Link Building for Law Firms: Ultimate Guide for 2024

SEO or search engine optimization is an incredibly effective way to ensure that your law firm stays on the top and has impactful online visibility. However, SEO for law firms is more than keyword research and content optimization. Link building is a vital organ to law firm SEO that can ensure your brand has a consistent & reliable online presence across the internet. Through link building, your law firm can unlock more quality traffic and make higher conversions.Nevertheless, link-building for law firms can seem daunting, and oftentimes, brands need help knowing where to start. But fret not. This blog is going to help you understand what is link building for law firms, how you can do it (with tried and tested strategies), and the benefits your firm will unlock.

Link Building for Law Firms

First things first, what is link building for law firms? Link building for law firms includes getting high-quality inbound links from top-ranking websites that have higher domain authority and credibility for search engine algorithms. It is regarded as one of the most effective ways to let search engines know that your website has valuable content and insights to offer. This, in return, makes search engines rank your website higher, drawing more website visibility and brand recognition There are many strategies that law firms can use for effective link-building. Most strategies include creating high-quality, niche-specific, and authoritative resources that have been created on complex topics that can be added as a reference to other websites. Guest postings and digital PRs are popular link-building strategies for law firms. Oftentimes, websites will link your content naturally (without you having to reach out to them) if they find it valuable. Alternatively, your brand can also proactively reach out to potential blogging websites to refer links to your website. Link building is an amazing opportunity to network with other websites in the same industry and beyond.

Consider The Following When Reaching Out To Websites For Link Building:

• Website’s authority: Links from high-authority websites will have a greater impact on your website’s ranking when compared to multiple links from low to medium-authority websites. Check a website’s authority before getting in touch with them.

• Website’s relevance: Links from any type of high-authority website (regardless of their profile or industry) will help your link-building strategy flourish.

• Quality of the content on the target website: You should want to publish your content on websites that have a history and legacy of producing flagship high-quality content pieces in their industry. This will make your content seem automatically credible and will also have a positive impact on your brand reputation.

• Existing profile links: Consider using a natural link profile to get the best results from your link-building strategy. Involve your brand with niche edits, guest posting, and digital PR releases. Trying a mix of these can also yield fruitful results.

Actionable Strategies for Law Firm Link Building

• Creating Linkable Assets:

  Creating high-quality content that is made to attract links. Once you have a pool of ready-to-publish content in hand, reach out to target websites, offering them to link your page. It can be a long but fruitful process. If the prospect website’s editor finds the content you are offering worthy of being shared on their platform, then they will positively agree to link your site (note that sometimes these prospect websites may ask for a posting fee). Once your content gets posted on the prospect website, its ranking on search engines will boost, and your content will likely naturally attract links from people who find your content useful. Here are some common types of content you can produce to get backlinks instantly and rank higher on search engines:

• In-depth guides that explain otherwise hard-to-comprehend concepts into simple, layman’s terms. This will instantly gain popularity within people from academics, journalists, and researchers as they could be sampling your content to support their arguments.

• Sharing useful resources (case studies, case analysis, etc) that can be used to understand a case without getting lost in the complexities of the legal processes.
• Answering frequently asked questions about a certain topic that many find challenging to understand.
• Stasticsts, as many journalists, students, and professionals, look for numerical backing for a point they are trying to make.

3 Tips to Create Asset Pool:

• Focus on your strengths and produce content that highlights your expertise.
• Avoid creating bulk content without having a coherent link-building strategy.
• Establish a goal and track SEO metrics to analyze and optimize your linking-building strategy to gain the type of results you are aiming for.

• Guest Posting: Guest posting is the process of writing content pieces that will get featured on other companies’ high-authority websites. It is an incredible way for law firms to score backlinks from relevant and high-authority websites. It presents lawyers to offer their expertise, perspective, and point of view on past or trending topics to gain exposure. Here is how you can create guest posting articles that can supercharge your link-building efforts:

• • Offer opinions on law-related websites and blogs that are relevant to your expertise in industries.
  • Discuss relevant topics with expert precision so that they can be published on platforms other than law.
  • Explaining intricate concepts and procedures through storytelling to capture the reader’s attention throughout the article.
  • Publishing interesting and trending stories that can get backlinks from high-authority websites within or outside the legal industry.

