It is crucial to grow your online presence organically if you want long-term success and digital results for your law firm. As a link building specialist, I’ve seen first-hand the vital impact link outreach and backlink building have in increasing search engine rankings, building credibility, and attracting potential clients. But, organic growth doesn’t happen overnight; it happens through consistent effort toward your law firm’s SEO strategy. Through outreach campaigns, you connect with influential websites and other industry experts and have the opportunity to create valuable backlinks that sustain your firm in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
How do link outreach and building backlinks enhance search engine rankings and position your firm as a trusted authority in the legal industry? Let’s break it down.
The Power Of Outreach
Link outreach is the most interactive part of growing a website. It involves a webmaster, Digital PR, or link building specialist, connecting with external sources – these can be business listing websites, private bloggers, or major news publications – to develop a linking relationship to their website. Using white hat SEO tactics, the goal is to establish a network of highly reputable websites within the same industry or niche that link back to the webmaster’s site – for the sake of this article, your law firm’s website. These backlinks signal to search engines that the website is trustworthy and relevant, ultimately enhancing its authority and improving its search engine rankings.
A similar practice that focuses solely on media outreach and link building via newsworthy stories is Digital PR. Companies and law firms turn to Hennessey Digital to create a Digital PR strategy that helps generate news that catches the attention of media outlets. Our team then works directly with those outlets and journalists to secure story placement with links back to the source – in this case, our clients. This strategy is effective in leveraging a firm’s online visibility, establishing awareness and trust in the brand, improving the site’s domain authority, and driving website traffic for the firm. This approach also happens to be one of the fastest ways to generate exposure, whether it is launching a new product, promoting your business, or raising awareness on an interesting or important topic.
Why Link Building is Important for Law Firms
Outreach is essential for all businesses, no matter the size. It’s an effective, low-cost marketing strategy that enables firms to increase online visibility and connect with a broader audience. It plays an even bigger role in the legal industry and law firm digital marketing due to the competitive nature of the legal space where law firms with a greater share of voice can dominate their market. It’s worth noting that link building is a good supplement to law firm marketing when you consider laws that govern how law firms can market themselves vary state by state, making some markets more difficult than others.
No matter the market you’re in or targeting, actively maintaining online visibility is key. Lawyers can raise awareness about their expertise and build trust with a broader audience through consistent marketing updates.
White Hat SEO: Building Backlinks the Right Way
One of the many positive outcomes of link outreach is the endless possibilities to obtain high-quality backlinks. Backlinks are links from an outside website that redirect the readers to your site. High-quality backlinks – ones from a reputable website and placed naturally within the site’s relevant content – play an important role in boosting your search engine ranking and increasing your visibility online, which can result in higher traffic to your website. Think about them as endorsements – they are recommendations from other websites signaling to search engines that your content is valuable in the legal field.
What is Considered a “Good Backlink”?
One high-quality backlink will increase your rankings more than a bunch of low-quality ones. Here are some of the main characteristics that help us identify the best-quality links for our clients:
- Authority: Obtain backlinks from websites with high authority and traffic because those have more value
- Relevance: For our legal clients, backlinks from law-related websites are more valuable because they are more relevant
- Anchor Text: Catchy law-related anchor text (the linked words that people click on) helps your website be visible to Google
- Destination: Backlinks should direct to the pages you want to optimize and increase traffic for
- Follow vs. nofollow: Link building efforts should focus on creating follow links that affect the ranking positively
Creating backlinks is necessary; however, we have to be careful! Creating too many of them, especially on websites with a low trust score, can be considered spammy by Google, who has specific guidelines when it comes to earning backlinks. That’s why it’s important to be cautious about the number of backlinks created for a page on your site. If they go against Google’s rules, the rankings will decrease.
Broken Backlinks & Lost Backlinks
Just like anything on a website, backlinks can become broken or lost, and they can impact your SEO efforts negatively. A backlink becomes lost when a website that was previously linked to your site removes the link or deletes the page where the link was placed. On the other hand, a backlink becomes broken when a link to your website redirects to a nonexistent or broken page, which often happens due to URL changes or deleted content. In both scenarios, the search engine ranking decreases. To make sure this doesn’t happen, check the statuses of the backlinks regularly – which we do regularly for our clients.
