They’re all correct — these are all critical avenues to get your firm’s information in front of high-quality potential clients.
But it’s rare that law firms really understand what backlinks are and why link-building is so important for lawyers.
So let’s be clear — this part of SEO is critical. Currently, 35% to 50% of the overall factors Google considers in rankings are links. If you’re not paying attention to link-building, you’re giving competing attorneys a chance to gain more site traffic, more visibility, and more clients.
If you’ve never heard of link-building before or have only a vague idea of what link-building for law firms involves, you’re in good hands. Neon Ambition has experience you simply won’t find anywhere else.
Three of our team members previously headed the SEO strategy for Morgan and Morgan, one of the nation’s largest personal injury law firms. We’ve been building high quality backlinks for our clients for nine years now. You won’t find a team more immersed in current best practices for SEO, technical SEO, and backlinks.
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So then how does a search engine like Google know whether your content is relevant and useful, especially when compared to similar content on another technically sound site?
It looks at backlinks — how many of them you have, and how many are high-quality.
When you have quality sites linking to your content, it shows Google that others have found your content meaningful and have effectively given it a stamp of approval by linking to it.
Google was actually the first to make sure backlinks were part of their algorithm. They weren’t the first search engine on the market, but they became the dominant player because they were able to bring users better-quality results. Ranking sites by looking at backlinks was one way they were able to achieve this.
If you’re a personal injury law firm or practice immigration law, family law, or have any other type of legal practice, you’re in a highly competitive industry. Neglecting any SEO strategy is a big mistake because it allows other law firms — including those with less experience — to get more visibility and more clients.
Even if you create lots of SEO content and nail the technical aspects, chances are you won’t rank well for your best keywords unless you also get link-building right. Neon Ambition helps you do just that, so you’ll get more organic traffic to your website. It’s as simple as that.
It’s not just about having lots of backlinks directing internet users to your law firm’s website. Where the links come from also matters.
Consider big websites in the legal world: directories and websites like Justia, Nolo, and FindLaw. If Nolo links to one of your law firm’s web pages, that’s a backlink. Nolo is the referring domain.
It’s important to have many links from many referring domains, not simply lots of backlinks from one. If you have Nolo linking to your website 100 times and you don’t also have other referring domains linking to your site, you won’t get the results you want. The secret is to get plenty of quality referring domains, not just lots of backlinks from one domain. Lots of backlinks from one site won’t help your SEO.
In theory, there are two ways to get backlinks to your website. You can get other sites naturally linking to your website, or you can buy links.
There are agencies out there that promise to buy you lots of links. Please listen to us here — don’t. It’s considered Black Hat SEO and Google algorithms can penalize suspicious links. Our team at Neon Ambition has worked with law firms who have seen their traffic stop dead in its tracks because of bad links. Sure, we can help you turn that problem around, but we’d rather you avoided this mistake entirely and we were able to help you get even more traffic to your website, rather than playing catch-up.
Buying links can also cost hundreds of dollars per link. Often, when you buy links they’re from unrelated, general websites that have nothing to do with the law. Google won’t boost your ranking with these low-quality links, and you’re just wasting your money.
All-natural links you build over time are best for your law firm, and that’s what we focus on at Neon Ambition. Natural links happen when someone chooses to link to your site. Usually, this happens because your writing stands out or you provide lots of quality legal information. Over time, you may get high-quality news sites as well as smaller legal sites linking to you, which can help with your organic traffic.
Neon Ambition focuses on creating great content that is authoritative and useful so people will want to link to it, and we can develop a strong strategy for link-building, so you never have to resort to dubious practices with questionable results.
We are always networking and making contact with webmasters, site editors, and site owners on social platforms and through email. By fostering these relationships, we have the resources to drive quality links to your website because we likely already know the owners of the most authoritative websites in your industry and location.
Link equity, sometimes known as link juice, is the way that one high-authority website can pass on its authority to your legal website. To squeeze the most link juice, you’ll want links that:
Once you have a link strategy that builds on link equity, you’ll also want to make sure it flows throughout your website rather than staying on one page.
For example, let’s say potential leads follow a link from FindLaw that links to your “What Is Family Law?” web page. On that page, you’ll want to have sparkling content, a call to action, and links to other pages on your site. That way, you can take advantage of this link juice and get traffic to other parts of your site or even encourage readers to call you.
At Neon Ambition, our copywriters have extensive experience with legal writing — one is even a JD. And all our content goes through a strict editing process. Our editor has over ten years of journalistic experience and wants nothing more than to polish your content until it shines.
More simply put, when Google ranks a website as authoritative and that site links to you, it makes your site look better in Google’s eyes.
That said, variety matters. Having links from many relevant sources can help. If you have some big-name referring domains but smaller legal blogs link to you, too, that can only help. When we talk about backlinks at Neon Ambition, we can mean a number of things:
While do-follow backlinks are most valuable, all these backlinks can help. Even if a quality website just mentions your website in a post and doesn’t provide a direct link, for example, it can build brand awareness and can encourage readers to Google your law firm’s name.
Domain Rating (DR) is another metric used to evaluate the quality of your links. DR measures the strength of your overall backlink profile, using a logarithmic scale that goes from 1 to 100. A logarithmic scale means that the higher you go, the tougher it is to jump a few points. Moving from 49 to 50 will be a much larger jump, for example, than moving from 1 to 20.
DR is based on the links being sent from referring domains. The more do-follow links you have from a variety of high-quality, relevant websites, the better your DR metrics will look.
