Legal Sector Website Performance Analysis 2020

The largest digital audit of the top 200 UK law firms – ever!

Welcome to the second annual legal sector website performance analysis of the top 200 UK law firms based on revenue.  This year we’re slightly behind schedule thanks to some kind of virus thing you might have heard mentioned once or twice in the media lately?

Seriously – we hope you are all safely tucked away in your new home office in your PJs and with a glass of something strong to help you through these crazy times.

If this is your first experience of our enormous audit then you are especially welcome – there’s a lot of information to take in as this is the single biggest digital audit of the UK legal sector in the world! – but you’ll find some useful insights into your own practice, and that of your competitors.  Make sure to download the full report for much more information and analysis.

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Want even more insights into your firm’s performance?

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Digital Marketing Opportunities in the Legal Sector

Last year we said there are huge opportunities for revenue growth and business development online that only a relatively small number of firms are taking advantage of.  This remains true in 2020 and in light of recent world events, improving your visibility online is even more vital than ever before.

Digital marketing done properly, can reap massive rewards for law firms, as we’ve seen with the work we’ve done with a law firm over the last few years that has seen them ranked in the top 5 in the entire UK for revenue growth between 2014-2018 – according to The Lawyer UK200 report.

We’re also seeing law firms take up our new local seo service to help generate more traffic and clients through better optimisation for local search results.  There are more than 40,000 searches each month for ‘solicitors near me’ not to mention all the other searches for legal services that Google returns local search results for.

We’ve been working in digital marketing in the legal sector for over 10 years and our team of specialists and consultants have many decades of experience building and growing businesses of all sizes.  We’ve worked with household name brands and startups – and all sorts in between!

If you need help with anything just give us a call or send us an email – you don’t need a retainer with us to take advantage of our knowledge of marketing and communications!

Legal Sector Digital Performance 2020

For this year’s digital audit we analysed the website performance of the top 200 UK law firms, as ranked by revenue, and reviewed key data from a range of sources to allow you to see how your business compares to your competitors and other law firms of a similar size.

We’ve included the data in the tables below but for a free PDF report with an explanation of the key performers, and a closer look at groups of law firms, download our full legal sector website audit report here.

The first table below shows the firms ranked for their total score across all the data we analysed and their total score adjusted for their revenue ranking to give a better idea of the effectiveness of their digital marketing.

We also include our very first ‘Legmark Weighted Index’ which is a calculation based on 6 key metrics from our full set of data, weighted to reflect the importance they have in website ranking and performance.  The first column in the table is the Legmark Index adjusted for the law firm’s revenue rank – this is the most comprehensive analysis on the Internet of the relative performance of the top 200 law firms.

Get the full report

Click here to download the full audit report – or read on for the data tables!

And the winners are…

If you haven’t got time now to check out how you and your competitors rank in the data in the tables below then we’ve summarised the top 3 for the two important categories below.  If you don’t want to know the scores, then look away now…

Total Score Adjusted for Revenue

The total score includes performance from all 10 sets of data we analysed. The top three for Total Score (adjusted for revenue) are:

1st Place

Pinsent Masons

Pinsent Masons perform very well for their domain rating, trust and citation scores, and the number of referring domains to their site.

2nd Place

DLA Piper

DLA Piper as you would imagine have the most authoritative domain rating, highest traffic volume and number of referring domains linking to their site.

3rd Place

Irwin Mitchell

Irwin Mitchell are top of the tree for the value of traffic to their site and score highly for the total traffic volume as well.

The Legmark Index Winners

The top three on the revenue adjusted Legmark Index (a weighted calculation of 5 key criteria and removing any of the estimated data) are:

1st Place

Barlow Robbins

Barlow Robbins benefit from a very good website speed and outperform their revenue position for the authority of the domain and quality of links to their site.

2nd Place

Ince

Ince are punching above their weight across the page speed and link quality metrics.

3rd Place

Pinsent Masons

Pinsent Masons perform very strongly across all areas except site speed but it’s enough to keep them in the top 3.

