508 Law Firm Pages, Measured Against the Pages Beating Them

Between 25 August and 18 September 2026 we measured 508 law firm pages against the pages ranking above them in Google. This is what the data says, and it disagrees with most of the advice law firms are given.

What is in the sample

Two things in that table matter more than the rest.

435 distinct domains. This is not one site measured many times. It is close to half a thousand separate firms.

Positions 4 to 20. We did not sample law firm pages at random. Every page here was already near the top and not in it. Pages in the top three were excluded, and so was anything below 20. That is the band where the text on the page is usually the deciding factor, and it is where most firms sit when they decide something is wrong.

So read every number below as being about pages that are close. It does not describe law firm websites in general, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Length is not what separates them

The median page in our sample runs 1,600 words. The median of the pages ranking above them runs 1,544.

Page by page, 241 were shorter than their competition and 247 were longer. That is a coin flip.

The spread is wide — a quarter of the pages are under 976 words and a quarter are over 2,437 — but the long ones are not winning and the short ones are not losing. If someone has quoted you for another thousand words of content, ask what evidence that recommendation rests on. In this sample there is none.

Topic coverage is already fine for most firms

The second thing law firms get told is to add keywords. We measured something close to that: of the vocabulary the pages above you use when covering the same subject, how much appears on your page at least once.

224 of the 508 pages — 44 per cent — were missing nothing at all. At the median across the whole sample, pages were short by four words.

But the median hides the other half of the story. 154 pages, about one in three, were missing more than fifteen words. For them the gap is real and worth closing.

So: for most firms, adding vocabulary is not the lever. For a third of them it is, and you can tell which group you are in by looking rather than guessing.

Nearly every page repeats itself

504 of the 508 pages — 99 per cent — use at least one meaningful word substantially more often than the pages ranking above them.

The words are not unusual. They are the firm’s own category vocabulary.

A page about commercial litigation says «legal», «services» and «litigation» over and over. The page outranking it uses those words a normal number of times and spends the rest of the space on commercial litigation itself: what it costs, how long it takes, what happens when the other side will not settle.

The target phrase is usually under-used, not over-used

This one surprised us.

If pages were being stuffed with their target keyword, we would expect the main search phrase to be the most over-repeated thing on the page. It is not. On 87 pages out of 508 — 17 per cent — the phrase the page was built for appeared less often than on the pages above it.

The repetition problem is not the target phrase. It is everything around it.

Why this happens to law firms

Two reasons, neither of them incompetence.

Legal writing is cautious by training. «Our firm’s legal team can assist with your legal matter» is how a careful lawyer writes, and it is also three category words in nine. A search engine reading that sentence learns almost nothing about the practice.

And most of these pages were written to a keyword brief. Someone was told the phrase was «commercial litigation attorney» and used it, and its parts, wherever they would fit. The brief was followed exactly. The page lost anyway.

What to do, and in what order

The order matters, because these edits interact.

1. Cut the repetition first. Count how often your category words appear — the practice area, «legal», «services», «clients», «firm». Delete the ones carrying no information. «Our legal team provides legal services in legal matters» becomes «We handle these matters» and loses nothing a client wanted.
2. Check coverage after cutting, not before. Removing text changes which terms now look thin. Add vocabulary second, or you will be building on top of the problem.
3. Leave the target phrase alone unless it is genuinely missing. Four times more often the mistake runs the other way.
4. Replace adjectives with specifics. Fees, timelines, jurisdictions, what you do not take on. That is what the pages above you are doing with the space you freed.

None of this is new content. It is an edit, and one service page takes an afternoon. If you would rather hand it over, this is what we do on SEO for law firms.

What this measurement does not cover

It compares text with text. It says nothing about your backlinks, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, or whether anyone is searching for the phrase you chose.

We have seen firms clean up their pages properly and stay where they were, because the results above them were national directories with twenty years of authority. Text is the lever you control. It is not the only lever.

It is also a snapshot. The pages you are measured against change, and a page that passes today drifts as the top of the result moves.

And it is a sample of pages in positions 4 to 20, taken from two English-language markets over three weeks. It is not a census.

If you want to check one page yourself

Open your service page and your competitor’s. Use Ctrl+F on each for your practice area, and compare the counts. Then do it for «services», «legal» and «clients».

On four pages out of ten in our sample, that one comparison would have found the problem.

Data requests

The measurement was run by Global One Digital between 25 August and 18 September 2026. Journalists and researchers can request the per-page figures behind any chart on this page, including the list of domains in the sample: info@development-web.com.

If you publish anything based on these numbers, please link to this page so readers can see the sample and its limits.