Link Building for Lawyers & Law Firms
Link Building is an art and a science, and the purpose is to increase your law firm website’s traffic and rankings to get more cases.
Why All Law firms Are Thirsty for Link Building?
Because Backlinks are still the #1 metric for ranking local and national websites, and Google wants to prevent all the spam that it’s generated on a daily basis.
If it’s against Google’s TOS What’s the solution?
Create links with a professional process that ensures the focus is on creating value (which is what Google ultimately wants) instead of being focused on gaming the system like spammers do.
Even though link building is a standard in terms of legal SEO marketing you need to make sure to find a great SEO agency for your law firm with a great process.
At the end of the day, doing link building by a professional agency will ensure your law firm grows in terms of traffic, and cases at the same time it minimizes the challenges that come with SEO as well as it’s on top of all the changes Google does to it’s algorithms.
Our Professional Legal Link Building Process
#1 Internal link building
Snapshot of an internal linking report
Internal linking is a great strategy to focus the power of specific pages on your website to areas you want to give more visibility. They have two purposes: #1 Increase the internal traffic of a section of your website and #2 Increase the visibility of that section of the website in Google.
In this case, our purpose is to power up option #2. We will focus on keywords that are important for your firm and use internal links to boost the visibility of those keywords. This can be a powerful and fast way to give your website a boost in traffic.
Internal linking can be a fast way to boost visibility
In order to get the most of your internal links, we focus in two main areas:
Internal link analysis: Using screaming frog, we will look to your current internal linking structure and find areas of improvements modifying anchor texts, link positioning and frequency on existing pages
Internal link strategy: Using Google search operators we will find the pages Google things are more relevant to a specific topic or search term and build links from these pages (if there was none) or modify existing links to make them more optimized.
#6: Competition link building analysis
Snapshot of competitors link analysis
Some of the best links you can obtain to your website are the ones that are helping other attorneys be on the top positions. We go and find, gather, analyze and grade the links that your competitors have acquire to focus on obtaining them for your law firm website as well.
Obtaining these links is not the easiest method, but it’s always the first step in the link building process.
If they got it, we try and get them too.
How to find and gather your competitors links?
We use three tools to do this:
Ahrefs: It has the highest link index database of all the tools available. That means it’s able to find a lot more links (in quantity) than any other tool.
SEMRush: Semrush is another great tool to find links from your competitors. It may bring some that Ahrefs have skipped for some reason.
Majestic SEO: Majestic is another tool that can give an extra layer of links that other tools may have missed.
Working with Ahrefs is usually enough, but we like to go the extra mile to find as many opportunities as possible.
After gathering all these link opportunities, we delete duplicates, sort them, analyze them and get them ready on a Google Sheet for the next step.
#7: Creating an outreach process and executing it
Image: CLIENT RESULTS. Source: Google Analytics
Snapshot of an example email pitch
Now that we have a good amount of competitor link opportunities, it’s time to find the information and emails of the website owners, preparing a document with a semi personalized pitch that resonates with them and then sending the emails to create a link.
This process is time consuming and tedious because it needs a lot of data processing, finding information that may not be easy to find and creating specific emails for each link.
Why is the outreach process time consuming and tedious?
The main reasons are:
Finding hidden information: When you find an article that links to one of your competitors, it is not always evident how to find the information of the person that wrote the article.
The contact page is usually one that won’t get you in touch with that person. We may need to go to LinkedIn, Twitter, use email finder tools to try communicate with the person in addition to using email validation tools.
Reading and personalizing: Using templatized emails like the ones you can find online when you search for “outreach emails” won’t give you the results you’re looking for. These templates have been so much that they become spam.
This may be some of the most valuable links we can get so going the extra step on creating semi-unique emails, however, takes time it’s worth it.
Following up: As a general rule, people are busy and the first email, most times than not, won’t get a response. That’s why following up multiple times with the person is necessary to end up acquiring these valuable links we dream of acquiring.
Image: CLIENT RESULTS. Source: Google Analytics
#8: Attorney Link Building
Snapshot of link building opportunities report for family law
Now that we have a good amount of competitor link opportunities, it’s time to find the information and emails of the website owners, preparing a document with a semi personalized pitch that resonates with them and then sending the emails to create a link.
This process is time consuming and tedious because it needs a lot of data processing, finding information that may not be easy to find and creating specific emails for each link.
Our Full Link building Process:
Create an email account for your company: This could be creating a new gmail account or can be having you create a new email account with your domain on it. If we use an email from your domain, the recommended way of doing it is with a current employee’s name.
So if their current email is jane@yourdomain.com we’ll ask you to create jane.j@yourdomain.com. This way we have a unique domain to work with and don’t flood “Jane’s” inbox while at the same time we look credible when pitching ideas.
Anchor text analysis: Using different tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and Majestic we’ll analyze the what is the anchor text of the current links that are pointing to your website and will compare it with your competitors’ anchor text.
Their anchor text is a fundamental part of why they’re winning and therefore the reason why we want your anchor text to be close or similar to theirs.
Link Audit: This is crucial to protect your website from future penalties. Even though Google has stated they “filter” bad links, it’s always important to take our own measurements to clean things up. It won’t be the first time we see a link-based penalty even if Google says they’re getting better at filtering “bad” links.
We’ll also look at the link velocity: How many links your competition is creating per month and losing per month. Then we’ll compare this to your site and take it into the mix.
Find Content assets: We’ll analyze what pieces of content you already have that can be used as content assets. Content assets are amazing pieces of content we can pitch to other websites/blogs that will fit their audience and complement their content. This is a win-win situation when done right.
Create a list of Search Operators: These are specific searches we perform in Google to bring filtered results that are potential websites or opportunities we can use to create links for your website.
Example: intitle:”car accident” AND “news” -inurl:news
This will bring websites that have “car accident” in the title as well as we word “news” but doesn’t have a string in the URL that is “news” (like website.com/news). This is likely to be websites that share and create news in this industry about this topic.
Create a list of websites: After we generate a list of search operators, we used them on Google and collect all the website that look like a good fit for your website. The number of websites collected depends on your budget.
Find contact information to pitch: After we collected websites that look like a good fit to create links from, we find the right contact information to send pitches (via email). This may include searching on Linkedin, Twitter, or other channels.
Create a personalized email: General pitches don’t work very well (as explained in previous sections). We create semi-personalized pitches that have a higher open rate and response rate than the average.
Follow up: Most people are busy and following up with them is a key important step to remind them we have something their audience may love. We usually do between 1 and 3 follow ups depending on the circumstances.
Reporting: As part of the entire process we include the link building as part of the report with live links, number of websites pitched, costs associated with it, etc.
⚡ IMPORTANT: Some of the websites will ask for a monetary contribution in order to get our articles or links on their websites. This is totally normal and is an extra budget you will need to have in place.
The most common link methods we use are:
* Link roundups
* Resource pages
* Broken link building
* Guest posting
* Sponsored posts
* Link reclamation
* Horizontal link building
* Local blogger link building
Image: CLIENT RESULTS. Source: Google Analytics
What Metrics Do We Take Into Consideration?
A dollar sign image :).
You have probably heard about metrics for links like DA (Domain Authority), TF (Trust Flow), RD (Referring Domains), etc. While metrics have it’s purpose, thinking about “metrics” is the wrong way to think about backlinks.
The way we think about metrics is this way: Would this link provide value to the person that sees it, and does this website receives traffic that may be interested in that topic?
That’s the best way to think about when looking for a professional link building campaign for your law firm instead of “metrics” which are focused on gaming the system.