Get the full report

Click here to download the full audit report – or read on for the data tables!

Top 200 Law Firms – the Legmark Index table

Note – due to the volume of data, the tables are best viewed on a desktop or laptop device.

 

How to use the table below

  • You can find your firm by using the search box to the top right of the table.
  • Click on column headers to sort ascending and descending.
  • Use the ‘show 25 entries’ to select all the listings in one table or navigate through the pages at the bottom
  • Total Score represents the performance across all 10 criteria we analysed
  • Legmark Index is the score we’ve calculated based on performance across the 5 key criteria
  • We’ve shown the ‘revenue adjusted’ rankings to better highlight the effectiveness of that firm’s marketing activity.

 

wdt_ID Legmark Index Rank (Revenue Adjusted) Total Score Rank (Revenue Adjusted) Revenue Rank 2019 Law Firm Legmark Index Rank Total Score Rank
1 107 2 1 DLA Piper 83 1
2 130 77 2 Clifford Chance 107 17
3 73 28 3 Linklaters 52 12
4 12 13 4 Allen & Overy 4 9
5 18 5 5 Hogan Lovells 8 4
6 120 11 6 Norton Rose Fulbright 96 8
7 95 64 7 Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer 79 15
8 21 6 8 CMS 10 6
9 53 54 9 Herbert Smith Freehills 39 14
10 109 7 10 Eversheds Sutherland 86 7
11 34 14 11 BCLP 20 10
12 123 119 12 Ashurst 100 31
13 14 40 13 Clyde & Co 6 13
14 7 59 14 Slaughter and May 2 18
15 3 1 15 Pinsent Masons 1 2
16 27 70 16 Gowling WLG 18 22
17 38 79 17 Simmons & Simmons 25 23
18 16 22 18 Bird & Bird 9 11
19 117 122 19 Womble Bond Dickinson 97 40
20 48 55 20 Taylor Wessing 34 16
21 23 105 21 Addleshaw Goddard 15 30
22 125 162 22 DWF 103 70
23 56 57 23 Osborne Clarke 43 21
24 30 3 24 Irwin Mitchell 21 3
25 19 99 25 DAC Beachcroft 12 29
Legmark Index Rank (Revenue Adjusted) Total Score Rank (Revenue Adjusted) Revenue Rank 2019 Law Firm Legmark Index Rank Total Score Rank

 

The full data table is below for you to sort, filter, and compare to your heart’s content. All the data is available through paid digital marketing and SEO software.

What we analysed:

Traffic Value

This is an estimate from SEMrush for the value of the website traffic generated from the keywords based on the equivalent cost of paying for this traffic through PPC.

Mobile Page Speed

From Google PSI this gives a score out of 100 with scores of 90+ considered ‘fast’ by Google and below 50 is considered ‘slow’.

Desktop Page Speed

Also from Google PSI this gives a score out of 100 with scores of 90+ considered ‘fast’ by Google and below 50 is considered ‘slow’.

Domain Rating

From Ahrefs software the Domain Rating is the link popularity of your website relative to others across the world on a scale of 0-100.

Keywords

This is the total number of keywords the website is appearing in Google search results for and it’s taken from Ahrefs.

Traffic

This is another Ahrefs datapoint estimating the traffic to your website based on the keywords you rank for and the search volumes of those search terms.

Backlinks

Data from Majestic showing the total number of external links to your website from third party sites. It’s possible to have many links from one site so this metric is less relevant than Referring Domains.

Referring Domains

Majestic data showing the number of third party websites linking to your website and is a major factor in how well your site ranks in search engines.  We used the Fresh Index (data from the last 90 days).

Citation Flow

A metric from Majestic that assess the link equity of the website – i.e. how influential the site might be.

Trust Flow

The second Majestic metric that measures the quality of the links – giving a higher score to sites with more high-quality links pointing to them.

