Link building… and why you should care.

Short Answer: Because google says so themselves.

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Source: Google

Long Answer: Link building comes from the idea that in order for Google to accurately gauge what should be showing up at the top, they have to have different kinds of metrics that can best estimate “authority” in a topic.  

Simply put, “link building” is the process of getting links on other websites that point back to your firm’s website. If there was maybe an article on some sort of healthy living blog talking about workers compensation, the text, “it’s important to hire a reputable workers compensation lawyer,” could link to your service page talking about workers comp.

Before we get too deep into link building, this is not the first thing that your firm should focus on. The adage goes, you can’t polish a turd right? 

If you have a bad site, it’s very difficult to rank well. Before any sort of link building can take place, there are a lot of very specific things that need to take place to ensure Google is even recognizing your site correctly. Your site might look pretty, but we also care about how it looks in Google’s eyes. We can get into this more later.

As we all know though, a good site is not enough to help you rank in a field as competitive as law. Probably 80% of our time and where we see the most success is through implementing extensive strategies for firms to generate high quality content that sites want to publish.

“So how do I get links?”

There are a number of different ways you can generate links for your firm, even by yourself. 

• Internal Linking – Though not as powerful, it is important to link on your site internally. If you have a blog post that mentions “car crash lawyer,” have that text link to your service page about “Personal Injury.”
  
• Associated Organizations – If you support any kind of non-profits or maybe you partner with another firm to serve a niche you aren’t currently, reach out to them to have a link placed on their site. It’s an easy ask especially since you already have a relationship with them.
• Mentioned Articles – Have you been in the news recently? Or someone wrote about you on their website? Reach out to them and see if they will add a link back to your firm. Since they are already talking about you, sometimes people are willing to do that.
• Content Creation – Bloggers are always looking for new content. Sometimes just a well written article on your website can be picked up by an organization looking to bring some more value to their audience. When this happens they will link back to the original content as the source.
• Partner Placements – A strategy can’t rest on just waiting for people to link back to your website. We work with high traffic websites and blogs to have content written and placed with your firm’s link. This allows us to, at scale, consistently get great content placed giving Google more variables on why you should rank higher. We’ve even gotten links placed on sites like Forbes.com through our relationships.  

The variables to success in this space is the number of domains that have a link to you, the quality of the content, the overall strategy, and the quality of your website.

When link building goes wrong.

There is such a thing as a bad link building strategy. This is when a firm doesn’t do its due diligence to check what kind of links are being created or what the overall strategy looks like.

• Bad Links – If you are paying for SEO work to be done, and the agency is getting content placed on low quality sites, that agency is just taking high margins for their work and ultimately doing zero benefit for you. This is also one of the more common situations we see that causes a firm to drop in rankings because of this.
• Keyword Strategy – We are obsessive over our keyword strategy. This is the text on a blog that is hyperlinked to your site. If every link to your website is “law firm” or “personal injury lawyer,” it looks spammy to Google and is ineffective in the long term at helping you rank for other terms you want to be showing up for.
• Only Doing Citations – We see firms spending a lot of money on sites like Justia or FindLaw to do their “SEO work”. Essentially firms are overpaying for a bunch of links to exist on the same website. Google wants to see your reputation come from lots of different places. Sites like those are essentially fancy phone books on the internet and have limited success to truly helping a firm rank better in competitive areas.