If your firm has a website, it’s almost impossible to avoid suspicious-looking emails asking if you’d like to have an article published on NYTimes or the Wall Street Journal with a link pointing to your website. Some of these services are legitimate and can get a lot of traffic to your website, for a fee of course? Should your firm pay someone to publish backlinks to your site on a blog? There are a lot of reasons to proceed with caution when dealing with paid links.

What’s the Benefit of a Paid Link?

Backlinks are a vitally important component of the internet. The more unique domains link back to your firm’s website, the more reputable your firm becomes. Google and other search engines will see these backlinks as votes of confidence from other businesses across the country. Typically speaking, the more websites link to your firm, the more you’ll show up in search results online.

So Why Not Pay For Links?

While paid blog networks worked really well for years (and still work well in some niches), Google cracked down on SEOs and webmasters trying to scam the system. Penguin, a Google algorithm update released in 2012, penalized thousands of domains that tried to manipulate SERPs by paying for links or agreeing to exchange links with other webmasters.

Google has stated time and time again that it’s important for backlinks to be built naturally, not through thickly lined pockets. Google even recommended that bloggers not link back to brands after receiving a product for free. At this point in search marketing, it’s never safe to pay for a backlink.

How Can You Get Links Without Paying?

Ideally you’ll upload an article on how cancer qualifies for Social Security disability or how Florida’s negligence laws affect a personal injury claim and a few websites will choose to naturally link to your source. While possible for large websites like CNN, it’s pretty unlikely for a small law firm to be rolling in the referring domains and backlinks.

An option that most webmasters and SEOs still utilize is link building. By offering free guest blogs to organizations that serve the same audience you represent in court, you can get a lot of free backlinks that are both high quality and relevant to your website. When offering guest blogs you’ll always need to ensure the website is relevant.

For example, a workers’ compensation attorney might want to reach out to labor unions in his or her state. Social Security attorneys can offer blogs to websites that serve people with autism.

The issue with building a backlink profile is that it’s very time consuming. You can send 100 cold emails and not get a single reply from someone, let alone get a blog published! It can take years to get into the swing of link building efforts.

Skip the Digital Marketing Headache

One of the easiest ways to get new clients is through digital lead generation. When you work with a lead provider you pay for the contact information from interested claimants, not your own marketing campaign costs.

eGen currently offers Social Security disability, personal injury, workers’ compensation, and employment leads across the country. To learn more about our pricing and available volume in your area, give us a call at 617.800.0089.