Law firm growth
How we increased a law firm's domain authority from 6 to 56 in seven months
Scarsdale Solicitors' Ahrefs Domain Rating went from 6 to 56 between April and October 2026. The four jobs behind it, and the warning signs to watch for.
In April 2026, the Scarsdale Solicitors website had an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 6. By August it was 30. In October it was 56, with 1.1K backlinks from 860 linking websites.
Scarsdale is a Greater Manchester firm that handles criminal, motoring, immigration and family law for clients across England and Wales. We rebuilt and relaunched its website around December 2025, then ran the search work that followed: content, links, news coverage and the groundwork for AI answers. The Scarsdale Solicitors case study covers the rebuild itself.
Ask most people how to raise domain authority and the answer is a list of links to buy. That answer keeps a lot of firms stuck. The 50 points came from four jobs that depend on each other: a site worth citing, content other writers want to reference, coverage in the news, and facts clear enough for AI answers to repeat. Links were part of the work. They were never the whole of it.
What domain authority measures, and why Google ignores it
"Domain Authority" is Moz's score. Ahrefs calls its version Domain Rating. Both rate a website's backlinks from 0 to 100 against every other site the tool has crawled, and most people say "domain authority" for either. Scarsdale's readings are from Ahrefs.
Google uses neither. John Mueller of Google has said so for years, including a 2020 statement that Google doesn't use Domain Authority "at all" for crawling, indexing or ranking, as Search Engine Journal's review of his comments records.
We track it anyway, because what it counts is real: how many separate websites have chosen to link to you, and how established those websites are. When a firm on DR 6 competes with firms in the 40s and 50s for the same searches, the score gap usually points to a gap in who is vouching for each firm.
Source: Ahrefs backlink checker screenshot, supplied October 20, 2026. The April and August readings come from our project records.
Two of Ahrefs' rules change how you read this screenshot. According to Ahrefs, only the first link from each website counts toward DR, and nofollow links don't count at all. So the 1.1K backlinks matter less than the 860 linking websites, and only 41% of those carry a followed link. About 350 websites hold up Scarsdale's 56. The other 500 or so add nothing to the score.
Domain Rating is somebody else's scoreboard. It's still a fair count of who has vouched for you.
The website came before any link
We rebuilt the site before any authority work started. The new structure follows how clients look for a solicitor: by the problem they have and the place they live. That meant a page for each practice area and pages for more than 170 towns, cities and London boroughs. Technical SEO, schema and analytics went into the build rather than being bolted on afterward. The law firm website redesign guide explains what to plan before a rebuild like this one.
The firm reported organic traffic up 300% within two months of launch. In April, its Domain Rating was still 6. The early gains came from the site and its pages, months before the authority score moved.
Order matters here for a practical reason. An editor or directory owner who clicks through to a slow, generic site doesn't link to it. And a link that does arrive sends visitors to a page that can't turn them into an inquiry. If your site is the weak point, our law firm website design work is where we would start.
Links multiply whatever the site already is. Multiply a weak site and you get a weak site with a higher score.
Content that gives other sites a reason to link
People rarely start by searching for a solicitor. They start with a worry, such as whether they could still be over the drink-drive limit the morning after a night out. The pages that answer those questions plainly, with the law stated and a firm's name on it, are the pages other writers reference when they cover the same subject.
That content does a different job from a practice-area page. A practice page persuades someone who already knows what they need. A guide gets found by someone who doesn't, and by journalists and bloggers who need a source to point their readers to. Our guide to SEO for law firms covers how the two kinds of page should link to each other, and earning links through useful content covers the outreach side for local businesses.
We aren't publishing Scarsdale's topic list, or how we decide which questions earn a page. Those choices depend on a firm's practice mix and on where its competitors are thin, so a copied list would mislead more than it helps.
Nobody links to a firm. They link to the page that answered their question.
News coverage and links that hold up
Getting the firm into news publications was part of our work. Its website now has an "In the News" section and an "As featured in" strip carrying regional and national titles.
News coverage counts for more than its link. An editor decided the firm was worth quoting, and a prospective client checking the firm sees that decision before they call. Plenty of news sites mark their outbound links nofollow, which is one reason 59% of Scarsdale's linking websites don't count toward DR. We never treated those as wasted. The reader was always the point.
Google's spam policies on link spam list the shortcuts that get links discounted: buying or selling links for ranking, excessive link exchanges, automated link building, paid articles with links that pass ranking credit, and keyword-rich anchor text in guest posts or press releases. A law firm also answers to a regulator. In England and Wales, paragraph 8.8 of the SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors requires publicity to be accurate and not misleading. In California, Rule 7.1 of the Rules of Professional Conduct says the same about communications on a lawyer's services. Coverage built on an inflated claim is a conduct problem before it is an SEO one.
The publications, the story angles and how we approach editors stay off this page. They are the part of the work a competing firm could copy.
A link an editor chose to give is the only kind your future clients will ever read.
