Your Domain Authority Is Too Low and Other Lies That Don’t Affect Your Rankings

If you’re the managing partner or marketing director of a law firm, you know what spam looks like. Probably this week (or today) some SEO company you’ve never heard of ran your site through a tool and now they’re telling you that your Domain Authority is too low, your PageSpeed score is killing your rankings, you need to buy a keyword-rich domain name before your competitors do.

They’ve got a proposal ready, they can hop on a call this afternoon, and they’d love to take your money and fix “problems” that won’t do a damn thing to make your phone ring.

Our AI law firm marketing platform, Sequoia is always running research that is training our system to work smarter with our team and focus on what works. Most of those discoveries are kept secret and are competitive advantages to be enjoyed by the law firms that partner with us (want to be one? Let’s talk!).

One of our research tools analyzes tens of thousands of real search results across competitive legal keywords in major U.S. markets, and I’ve been all too happy to publicly share the data that hits at what I hate more than anything else in the SEO world…

Vanity metrics.

I hate vanity metrics. They waste your time. They waste my time. And they keep wasting my time, every time I have to explain why they’re a waste of time.

Here are some of the lies you’re being told by SEO companies that are selling vanity metrics and not results.

Your Domain Authority Is Too Low

No it isn’t. Or maybe it is. It doesn’t matter because DA (nor DR) doesn’t predict where you rank. Our latest study, titled “Website Authority Scores Like DA and DR – Do they mean higher rankings?” cleared that up for us.

We analyzed 12,794 search results across 32 keywords, 8 practice areas, and the 50 most populous U.S. cities, scored every result for Moz Domain Authority (DA), and ran Spearman rank correlation against ranking position. For law firms competing against other law firms the correlation was -0.0819, which isn’t weak, it’s negligible, it’s the statistical equivalent of nothing. The median DA difference between a law firm sitting in the #1 spot and one stuck at #8 was 4 points on a 100-point scale, and if that’s the gap you’re building your sales pitch around, you’re selling anxiety, not law firm SEO.

We went further. We tested every head-to-head matchup between law firms appearing in the same search results, 26,938 pairs in total, and the higher-DA firm ranked higher only 54.9% of the time. That’s a coin flip. We found firms with DA scores of 6 and 15 and 20 sitting in the #1 position for competitive terms in major cities while firms with scores three and four and six times higher sat at the bottom of the page.

Website authority scores do not determine higher or lower rankings for your law firm’s website.

Your PageSpeed Score Is Hurting Your Rankings

We ran a study asking if PageSpeed matters for law firm seo and the answer is “no.”

We pulled PageSpeed scores for 1,750 ranking URLs across 50 U.S. cities and 11 personal injury keywords and correlated them with ranking position. We focused on personal injury keywords due to their unequivocal competitive nature. The Pearson correlation was r = -0.029, which is so close to zero that calling it a correlation at all is generous. The average PageSpeed score at Position 1 was 66, at Position 5 it was 65.

Does real-world page speed matter at all? Yes. A site that takes eight seconds to load loses visitors and that’s a conversion problem that needs immediate attention. But the core web vitals scores are not real-world load times.

In fact, Google’s official blog on Core Web Vitals actually fails Core Web Vitals 🤦‍♂️

✅ Real-world user experience does matter for conversions.

❌ PageSpeed scores do not matter for rankings.

Keyword-rich Domain Names are More Valuable

One of my favorite reports of the first quarter was on how valuable URLs are to law firm rankings.

Our URL structure study analyzed 31,977 ranking URLs across 288 U.S. markets and 8 practice areas, and we did find that URL structure genuinely matters; this is one area where the data actually showed a meaningful relationship with rankings.

But the part that matters is the URL path, not the domain name.

• URLs in the 45 to 75 character range with practice area keywords in the path outperformed shorter generic URLs
• Pages with the target city in the URL path ranked measurably better for geo-modified searches
• And well-organized site architecture with descriptive keyword-relevant paths made a real difference across every practice area we tested.

✅ Your website’s structure and keywords in the URL are VERY important.

❌ Keywords in the domain name? Worthless.

The data showed no ranking advantage for exact-match or keyword-rich domain names. So the spam you’re getting about how “YourTopKeywordandCity.com” will help you rank better is 100% false. They’re selling a 15-year-old tactic that the data shows stopped working a long time ago. A branded domain with smart URL architecture beats a keyword domain with a flat site structure, and I have a receipt with 31,977 data points to prove it.

There Are Plenty of Things That Truly Matter in Law Firm SEO and AEO

The firms sitting in the top spots across our data share a few things in common and none of them are metrics you can check with a free tool in 30 seconds.

• Practice area pages that rank well tend to walk through the legal process, cite the laws that apply, explain what the client should expect at each stage, and demonstrate that the attorney behind the content has handled these cases before. Pages that would still be useful if Google didn’t exist.

• Case results are the single easiest way for a law firm to demonstrate real-world experience and the one thing most firms never get around to publishing. Settlements, verdicts, case types, outcomes. Google’s quality guidelines talk about experience and expertise as ranking considerations, and a track record of actual results attached to a real attorney’s name communicates those signals faster than anything else on your site. Case results are also a great way to win new clients through answer engine optimization.

• Local reputation carries more weight than most firms realize. Google Business Profile optimization, review velocity, citation consistency across directories, geographic-specific content that proves the firm actually operates in the market it’s targeting. The firms dominating their cities are investing here while their competitors obsess over vanity metrics.

• Links that move rankings look like a mention in the local news, a quote in an industry publication, a case result picked up by a legal blog, a speaking engagement linked from a bar association site. They boost your real-world authority and can actually improve your rankings, not just some platform’s score.

• Site architecture pays compounding returns. Our URL study proved this one with data. Descriptive paths, keywords in the right places, city names where they belong, logical hierarchy from practice area down to specific case type.

There are real things worth investing in that will boost your case load. Vanity metrics distract from those efforts. So the next time you get a scary email about how some score or your domain name is keeping your rankings down, you can delete it and save yourself a lot of time and money.