How Google ranks legal pages: what we learned from 40+ barrister websites

Tuesday 5th August 2025

Tela analysed over 40 web pages targeting two competitive legal search terms: “professional negligence barristers” and “crime barristers.” Our aim was to understand why Google ranks some legal websites above others by analysing the key factors that influence search performance.

This research draws on multiple data sources:

• Google Lighthouse, which provided insights into each page’s technical performance, accessibility, SEO best practices and overall page speed.
• SEMrush Domain Overview, which allowed us to assess domain authority, backlink volume, organic search traffic and traffic share across competitor sites.
• Dashword (https://www.dashword.com/), which was used to evaluate content quality and generate content grades for each page.

Below is a summary of the most important trends we observed.

Content quality

A number of high-ranking pages featured only average content scores (C+ or B-) and relatively low word counts, often under 300 words, yet still appeared prominently in search results. This suggests that Google’s ranking algorithm considers more than just the quality or length of on-page content. Factors such as domain authority, backlink profiles and technical site performance significantly influence visibility.

Backlinks and authority

High-ranking pages almost always had strong backlink profiles. In the “professional negligence” space, one B- grade page ranked #2 with over 130,000 backlinks. In the crime barristers research, a page with average content ranked high due to 864 million links from The Guardian.

Technical SEO

Sites that scored well on performance, accessibility and SEO best practices frequently outranked competitors with better content. Clean code and fast load times can help bridge the gap if your domain is newer or less authoritative.

Length of content

Word count varied widely, from under 300 to over 4,000 words. What proved more important was how effectively the page aligned with user intent and how easily Google could crawl and interpret the content.

Want the full research?

We’ve compiled a full comparative report showing:

• Content grade
• Word count
• Domain authority
• Organic search traffic
• Backlinks
• Traffic share
• Performance
• Accessibility
• Best practices
• SEO

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