Making the firm easy for AI answers to cite
People now ask ChatGPT what a charge means or which solicitor to call, and Google answers many searches with an AI Overview before any link. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and that SEO fundamentals still apply. That matches what we see. A firm gets cited when its facts agree everywhere they appear.
For a firm like Scarsdale, that means the firm's name, regulator number, practice areas and coverage area reading the same on the website, in directories and in the press, with pages that answer one question directly near the top. For firms with an office clients visit, the Google Business Profile belongs in that same check.
How we test what each AI tool says about a firm, and how we close the gaps, is part of our AI search optimization service. For a business outside law, our SEO and AEO case study shows the same checks run across more than 300 queries.
An AI answer repeats what the web agrees on. Make sure the web agrees about you.
Why the second 26 points came faster than the first 24
| Reading | Ahrefs Domain Rating | Change | Time since last reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 6 | Starting point | None |
| August 2026 | 30 | +24 | About four months |
| October 2026 | 56 | +26 | About two months |
Ahrefs says DR gets harder to raise the higher it climbs. Scarsdale's second climb was bigger and took half as long.
Our reading is that by August the pieces were working together. Coverage pointed readers at guides that already ranked. Guides that ranked were found and cited by other writers. Each new link landed on a site that already looked established. That is our interpretation. A third-party score can't prove which link did what.
The first 24 points were pushed. The next 26 were pulled.
What changed for the firm
A higher score isn't a business result. Here is what the firm has reported: organic traffic up 300% within two months of launch, more inquiries by phone and through the contact form, and 6,714 pageviews in August 2026 alone. The analytics screenshot for August is in the case study.
The firm's revenue figures stay between us and the firm. Our search work for Freshly Folded, a laundry business in San Diego County, shows 1.52k Google clicks in 28 days, so the results aren't limited to law.
The score went up. So did the number of people calling the firm.
Warning signs when someone sells you domain authority
Offers to raise a firm's domain authority often have at least one of these:
- A promised DR number by a date. Nobody controls a third-party score, and the work that moves it depends on editors and other site owners.
- Packages of "DR 50+ links". Ahrefs splits a site's rating across every domain it links to, so a big site that links to thousands of others passes little to each.
- Links from sites with no readers of their own and no connection to law, your area or your clients.
- Every link followed and every anchor carrying your keyword. Google names keyword-rich anchors in guest posts and press releases as link spam.
- A rising score with flat inquiries. That usually means the links come from places your clients never go.
If a proposal leads with the score, ask what it does for the phone. Our law firm SEO cost guide lists the other questions worth asking before you sign.
Finding your firm's citation gap
This article shows the shape of the work. It leaves out the parts that decide whether it works for a particular firm: the publication list, the story angles, which questions get a guide, the order the pages were fixed and the checks we run across AI tools.
All of those start from one list we call the citation gap: the publications, directories and websites that cite the firms ranking above you and don't cite you yet. If another firm outranks you for your main practice area, you have one. Its size, and what's in it, decide how long a climb like Scarsdale's would take for you.
On a call, we look at your site next to the firms ranking above you, compare who links to each, and tell you whether the site, the content or the coverage is holding you back first. Bring your domain, your two or three most important practice areas and the towns or cities you take clients from.
Book a call to see your firm's citation gap. You can also read how our law firm SEO services are scoped, or see the rest of our work for law firms. For businesses outside law, our SEO services follow the same order.
Questions about increasing domain authority
Scarsdale Solicitors went from an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 6 to 30 in about four months, then to 56 in about two more. A firm starting from a different score, in a different market, will move at a different pace. Anyone who promises a number by a date is guessing.
No. Domain Authority is a Moz metric and Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric, and Google has said many times that it uses neither. They are still useful because they estimate how many established websites link to you, and links are something Google does look at.
There is no fixed number. Compare your score with the firms that rank above you for your main practice area in the places you take clients from. If they sit in the 40s and you are in single digits, authority is likely part of the gap. If you are level with them and still behind, look at your pages first.
Google's spam policies class buying links for ranking purposes as link spam, so links bought for that reason can be ignored or can lead to action against the site. For a regulated firm, a paid placement that presents itself as independent coverage can also raise conduct questions.
Not in Ahrefs' calculation, which counts only followed links and only the first link from each website. Nofollow links still bring readers, and much news coverage is nofollow. At Scarsdale, 59% of the linking websites gave no followed link.
Sources
- Ahrefs backlink checker results for scarsdalesolicitors.com, screenshot supplied October 20, 2026, reproduced above.
- Ahrefs, Domain Rating: what it is and how to increase it, and What is Domain Rating (DR)?
- Search Engine Journal, Is domain authority a Google ranking factor?
- Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search: link spam.
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website.
- Solicitors Regulation Authority, Code of Conduct for Solicitors, RELs, RFLs and RSLs, paragraph 8.8.
- State Bar of California, Rules of Professional Conduct, chapter 7.