 

wdt_ID Revenue Rank 2019 Name Traffic Value Mobile Speed Desktop Speed Domain Rating Total Keywords Total Traffic Backlinks Referring Domains Citation Flow Trust Flow Value per Keyword
1 1 DLA Piper 199,300.00 2 48 80 152,800 96,948 1,826,651 8,987 51 63 1.30
2 2 Clifford Chance 6,800.00 0 25 75 71,491 44,910 957,381 4,099 54 60 0.10
3 3 Linklaters 177,700.00 23 74 73 45,783 30,608 1,681,823 3,137 49 58 3.88
4 4  Allen & Overy 39,900.00 54 84 75 58,808 32,266 646,346 4,055 43 59 0.68
5 5 Hogan Lovells 38,900.00 45 76 77 111,152 62,547 1,537,757 5,551 49 60 0.35
6 6 Norton Rose Fulbright 9,300.00 21 74 76 111,212 58,400 611,324 5,885 41 43 0.08
7 7 Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer 25,800.00 30 89 72 39,384 32,204 915,093 3,309 50 34 0.66
8 8 CMS 53,600.00 37 79 76 87,458 36,967 2,986,042 5,356 55 59 0.61
9 9 Herbert Smith Freehills 2,800.00 42 75 71 56,091 36,778 280,320 1,964 43 52 0.05
10 10 Eversheds Sutherland 9,200.00 16 54 73 66,899 29,933 16,038,508 2,992 70 41 0.14
11 11 BCLP 17,200.00 40 85 72 83,153 30,379 679,615 2,823 53 56 0.21
12 12 Ashurst 75,300.00 21 45 69 50,991 28,025 89,566 1,967 42 52 1.48
13 13 Clyde & Co 4,900.00 86 99 70 50,271 23,759 268,157 2,806 30 31 0.10
14 14 Slaughter and May 4,700.00 76 97 64 19,679 11,162 57,031 1,436 44 49 0.24
15 15 Pinsent Masons 72,200.00 64 96 79 91,261 45,085 845,267 7,751 59 60 0.79
16 16 Gowling WLG 3,700.00 83 99 70 39,815 24,378 219,060 1,657 29 27 0.09
17 17 Simmons & Simmons 3,800.00 59 93 68 28,319 12,162 358,526 2,001 41 42 0.13
18 18 Bird & Bird 10,500.00 48 78 76 62,496 24,937 333,180 3,833 43 56 0.17
19 19 Womble Bond Dickinson 12,900.00 17 68 69 33,851 16,750 687,544 1,703 45 51 0.38
20 20 Taylor Wessing 6,300.00 66 96 73 54,020 21,623 130,162 2,847 31 30 0.12
21 21 Addleshaw Goddard 19,200.00 62 74 60 7,090 7,490 173,444 1,273 53 48 2.71
22 22 DWF 22,800.00 20 48 68 15,157 8,269 326,348 2,004 43 49 1.50
23 23 Osborne Clarke 11,000.00 36 72 72 53,630 16,431 62,264 2,440 46 54 0.21
24 24 Irwin Mitchell 731,600.00 42 77 72 39,639 46,431 8,067,626 2,481 48 57 18.46
25 25 DAC Beachcroft 20,600.00 83 99 58 19,709 12,494 34,943 674 33 35 1.05
Revenue Rank 2019 Name Traffic Value Mobile Speed Desktop Speed Domain Rating Total Keywords Total Traffic Backlinks Referring Domains Citation Flow Trust Flow Value per Keyword

 

Notes:

We used the following software and web tools to perform the analysis:

  • Ahrefs
  • SEMrush
  • Majestic
  • Google Page Speed Insights

Data was collected between 11/4/2020 and 18/4/2020 at various times of day.

The URL used was the root domain for each website.

All searches were performed on Chrome Version 81.0.4044.92 64bit

Some of the data is estimated by the various software based on the calculations made according to the information it has available. We take no responsibility for the accuracy of those calculations – if you want to send us your data from Google Analytics, we will update the tables accordingly.

For the full report and analysis PDF including insights into what firms can do to improve their performance, fill out the form by clicking here and we’ll send you the report by email.