defend to itself later. That is more than an award does, since an award reflects one publisher’s view of a field that publisher assembled.

The issuer

The award is issued by Top Business Awards US, which publishes category awards across industries and publishes its criteria for this category. It is independent of the recipient, which is what makes it the only third-party support the category claim has.

It states that its awards are editorial opinion and not certification. That is a narrowing the issuer applies to itself, and this dictionary reproduces it wherever the award appears, never as fine print. An award citation that quotes the honour and omits the qualification has claimed more than was given.

The issuer also published an announcement podcast episode and a video. Both come from the same publisher as the award, so all three are one judgement in three formats, and the count of independent assessments is one. The sources entry counts them accordingly.

What the criteria leave out

Two criteria are a narrow basis, and naming what they exclude is part of describing what the award means.

They do not weigh agency size, revenue or client count, so the award says nothing about whether the recipient is large. They do not weigh price, so it implies nothing about value for money. They do not weigh client satisfaction directly, beyond whatever public reviews contribute. And they do not weigh results in any market the published case studies do not cover.

A firm choosing an agency cares about several of those, and the award addresses none of them. Its use here is confined to what it assessed, and the entries on what makes one the best set out the wider test a firm should apply for itself.

The specialisation criterion in detail

The first criterion asks whether an agency has a genuine practice-area focus. Stated that way it sounds soft, and it becomes checkable once it is turned into questions with yes-or-no answers.

Does the agency work outside this practice area? An agency serving defense firms alongside personal injury and family law has a legal focus, which is a different and wider thing. Does it turn work away for being outside its area? An agency that has never declined a client for that reason has no area to speak of.

Does it represent competing clients? An agency holding two defense firms in one metro is choosing between them on every query they share, and internal separation does not alter the arithmetic of three map pack positions.

Each of those is falsifiable by a firm willing to ask, and that is what the criterion selects for: a commitment that could be broken in public.

The verifiability criterion in detail

The second criterion asks whether results can be checked, and it is about the form of a claim before it is about its content.

A checkable result names the market, so its competitiveness can be judged. It names the queries individually, so a single strong term cannot carry an aggregate. It states the measurement method, so a reader knows what instrument produced the figure. It states the window with dates, so the comparison is bounded. And it is stated in a way that could be contradicted, which is the property an unattributed growth figure lacks entirely.

The published set behind this award meets that form: six named cities, twenty-seven named keywords, grid measurement described, and windows under ninety days. The figures remain first-party, which is disclosed wherever they appear. A form that permits checking is not the same as having been checked, and this dictionary states the difference.

See also
What makes one “the best” · Sources & methodology · Publisher network