9 Mistakes To Avoid When Guest Posting:

1. Avoid excessively talking about your business and its services throughout the article.
2. Not linking your articles back to your website to help readers find your brand.
3. Not making an offer to your author makes your readers want to learn more about your business and how your offer can make a difference to them.
4. Using guest posting as a way to get inbound links and not for networking purposes.
5. Reaching out to random websites without a proper link-building strategy.
6. Not having valuable content on your website that can provide information about your business, its range of services, and contact information.
7. Generating low-quality content and sharing it on high-authority websites in an attempt to quickly start attracting traffic to their website.
8. Not having a solid networking strategy and reaching out to websites in an erratic manner.
9. Only using their platform for guest posting and not establishing relationships with their website owners and their mission & vision.

• HARO:

  Guest blogging presents brands an opportunity to have a voice in an otherwise crowded marketplace. It allows you to share your honest take on everything in the legal domain. These content pieces are often picked by journalists and students who are constantly looking for information to consume. Usually, journalists have their own resources to get inputs from and become a reliable source of information. HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, is a way for businesses and individuals to get featured in major publications as well as news outlets. How HARO works:

• • Head over to the HARO website and sign up to become a service provider (source in this case).
  • The platform sends out three emails a day at different times throughout the day (5:35 a.m., 12.35 p.m., and 5.35 p.m. ET), listing all the available categories.
  • If you find a topic that interests you, click on it to understand the nature of requirements and if you can deliver any information.
  • The email may also contain a set of instructions to be followed when creating content pieces (information source).
  • Reply to the email with your area of expertise and interest.
  • Once you have received a confirmation, be sure to respond quickly with the content pieces.

Strategies to follow:

• Be prompt with your responses, as there are journalists who are looking forward to legitimate content to back their stories/reports.
• Thoroughly follow guidelines and instructions as issued by the website.
• Write answers that require no (or minimum) editing and can be used by journalists directly.
• If your team has expertise outside law and legal matters, consider writing for those niches, as they will expand the horizon your firm deals in.
• Keep looking out for opinion roundup posts, as these accept multiple requests.

• Community Mentions:

  A simple yet highly effective strategy to earn backlinks by requesting parties who have worked with you to link your business website. It is an excellent way to gather backlinks from your network. Here are some instances you can ask for a backlink from people you have worked with:

• • Offer testimonials to businesses you have worked with and request them to update the same on their business website with a backlink to your website.
  • If a business pens a blog mentioning/highlighting their experience with your service or products, you can request them to include your website link as well to the blog.
  • Consider collaborating with other businesses and writing about your partnerships on each other’s websites.

• Scholarships:

  If your budget for backlink building is high, then this strategy will be of benefit to ensuring that your backlinks are from top-notch .edu sources. The strategy involves a law firm business issuing scholarship programs for students. A web page is created listing and highlighting everything about the scholarship (stipend, duration, and what the intern will get). Then, the law firm reaches out to education websites, requesting backlinks in related and relevant articles. Such websites are always on the lookout to help students and will be more than glad to accept offers from top-notch law firms. However, to ensure that your scholarship program and law firm link-building yields results, take these factors into consideration:

• Decide on the stipend that you are comfortable with. Be sure to understand and analyze the market before making your decision.
• Where are the backlink opportunities coming from? Check local university websites to learn more about their scholarship programs and how your law firm can fit the equation. Also, check if the links are follow or nofollow types.
• Outline scholarship eligibility criteria and the screening process for eligible candidates.
• Reach out to educational websites that have higher success rates of publishing content and providing backlinks.
• Set a duration for the scholarship program and how frequently you are willing to launch it. Also, consider offering job roles to candidates who have performed well during the course of their internship.

Pro tip: You can always request your interns to pen a positive social media post (tagging the brand or people they worked with) about their experience interning at your law firm. This acts as UGC and can be used to prove the credibility of your brand.

• Directories:

  An incredibly effective way to supplement your local link-building efforts is getting your business listed in local directories. Aside from focusing on getting your website listed on paid directories, consider free directories, including Justia and FindLaw, where people can find your contact information easily without having to pay any membership fees. Additionally, you can also register for small directories that are highly area-specific. These can include colleges, local news publishers, or blogs where there are sections dedicated to listings. It is noteworthy that oftentimes, these backlinks are nofollow and, at times, aren’t taken into consideration by Google when it comes to ranking the website on search engines. Nevertheless, these backlinks can help your business get clients.