Many law firm marketing agencies talk about DR 20+ links. But since DR is measured on a logarithmic scale, these are not very valuable since they’re easy to secure. At Neon Ambition, we work to have our links average DR 50+ which is a real competitive advantage for our clients. In competitive markets, like legal, we’ve found this helps improve search engine rankings and organic traffic best.
Neon Ambition understands how to create a custom link-building strategy for your law firm. We understand how Google has gotten stricter about link quality over the past few years and how we can work with you to get your website more visible.
With that in mind, here are a few things you may want to try as part of your strategy:
Guest posting means you write a blog post or article for another legal website or blog, and you add a backlink to your own page in the body of the text.
Guest posting lets you get lots of good backlinks from quality, varied sites. However, finding guest posting opportunities, researching topics, writing and editing pieces, and submitting your work is very time consuming, especially for a busy attorney. We find that securing even one link from a guest post can average 16 emails back and forth with the webmaster to get a guest post acquired, approved and posted to their site.
Neon Ambition can help you create a backlink strategy that gets your content on high-quality pages with high domain authority and ratings. Our team of legal copywriters can also create and edit content for you and submit it for your approval. We make sure to use varied anchor text and backlink best practices to drive more traffic to your website, so you can focus on what you do best — taking care of your clients.
Directories aggregate law firms and lawyers on one site, organizing them by location and practice areas. Think of them as an online phone book. Some charge you a fee to be included while others are free.
Legal directories like FindLaw and Justia can link back to your website and can help you with your link strategy. The more established law directories are reputable and can offer high-quality links. They can be especially valuable for new attorney websites just starting from scratch.
Here are just a few of the directories where you could be listed:
If you need help deciding which directories will offer the best ROI and bring you the best quality leads, Neon Ambition can help. We can make sure you have the right exposure on the sites most likely to make a difference to your site traffic.
So far, we’ve looked at ways to build links, but to improve your law firm’s link-building strategy, you also need to focus on broken links.
If you’ve ever clicked on a link online only to see a “this page can’t be found” message, you’ve encountered a broken link. This happens when a website is restructured and old links become outdated. You don’t want prospective leads reaching a dead-end on your site. This hurts your website authority and means you lose out on a chance to convert that visitor. It also means you are missing out on getting the equity from the link!
There are plenty of tools out there that can help you detect broken and inactive links to your website, but one of the best ways to fix this problem is to create fresh, quality content for the pages your leads are being directed to.
Again, though, doing this manually takes time that you may not have. Neon Ambition, on the other hand, can run a robust analysis of your website and online presence and weed out any suspicious links that could be harming your traffic. Social media platforms allow you to insert links back to your law firm’s website. They also give potential clients another way to find you and contact your law firm.
Creating social media profiles on different platforms is a good idea for your marketing in general and can help your link-building strategy. Once you have profiles on a few platforms, you can create high-value, informative content that contains links back to your website or to specific web pages or blog posts on your law firm’s website.
The best way to build links using social media is to make sure you create eye-catching and user-focused content. This can create the high-quality links you need. At the same time, avoid overusing links, since this can get you banned on some platforms.
Deciding which platforms to engage with and then creating great content regularly takes a lot of effort and time. Neon Ambition can steer your social media strategy, making sure it is on brand and helping you attract the right prospective clients.
Being featured on the news, in online articles, and in online publications can help build authority. Links from top sites such as Forbes and the Wall Street Journal are also high-quality and improve your link-building strategy.
There are writers who routinely work the beat on top publications and may be able to mention you in articles or even quote you. You can develop relationships with writers in a few ways:
Getting your content into the news also takes a lot of time away from your billable hours. Neon Ambition can help you develop strategies to drive traffic without cutting into your casework.
Link reclamation means using tools to track down links that should direct to your website and should have been attributed to you but weren’t. This can happen if a webmaster fails to correctly attribute a quote or information to you or uses the wrong link. You can fix this problem by contacting the webmaster of the website with the wrong link and asking them to fix the mistake.
If you already have plenty of backlinks, link reclaiming can improve your link-building strategy. It’s less useful if you’re just starting to generate links; there just may not be many links for you to reclaim yet.
Neon Ambition can run an analysis of your backlink strategy to see if you’re missing out on quality links due to misattributed or missing links.
At Neon Ambition, we know link-building doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s why we build comprehensive strategies that consider the big picture. We look at your links, branding, persona, technical SEO, content, traffic, competitors, download speeds, and more. We know all these elements (and more!) work together to drive traffic to your site and potential clients to your contact forms and phones. With law firms being in such a competitive space, it’s important to get all the moving parts of your online strategy right to get ahead.
That’s why when you partner with Neon Ambition, we do the following from the start, all at no cost:
All of this is done in a consultation with our agency founder, Jordan Slover. By working with Jordan you can be assured that he will be there when your initial contract is over and is held accountable to the expectations that were set out initially. We feel this is a much better experience for you compared to meeting with a sales rep who might over promise in an effort to hit their monthly quota and who may or may not be around when your contract ends.
In your discussion with Jordan, you can discuss your link-building strategy as part of the biggest picture of how to drive more clients to your law firm. We understand that’s what it’s ultimately about. It doesn’t matter how many great links you have to your page if it doesn’t mean more cases and more billable hours that help your legal practice grow.
That’s why Neon Ambition looks at everything that could be slowing you down. Jordan will set some realistic expectations and explain exactly what it will take to outrank other law firms in your area. Our goal is the same as yours — to make sure leads call your law firm and not anyone else when they need legal services.
Give us thirty minutes today and we’ll show you how to make that happen.
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