Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one of the most popular marketing options for both solo practitioners and nationwide law firms. If you’ve already invested time and effort into SEO, you’re likely familiar with link building. Google and other search engines see links from other sites to your firm as votes of confidence, meaning that the more backlinks pointing to your firm, the better your firm could perform on search results. If you don’t already have a link building strategy, your SEO efforts could be going to waste.

Why Link Build in the First Place?

In an ideal world, you’ll publish a blog on qualifying for disability benefits with lung cancer or how to include future medical bills in a personal injury claim and dozens of webmasters will link to you due to how great the article is. Unfortunately, this rarely (if ever) happens. Unless you’re actively trying to get backlinks to your firm, it’s possible you won’t get any high quality links at all.

There is a high correlation between the number of unique domains you have linking to your site and how high you show up on SERPs. Let’s say that you and a competing firm in the area both have articles on negligence in PI claims. Your article has two referring domains linking to it, but the competing firm’s article has 25. All other things being equal, the other firm’s negligence article should outrank yours on search results due to the high number of referring domains.

Creating a Link Building Strategy

There are a lot of places to start when determining a link building strategy. One of the first steps for your firm will be finding an audience that makes the most sense to be linking to your firm’s website. For example, it wouldn’t make any sense for local cleaning companies to link to a Social Security disability firm. Google sees unnatural links and removes entire domains from search results accordingly, so be sure to not reach out to any webmaster under the sun.

Following Through With Your Strategy

It’s not enough to simply email 100 organizations and hope they post a link to your blog. You’ll need to consistently follow up with contacts to ensure a blog is used. Additionally, most webmasters will appreciate a shout out from your firm as well. You should not exchange links with anyone. This won’t help your SEO efforts and could even lead to a Google penalty. What you can do, however, is share an organization that’s linking to you on social media. This way more people will learn about the organization who’s working with you, which is always appreciated, especially if you’re connecting with small nonprofits.

While link building can dramatically increase your presence on search results, it’s often not enough to build your firm’s caseload alone. Lead generation is a great way to supplement the digital marketing effort you’re already doing. To learn more about our current Social Security disability, personal injury, workers’ compensation, and employment and labor law lead availability, give us a call today at 617.800.0089.