• Unlinked Mentions:

  Sometimes, it happens that a website mentions your business name but forgets to link to your website. This can lead to your business losing out on crucial traffic coming from the target prospect’s website. With a plethora of articles getting published on a regular basis, it can seem challenging to find out how many of these published articles missed your mention. Google Alerts can be of incredible help in such cases. You can register on the tool and set an alert whenever your business name pops up in an article published on the internet. This way, you can check if the article mentioning your business has a link to your website. In case it doesn’t, you can always send the website a thank you note and request them to link your website. Reaching out to websites also gives an opportunity to network with them and create future possibilities together.

• Leveraging Contacts:

  Asking your contacts to give a backlink to your website is a great way to build lasting partnerships. It also gives your business the opportunity to work with different websites without specifically focusing on law as a niche.Additionally, it strengthens your brand’s reputation as you will be interacting with businesses from various domains. You can always offer to write about their business on your blogs or columns or share their information on social media channels. While reaching out to businesses in your network, be sure that they offer contextual value to avoid the backlinks being recognized by Google as part of the link scheme. Avoid getting backlinks from articles that are unrelated to your business.

• Starting a Blog:

  Writing your own blog for your business website is a beneficial and effective way to show your expertise in the industry by writing blogs on trending and evergreen topics. Blogging ensures that you are keeping your audience up to date with first-hand expert opinions. Focusing on writing high-quality content will attract links from high domain authority websites that are linking your article as a reference for their claims. Blogging also opens pathways to implement SEO best practices into your website to attract traffic and leads, as you will be using more keywords for the articles being published. Six benefits of blogging for law firms:

• It helps in demonstrating your expertise and the range of services offered in the industry.

• It helps in building your own network and relationships as more people find your brand credible for the information it is offering.

• Additional way to drive organic traffic to your website.

• Blog content can be repurposed as an Instagram/Facebook post or as a Tweet.

• It helps business development efforts as you will be able to address client concerns, tackle misinformation with knowledge, and provide reliable information.

• It creates a pool of content for your brand that can later be used to create microblogs or even podcasts.

• Niche Edits:

  Popular amongst SEO enthusiasts, niche edits involve the placement of links in a content piece that has already been published. Due to this, the process is also known as link insertions. Niche edits are an impactful law firm link-building strategy to implement as your brand gets to add its point of view and expert opinions and even add your own quote. Notably, niche edits are considered a part of whitehat SEO tactics, making it a time-consuming process. We advise you to be extra careful with the websites you are choosing to partner with and the nature of the content you are offering to them. To leverage the benefit of this tactic, you could be required to pay a certain fee to the prospect’s website to ensure your niche edit is being added. Common reasons a website will allow niche edits:

• • Building broken links wherein you find all the broken links on their website and email them, requesting to update the broken links to your webpages.
  • Mention link building wherein you find all the pages, blogs, and resources and reach out to them, requesting a citation for the name mentioned.
  • Resource page link building wherein you reach out to a website that is covering the same range of information as being offered by your brand and request them to include your content into existing content pieces.

How are niche edits different from guest posting? Guest posting and niche edits are aimed at earning a backlink from a reputed, high-domain authority website. The point of difference lies in their approach to building backlinks. While niche edits aim at injecting links into an existing, published piece of content, guest posts are complete articles that are built to include links and are posted on other websites. Both are effective in their own ways and depending on the link-building process you are utilizing, you can plan ahead and reach out to reputable and relevant websites with your offer. Seven mistakes to avoid with niche edits:

• Avoid adding irrelevant anchor text.
• Avoid keyword stuffing in your anchor text.
• Keep the flow of the article in mind when inserting links.
• Offer niche edits to websites that have relevance to your niche and industry.
• Focus more on quality over quantity, as a single high-quality niche edit will yield more benefits than multiple mediocre content pieces.
• Diversify your links to ensure you are covering more horizons.
• Pay close attention to the context in which your link is getting placed.

Evaluating the Impact of Link Building on Law Firm SEO

Link building is essentially the process of proactively taking steps and measures to increase the number of backlinks to your website. These links help search engines find new pages and determine which page is worthy of ranking higher on search engines. Link building ensures a better ranking of your web pages by attracting more traffic to your website. It also improves referral traffic. These backlinks can also improve the domain authority of your website. Moreover, backlinks also improve your perceived authority on the internet. Lastly, link building ensures your website is able to network better and form relationships within the industry.

Conclusion

Ready to take your law firm’s website to rank higher on search engine results pages? With these link-building strategies, your website can build relationships, attract more traffic, and drive better leads. Remember, a good link-building strategy is time-consuming, but the results will surely make the efforts worth it.