Quality backlinks must be a vital part of any law firm’s SEO strategy. A backlink—where a URL to your site is placed on another site—is a powerful signal to search algorithms that indicate your site is trustworthy and an authority source in its niche.
The artificial intelligence of search engines has advanced significantly over the past decade and perhaps no area indicates this better than the question of how to get backlinks. It used to be that the goal of backlinks was just to acquire as many as possible, leading to a lot of spammy “link farms” that were created to juice up a website’s numbers.
Today, search engines distinguish between backlinks from good, reputable sources and those that are useless spam. In short, backlinks are now about quality rather than quantity.
Using these 3 strategies will help your law firm get links that will be respected by search engines.
Your alma mater
Most every college—both undergraduate and for law school—will have an area of their website devoted to their alumni. The universities need this for their own marketing purposes. An alum who is a successful law partner is certainly a terrific advertisement for the school, and they’ll likely be happy to post your bio there. Make sure your bio includes a link back to the law firm website.
Legal directories
There are basic directories that any local business should get listed in—Google My Business, Apple Maps, etc. But the legal field is one of the best at having niche directories specifically for lawyers.
One of the many advantages of a good legal directory is that their structure is designed specifically for law firms. As in, there is space for you to list any articles you’ve written, what organizations you are a part of and—most importantly—what cases you’ve won or deals you’ve seen through to a happy ending for a client.
Create your profile on these directories and take the time to make sure as many fields as possible are filled out. Of course, make sure that space to enter your website backlink is taken care of.
Q&A sites
You know better than anyone how much people want free legal advice. We know you can’t give away the store, but jumping into different Q&A forums to provide answers to very basic questions is a way to elevate your name recognition.
Since you’ve provided the forum community with the benefit of your expertise, it’s perfectly legitimate to include your link with a polite request for anyone to reach out if they have further questions.
The search engine’s emphasis on quality backlinks means that acquiring backlinks will take some time and waiting on results requires patience. But for law firms like yours that provide a quality service to the public, it means a black-hat operator can’t swoop in and take your progress with a bunch of spammy backlinks. That marks progress.
