Winning new clients as a lawyer through your website is a goal for any practice. But standing out in your local area with many competitors can be challenging. To help your law firm’s website stand out in search engine rankings, you need high-quality backlinks.
Links are a major ranking factor, and in a competitive market such as the legal industry, they can help you stand out and get more clients.
Today, we’ll show you what link building for lawyers is and how you can improve your website’s SEO with high-quality links.
Link building for law firms – the basics
A backlink is when another website links to your law firm’s website and points to a certain page. The stronger your backlink profile, the better your website will perform in search results, the more organic traffic you will get. When you build backlinks to your legal website, you can expect an increase in all key metrics and better rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
However, you want to build links the right way and avoid spammy tactics that will do more harm than good for your website. Using black hat SEO can have your website penalized by Google’s algorithm and as a result, you may not even show up in Google search anymore.
So, do your research or hire a reputable agency to build hyperlinks from reputable websites. There are many different types of links. From high-quality, dofollow links to low-quality links that are nofollow and have low value for your website.
Top link building strategies for law firms
If you want to create a strong link profile, you’ll need to build high-authority backlinks from strong and unique referring domains. You can try this on your own or hire a law firm SEO agency, but the methods are the same. Here are some ways to get quality inbound links with modest link building efforts.
Find guest posting opportunities
Guest posting or guest blogging is one of the easiest ways to get new backlinks for your law firm website. All it takes is doing outreach to bloggers to find someone interested in a story you have to share. The process is simple:
- Find a target website that you want a backlink from
- Pitch them an idea for a guest post
- Write that guest post and include a link to one of your pages
- They publish the post and you get a backlink, more traffic and ideally, more conversions
For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer, you could pitch local websites and offer them stories on personal injury lawsuits. This can get you a good link, and if the content in the guest post is good, you can also get some referral traffic coming to your website.
Even in 2024, algorithms such as Pagerank recognize guest posting as a white-hat link building method that works well, when done right. You can use the opportunity to brush up on your content marketing skills and see what kind of traffic you can get for your own website.
Broken link building
Other law firm websites build links and for various reasons, they stop working. Broken link building is one of the more common tactics in digital marketing. The great news is that there is a blueprint that you can use to land some easy backlinks this way. Here are the steps you should take:
- Find a website that has links to law firm websites
- Load it up in a tool such as Ahrefs, MOZ or Semrush to see how many of those backlinks are broken and what pages they lead to
- Find out the reasons why they are broken – the target page could be deleted for some reason, there is a broken redirect chain, etc.
- Reach out to the webmaster and offer a replacement (via email, LinkedIn, or your preferred platform)
When you explain to the website owner that a broken link is bad for their website and their target audience, there is a high likelihood they’ll add your link. After all, no one wants broken links on their web pages.
HARO (Help a Reporter Out) – now Connectively
HARO is a platform where journalists go to seek quotes for their pieces. It was recently sold and renamed to Connectively, but it’s still a superb way to land a natural link.
This is how it works:
- You apply to be a source
- You get daily emails with questions from journalists
- You reply to those emails with a relevant pitch
- Hopefully, the journalist accepts your pitch and publishes your quote with a byline and a link to your website
This is one of the most common link building tactics out there and while the competition is tough, submitting pitches with high-quality content is a great way to stand out.
Get registered on free legal directories
Directories for businesses can improve your online presence and the best part is that they’re free. All it takes is looking up your practice and finding out if you’re listed. These are some great starting points for your search:
These free directories will add your practice for free, netting you a high-quality backlink to your website. These are just the directories with the highest domain authority, but you should also take a look at your local ones in your state, area, or city.
While you’re getting your practice added to these listings and citations, make sure all the information there is up to date: your address, phone number, email and other contact data. This can bring a massive boost to your local SEO success.
Go after unlinked mentions
When was the last time you Google’d your practice name? There is a high chance that someone out there is writing about you but they’re not linking out to you. And every time someone mentions your brand name, it’s an opportunity to get good quality, do-follow links.
Simply do a Google search for the name of your law office and jot down the websites that mention you without a link. Then it’s all about doing outreach to relevant websites and asking them to turn a mention into a link.
Since they already mentioned you, the barrier to entry is lower – they won’t object to giving you a link with your brand name as the anchor text. Launch a link building campaign with this set up and you can expect the first results of your new SEO strategy to come in quickly.
Start a scholarship
Scholarships are one of the oldest tricks in the link building book and to this day, they still work. You can use scholarships for more than just building links, as they have multiple benefits:
- Excellent PR
- Get in front of potential clients (students’ parents)
- Help out a student in need
- If you want to, you can hire scholarship winners as interns in your practice
Scholarships as a tactic require (seemingly) more money, as you need to set aside a fixed sum to award to the winner. But as many case studies have shown, the links you get are worth that investment.
The reason is simple: when you launch a new scholarship, the websites that give you backlinks by default are news outlets and educational institution websites. Both types of websites generally have strong domain rating and some SEOs claim that links from .gov websites are stronger ranking signals than your typical .com domain.
As you launch a new scholarship, you’ll slowly start to see mentions and links coming in. Beyond search engine optimization, scholarships are a great way to build a good reputation in your local community. You’ll also get tons of social media shares, and you may get picked up by popular influencers in your local area too.
Wrapping up
Legal marketing may sound complex but landing new potential clients with SEO is not rocket science. Building links from quality websites is something that you can do on your own, with the basic knowledge of SEO best practices.
Or you can get help from an expert instead. At ReportCard, we can build high-quality links from relevant websites and help you both rank well and get new leads from SEO. We have guaranteed results, transparent pricing and experience in your industry.
Book a free call today to learn more!
