While many components of search engine optimization are simple and cost-effective, link building is one of the most misunderstood and hardest to implement tactics. Link building (also referred to as backlinks) are links to your website from a third party website. According to surveys of industry experts, link building is considered to play the biggest role of all search ranking factors, as links to your website from other sources indicate your website provides quality answers and might be considered an “authority” on a topic. So, if nothing else, link building is really important. But no matter how tempting it sounds, don’t take shortcuts by buying links. Focus on long-term strategies to ensure your law firm website will perform better in Google in the long run.
The way most SEOs grow traffic is by researching what their main competitors are doing and doing it better. So, start off your quest for backlinks by finding the top performing pages on your competitors’ websites. Look at who is linking to your competitors’ most popular pages, the anchor text they are using, and the authority/quality of the backlink. You can use a tool like Ahrefs to look for link intersections, which will show your three closest competitors and the sites that link to them and not to you. Then engage in email outreach to the site owners to build a relationship and ultimately ask for a link.
Building Backlinks From High Quality Websites
- Guest Posting: Posting your content on other high-performance websites means it will be seen by a lot of readers and the links contained within your posts will get clicked. Make a list of popular, relevant publications your target audience is likely to read. Then create engaging and helpful educational content for submission.
- Media Mentions: Get links on local news site and even national news sites. One method for achieving this if you are just getting started is to utilize HARO to find journalists seeking quotes within your areas of expertise.
- Forum Participation: Participating in active online forums like Reddit and Quora will not only help you engage with users you can help, but it will also allow you to leave a link to your website in your posts.
- Image-Based Link Building: People love images. Creating highly shareable posts on your own blog or website will help get links from other sites. Infographics are highly shareable and can be created largely for free using sites like Canva. Additionally, if you find sites are using your graphics without linking back (try using Google Image Search), you can reach out to them and ask for credit via a backlink. Playing image credit police has been shown to have the highest success rate of all link building strategies, at close to 100%.
- Directory Listings: In the early days of SEO, digital directories (also known as citations) were what it was all about. If your website was listed in a bunch, Google’s algorithm thought you were awesome. But Google is much smarter now and does not view all links equally anymore. Therefore, nowadays links from a web directory are a lot less helpful than links from high authority websites in your area of focus. But, that doesn’t mean they are useless. Some relevant directories where you can list your law firm website include: Google My Business (of course – crucial!), Best of the Web, Spoke, Bing Places, Yelp, Better Business Bureau, eLocal, and Local.com.
- Link Reclamation: As your website gets older, you’ll notice people will naturally mention you and your company. But when they mention your company name they won’t always link to you. So why not email all of these people and ask them to turn the mention into a link? It’s a simple strategy, and it works really well. Be as specific as you can in your outreach email, letting them know exactly where your name was mentioned and which link you’d like them to add. Likewise, you can use the same tools you’re using to monitor your own brand mentions to also monitor mentions of your competitors.
- Broken Link Building: When businesses make big changes (such as in their entity name) or shut down completely, as is apt to happen, it opens up link opportunities. Find legal industry websites that have changed name, stopped updating, or are slowly dying, and research who is linking to them. Ask those website owners to link to you instead.
Internal Link-Building
You don’t have to rely on other websites to build links; you can improve your link building right from your own site, too. Internal link building is something you have complete control over, which makes it a great strategy to use in order to master link building. An internal link connects your web page or post to another page or post on your website. It helps users navigate your website, as well as boost your SEO. Within your blog content, you need to be adding internal links that connect to your other content, particularly evergreen content like your practice area pages.
Legal Marketing Experts Can Help
Building backlinks to your law firm website is an extremely detailed process that is very time-consuming. If you are practicing law, chances are you won’t have time to undertake a meaningful analysis or to engage in outreach to acquire links. That’s where we come in – the legal marketing experts of Stacey E. Burke, P.C. handle effective link building strategies for lawyers across the country. Contact us today to see if we can help.
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