By Alex Comosci, founder of Global One Digital, the SEO and web development agency operating through development-web.com.
Most advice given to law firms about search comes down to two instructions: publish more content, and use more keywords. We went looking for evidence that either one is the actual problem. We did not find it.
Over the past months we ran automated comparisons on 508 law firm pages in the US and UK Google results. For each page we took the query it was trying to rank for, pulled the pages ranking above it for that same query, and compared the two on three things: how long the text is, how much of the topic’s vocabulary it covers, and how often it repeats individual words relative to the pages beating it.
The results were not what the standard advice predicts.
Length is not the problem
The median law firm page in our sample runs 1,596 words. The median of the pages outranking them runs 1,544. Law firm pages are, if anything, slightly longer than their competition.
Split by page, 241 of 508 were shorter than the top of their result, and 267 were longer. That is close enough to a coin flip to say that word count is not what separates page one from page three in this market.
If you have been told your service page needs another thousand words, ask what that recommendation is based on. In our sample, length had no clear relationship with position.
Topic coverage is not the problem either
The second standard instruction is to add keywords. We measured this as breadth: of the vocabulary that the pages ranking above you use when covering this topic, how much appears on your page at least once.
The median law firm page scored 72.8 against a target of 75. The median page was missing four words. Four.
That is a rounding error, not a strategy gap. A handful of pages were genuinely thin on topic vocabulary, but they were the exception.
What we did find
504 of the 508 pages, 99 per cent, repeat at least one meaningful word substantially more often than the pages ranking above them.
The words are not exotic. They are the firm’s own category vocabulary:
| Word repeated more than the top | Share of pages |
|---|---|
| law | 42% |
| legal | 41% |
| business | 38% |
| contact | 36% |
| services | 35% |
| litigation | 29% |
| clients | 28% |
ORIGINAL RESEARCH | GLOBAL ONE DIGITAL
Law Firm SEO Study 2026: The Full Findings
This analysis of 508 US and UK law firm pages is based on research by Global One Digital. The full study includes the underlying dataset, charts, methodology and limitations of the sample.
Read the Full Global One Digital Research Report →Read that table again, because it describes a specific failure mode. A page about commercial litigation says “litigation”, “legal” and “services” over and over, while the page outranking it says those words a normal number of times and spends the rest of its space on the actual substance of commercial litigation.
The median overuse score across our sample was 102.8, where the upper edge of normal is around 83. One page scored 292.
Why this happens to law firms specifically
Two reasons, and neither is incompetence.
The first is that legal writing is cautious by habit. “Our firm’s legal services team can assist with your legal matter” is how a careful lawyer writes. It is also four category words in twelve, and a search engine reading that page learns very little about what the firm actually does.
The second is that most law firm pages were written to a keyword brief.
Someone was told the target phrase was “commercial litigation attorney”, and they used it, and its components, everywhere they could. The brief was followed exactly, and the page lost.
What to change, and in what order
The order matters more than people expect, because these edits interact.
First, cut the repetition. Go through the page and count how many times your category words appear: the practice area, “legal”, “services”, “clients”, “law”. Cut the ones that carry no information. A sentence that says “our legal team provides legal services in legal matters” becomes “we handle these matters” and loses nothing a reader wanted.
Second, check coverage after cutting, not before. Cutting words changes which terms look underused. If you add vocabulary first and cut second, you will undo your own work.
Third, leave the main phrase alone unless it is genuinely absent. In our sample only 17 per cent of pages underused their target phrase. The far more common mistake runs the other way.
None of this requires new content. It is editing, and a competent writer does a service page in an afternoon. We cover the method we use for this on our own SEO for law firms page, including how we set the comparison up.
What this measurement does not tell you
Being honest about the limits: this compares text against the text currently ranking above you. It says nothing about your backlinks, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, or whether the query you picked has any real search volume behind it. We have seen firms fix their text perfectly and stay on page three because the five results above them are national directories with decades of authority.
It also measures a page against its current competition, which moves. A page that passes today can drift out of range as the top of the result changes around it.
What it does tell you is whether the text itself is holding the page back. For 99 per cent of the law firm pages we looked at, the answer was yes, and in a direction almost nobody is being advised to look.
If you want to check one of your own pages the quick way: open it, press Ctrl+F, and count how many times your practice area appears.
Then open the page sitting above you in Google and count the same word there. In our sample, that single comparison would have flagged four pages out of ten.