301s redirects are one of the most common ways for a backlink to become lost. For example, if the structure of your URL changes, the linking page is now redirected somewhere else. When making updates to your website, thoroughly analyze these types of changes and make sure that all the URLs are up to date and linking properly.
The Value Link Building Has on Growing Your Law Firm
As we know, SEO is vital for law firms that want to attract more clients through organic search traffic. Here is a short list of reasons why backlinks are important for law firms:
- Boosts Search Engine Rankings: Search engines view backlinks as a sign of authority. Having a large number of high-quality backlinks for your law firm’s website will improve the chances of it ranking high in the search results. This increases the chances of people looking for legal services to come across your law firm and visit your website, as you will be at the top.
- Improves Domain Authority: Domain authority is a score that search engines use to predict how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). The more backlinks earned from quality websites, the better the domain authority, which helps in ranking for relevant terms like “personal injury lawyer.”
- Attracts Specific Audience: If a person discovers a page by following a hyperlink from another page, it is obvious that the person has already shown interest in the subject of the link. For law firms, this suggests that people who come to your website through a backlink are usually potential clients who are looking for a specific legal service. This brings targeted traffic to your site, increasing your chances of converting visitors into clients.
- Increases Credibility and Trust: In the legal field, trust is everything! Backlinks from prominent websites act as a recommendation. These are signaling to potential clients that your law firm is credible and trustworthy. The more trusted sources that link to your website, the more confidence both search engines and clients will have in your firm’s authority and expertise.
- Increases Online Visibility: Online presence has a lot of advantages, especially for law firms. Backlinks help increase your firm’s online visibility by making it easier for search engines to find and index your site. The more links you have from high-authority websites, the more likely it is that your firm will appear in search results for legal services.
In an industry as competitive as the legal one, your firm needs every advantage it can get to attract potential clients.
Backlinks via Digital PR & SEO – The Perfect Mix
Hennessey Digital is on the forefront of Digital PR, a modern SEO and digital marketing strategy that has evolved from both traditional PR and SEO. It takes the foundations of traditional PR, which raises brand awareness and improves the brand’s reputation, and combines this with the organic benefits of search engine optimization.
Our Digital PR approach involves creating newsworthy content and stories for your brand that can be pitched to the press. We draft newsworthy stories into press releases that journalists cover and write about on their websites, the important element being the inclusion of a link back to our client’s website. This not only helps to drive brand awareness, but also drives link equity to our client’s websites, supporting in improving their SEO metrics.
Digital PR and SEO make the perfect recipe for success. Using the best techniques to enhance website visibility, credibility, and ultimately, search engine rankings, this strategy is internet gold. Here are some of the high-impact results you can achieve through Digital PR:
- Brand awareness
- Improved domain rating
- Improved keyword rankings
- Increased traffic to their website
Why Digital PR is Important for Law Firms
Digital PR is effective and efficient for a law firm because it offers plenty of benefits that can significantly increase the visibility and traffic of a website.
- Enhanced Visibility: Digital PR helps law firms increase their online presence, making it easier for potential clients to find and trust them.
- Reputation Building: By securing features in reputable online publications, law firms can build authority and credibility within the legal industry.
- Targeted Outreach: Digital PR allows law firms to connect with specific demographics or industries, ensuring their services reach the right audience.
- Improved SEO: High-quality backlinks from digital PR campaigns boost a law firm’s website ranking, driving more organic traffic.
- Thought Leadership: Publishing expert opinions or legal insights through digital PR platforms positions law firms as thought leaders in their area of practice.
- One Step Ahead: By conducting Digital PR, legal brands can get ahead of their competitors who may not yet be conducting Digital PR.
Final Thoughts
Growing your law firm’s online presence takes more than just a website; it requires strategic link outreach and backlink building to unlock long-term visibility and authority. These efforts not only boost search engine rankings but also build credibility, drive targeted traffic, and position your firm as a leader in the legal space. With the right strategy—one that combines high-quality backlinks, proactive link monitoring, and Digital PR campaigns—you’ll have a powerful foundation for organic growth.
Ready to take the next step? Reach out to us today, and let’s talk about how we can build your backlinks—and your business—one link at a time.