New Study Finds .law and .lawyer Domains Offer No SEO Advantage for Law Firms
San Francisco, California – Law firm SEO and AEO company, Custom Legal Marketing has released a nationwide study examining whether legal and law related top-level domains such as .law, .legal, .lawyer, and .attorney influence law firm rankings in Google. The study, conducted through the company’s AI law firm marketing platform, Sequoia, analyzed 73,674 ranking appearances from 9,216 competitive legal searches across 288 U.S. metropolitan areas and found no measurable ranking advantage or penalty associated with the legal extensions.
The research examined Google’s top 8 organic desktop results across eight practice areas, including personal injury, criminal defense, family law, and estate planning. After classifying every ranking website, the study identified 9,113 unique U.S. law firm domains. Only 125 of them, or 1.37 percent, use one of the four legal extensions, with .law accounting for 91 of the 125.
Law firms using legal extensions averaged position 4.86 in search results, while firms on .com domains averaged 4.77, a difference the study found to be statistically indistinguishable from zero. In 555 search results where a legal TLD firm and .com firms competed on the same results page for the same keyword in the same city, the legal TLD firm outranked the average .com competitor 47.9 percent of the time, a result consistent with a coin flip.
The study did identify one consistent benefit of the legal extensions. Among ranking law firms, the median domain name on .law and .legal extensions is 6 characters long before the extension, compared to 12 characters for firms on .com domains. Custom Legal Marketing made the same tradeoff itself this year when it moved its own website from customlegalmarketing.com to custom.legal.
“We cut fourteen characters off our web address, and that had real value for our brand,” co-founder Jason Bland said. “What it did not do, as our own research now confirms, is change where anything ranks.”
The findings align with Google’s public guidance, which has stated since 2015 that keywords in a top-level domain provide no ranking advantage or disadvantage. The study joins a series of CLM Sequoia research reports that have measured the true ranking influence of factors including PageSpeed scores, domain authority metrics, word count, and URL structures.
Custom Legal Marketing is a law firm marketing agency built for how clients actually find lawyers today. Founded in 2005, CLM combines award-winning creative with a purpose-built AI platform to help law firms stand out, get chosen, and grow in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.
Custom Legal Marketing
1111 Kearny Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
800-789-6451
https://custom.legal/
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