Why Law Firms Should Care About Backlinks (How To Get Them)

As the competition among law firms heats up, a personal injury SEO agency becomes the best ally for growth. These SEO professionals efficiently acquire assets, also known as backlinks, that significantly increase brand visibility and qualified leads.

This article enumerates the top reasons why backlinks matter in digital marketing strategies. It shares effective tips such as:

• Developing high-quality content that meets search engine standards and guidelines.
• Complementing online tactics with offline marketing ideas.
• Improving your site’s performance with technical SEO.
• Vetting backlinks.
• “Stealing” your competitor’s inbound link.

Stay competitive by implementing these ideas. Read the article below to learn more. Let’s go!

Are you tired of investing in search engine optimization without seeing any tangible results for your personal injury law firm? We have the solution that will make SEO work effectively for your firm.

Why Backlinks Are Vital for Legal Businesses

Demand for legal services is high. Within the next five years, revenues for personal injury law firms alone could hit nearly $60 billion. For the last five years until 2023, the expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) was 3.6%.

Just as demand for services is high, so is competition. More mid-sized and private practitioners are entering the market, using digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) in particular to level the playing field.

Simply put, although still helpful, traditional offline marketing is no longer enough. Your business’s website should be visible to search engines. Generating backlinks helps you stay competitive.

Backlinks are incoming hyperlinks from another website linking to yours. Because of this attribute, they provide many benefits, including:

• Widening your brand’s exposure. In a way, it is a form of referral or word-of-mouth marketing because other people are sharing your links with their audience.
• Enhancing your credibility and trust. Backlinks achieve this in two ways. First, they work like votes of confidence. Publishers link to you because they believe you can meet their audience’s needs. Second, studies have shown that humans trust recommendations from friends, family, and influencers that they follow.
• Improving your ranking. Getting backlinks helps you meet several search engine ranking signals. As a reward, your URLs can appear higher than your competitors in search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Reducing marketing costs. These inbound links help increase your profit and cashflow by decreasing advertising expenses because they offer free traffic and brand exposure. They also support SEO, an effective long-term strategy for acquiring organic or unpaid leads.

3 Best Backlink Strategies for Law Firms

Legal firms can get inbound links in two ways: via a shortcut or a long approach. The fastest way is to buy them from third parties.

However, this approach puts your online marketing plan at risk. This shortcut might cause you to violate spam policies or federal and industry guidelines.

Getting quality backlinks takes time. An expert personal injury SEO agency, however, knows tried-and-tested strategies to speed up the process. These include the following:

     1. Develop High-Quality Content That Meets Search Engine Standards and Guidelines

Backlinks are more elusive if your website does not appear in the search results. To be placed there, your content should meet certain standards and guidelines to be considered high-quality.

One such standard is E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Examples of this include: 

• Share numbers and data about your industry and business. For example, how many cases have you won? Are your lawyers’ members of local legal organizations or associations? What locations do you serve? Who are your partners? Share their photos and professional bios online.
• Use other online marketing strategies to promote thought leadership. Publish a podcast, create short-form videos, or launch webinars and white papers. Write insightful blog posts that showcase your in-depth knowledge about the subject matter.

     2. Complement Online Tactics With Offline Marketing Ideas

Traditional advertising is not dead, and you can use it to enhance the effectiveness of your Internet marketing tactics, especially in getting backlinks. Consider these ideas:

• Attend networking events and join associations. Building relationships with other experts boosts your credibility and trust. It might also lead to referrals, interviews, and collaborations that may result in inbound links.
• Write for legal publications. Be generous with your expertise and share your thoughts on the most controversial topics in newspapers, journals, and magazines. Most have online versions that can publish content from your website.
• Strengthen your public relations. It helps your business to tout your accomplishments and other notable activities. These include landmark cases that you have won and donations that your firm has made. In addition, talk about well-known lawyers and partners in your firm.

     3. Improve Your Site’s Performance With Technical SEO

Sometimes, although you are getting good backlinks, you are still not seeing the results that you want. This could be because your website is preventing you from doing so. This usually happens when you have several technical optimization issues, such as:

• Having several broken or dead links will bring your ranking down and negatively affect the user experience.
• Poor navigation and structure make it difficult for search engines to crawl and index your pages.
• Lacking a schema markup, which could have created rich snippets and improved local SEO strategies.
• Having insecure pages that result in search engine warnings increases your risk of cyberattacks.

A reliable personal injury SEO agency conducts a thorough SEO audit before designing or fine-tuning your online marketing plan. This way, they uncover and immediately fix barriers to better ranking and backlinking.

     4. Vet Backlinks

Backlinks are not a numbers game. Having a few high-quality inbound URLs is much better than having scores of mediocre or bad ones. This is because:

• Search engines might suspect that you are violating their rules, including trying to manipulate the search results.
• These inbound URLs may be toxic or spam.
• The content on these websites may be thin or directly goes against community standards. Your page might ultimately be affected if these pages get penalized.

Take time to vet your backlinks. Many tools already list the sites that point back to you. Check if they are trustworthy, relevant, and accurate. Disavow them if you believe they can hurt your reputation and rank.

     5. “Steal” Your Competitor’s Inbound Link

Another reason to work with SEO experts is that they search for broken or dead links and offer yours as an alternative, creating a win-win situation for you and the publisher. Doing this has the following positive results:

• You get the inbound traffic that could have gone to your competitors.
• The linking website provides its audience with more relevant and useful content, enhancing the user experience.

Remember that this strategy only works if you have high-quality content. Refer to the first tip on how to develop this type of content.

Summing Up

Your law firm is a business. You have revenue to build and expenses to pay. Digital marketing, such as SEO, helps you generate profit by increasing conversions and decreasing advertising costs.

If you want to save more money, boost revenues, and speed up acquiring backlinks with optimization experts, look no further than Digital Authority Partners (DAP) for help. We are a personal injury SEO agency, here to assist you with planning a comprehensive strategy that produces results. Contact us today to learn more.