94% of web pages have zero backlinks. Interestingly, pages with the highest number of backlinks usually rank the highest on Google, indicating that backlinks are still a key indicator of ranking.

For lawyers, securing quality backlinks not only boosts search rankings but also enhances credibility, drives targeted traffic, and helps attract clients actively seeking legal counsel.

In this guide, we’ll outline the benefits of link-building for lawyers, including proven methods for getting link placements in high-authority domains.

Considering how essential link-building is to your law firm website’s SEO performance, we recommend outsourcing to an expert.

At Profit Engine, we have nearly 15 years of experience helping lawyers secure high-quality backlinks to boost their websites’ authority and SERP ranking. We utilize link-building tools to identify backlinking opportunities and then manually vet the links to assess their safety and quality.

Schedule a free, no-obligation call to learn how we can help grow your law firm website’s authority.

Why Link Building Matters for Lawyers?

Link-building is a powerful SEO tool for law firms looking to establish themselves as thought leaders in the legal field and attract more clients.

Below are the main reasons your law firm should have a link-building strategy:

• Improved SERP Ranking: Inbound links from niche-relevant, high-authority domains are a vote of confidence that your website contains helpful, accurate data, which signals search engines to rank your site higher on SERPs.
• Local SEO Benefits: Backlinks from local directories help your website appear in ‘law firms near me’ searches, leading to increased foot traffic and inquiries.
• Online Visibility: Linked brand mentions on directories and news pieces help broadcast your law firm to a wider audience.
• Lead Generation: Backlinks from high-authority domains, such as those of civil society groups, can direct ‘warm’ and ‘hot’ leads to your service pages, where you can introduce them to your conversion funnel.

How to Build a Link-Worthy Law Firm Website

The best way to grow your backlink profile is to build a legal website that attracts inbound links naturally. This ensures a regular stream of niche-relevant, high-quality backlinks that boost your website’s perceived domain authority.

Below are proven methods for turning your law firm’s website into a lead magnet:

• Professional Website Design: First impressions matter, and very few high-PR domain owners will want to link to your website if it looks amateurish. Build a clean, visually-appealing law firm website that reflects professionalism and inspires confidence.
• Create Evergreen Content: Identify high-interest topics like groundbreaking court rulings or controversial laws on sensitive issues, like same-sex marriages, gun control, and the death penalty, and provide insightful, thought-provoking commentary.
• Technical SEO: Optimize visitors’ user experience by ensuring the website is mobile-friendly, has intuitive navigation, and leverages internal links to guide user journeys on your site.
• Establish Authority: Showcase detailed attorney profile, prominent case results, client testimonials, and accurate contact information to build social proof and establish credibility.
• Link Magnets: Publish unique resources, such as legal statistics, infographics, whitepapers, and state- or jurisdiction-specific content, to entice high-DR domains to link to your website.

How to Start Link Building for Lawyers

Effective link-building follows a structured approach to ensure that you prioritize quality backlinks, which improve your website's authority and search engine rankings.

Below is a step-by-step guide to help you secure genuine, high-quality links for your law firm website:

• Outline Link-Building Goals: The first step should always be to define your expected link-building outcomes. For example, you could aim to rank higher on SERPs when users search for high-intent legal keywords, such as attorney services, litigation, and solicitor. Alternatively, you could want to double your referral traffic by the next quarter.
• Define Target Audience: Who do you want to reach? Describe your ideal client profile, including their pain points and information needs. This will help you create content that resonates with your target audience.
• Competitor Analysis: Use link-building tools, like SEMrush, Majestic, and Ahrefs, to spy on competitors’ backlinks and identify link gaps and opportunities. For example, check where your competitors get most of their high-quality backlinks and how they impact their websites’ SEO performance.
• Identify Prospective Link Partners: Shortlist reputable, high-DR domains that are relevant to your niche. Examples include legal directories, local chambers of commerce, and legal news sites. Also, highlight the most suitable link-building technique for each prospective referring domain. For instance, some news sites might accept guest postings from reputable attorneys and law firms.
• Create Linkable Assets: Develop content and resources worth linking to attract organic backlinks. Examples include how-to guides, explainer videos simplifying complex legal jargon, and free legal tools, checklists, or templates.
• Conduct Link-Building Outreach: Choose the right link-building agency to help you draft outreach emails to secure backlink placements. You can offer prospective link partners a win-win situation, such as updating obsolete content or increasing approval rates.
• Monitor Link Performance: Leverage SEO tools to track essential link-building metrics, including referring domain authority, anchor text distribution, and referral traffic.

Outreach Strategies That Win Lawyer Links

Once you’ve prepared your law firm website for backlinks and identified high-priority referring domains, it is time to reach out for link-building opportunities. 

We have compiled a list of the most effective outreach strategies to help you secure genuine, high-quality backlinks:

1. Guest Posting

Guest posting simply means publishing blogs on third-party domains and then adding backlinks that point to your law firm’s website.

The good news is that most industries overlap with the legal sector, offering endless guest posting opportunities. For example, you could publish a guest post on an insurance website exploring common topics, like injury claims, and adding outbound links to your service page.

2. Niche Edits

Link insertions are a more convenient way to add backlinks to high-PR websites without publishing a guest post. It involves finding high-DR websites relevant to the legal sector and asking the domain owners to insert outbound links on contextual anchor texts.

However, sometimes, you might have to provide content, such as a paragraph, to ensure the backlink appears natural so it is not flagged as spam.

3. HARO Link Building

Journalists often look for attorneys’ input when covering legal topics to boost their articles’ credibility and perceived authority. Use such opportunities to share expert commentary in exchange for a backlink to your law firm’s website.

HARO link building also gets your law firm mentioned in mainstream media, which boosts brand visibility.

Guest posting, niche edits, and HARO (help a reporter out) are the gold standard of link-building. When pursuing backlink placements, choose the domains wisely, ensuring the links are safe, niche-relevant, and high quality.

But if you’re unsure about which domains to choose, get help from a link-building agency to craft winning outreach emails.

At Profit Engine, we use a 16-point link building checklist to ensure the links are high-quality. Additionally, our team utilizes link-building and SEO tools to audit your backlink profile and conduct competitor analysis, identifying link gaps that can give your law firm website a competitive edge.

Book a free call so that we can get started on your link-building strategy.

4. Local Directories

Get your law firm listed in legal and business directories to generate more referral traffic to your website. Directories like Justia, FindLaw, and LawInfo are often free to join, which is convenient for small law firms with a tight link-building budget. 

Additionally, send outreach emails to local directories and community platforms to enhance local SEO performance, ensuring your law firm appears when users search for ‘legal services near me.’

5. Unlinked Mentions

Another simple way to gain backlinks is to find websites that mention your law firm or other branded keywords affiliated with your company name. 

For example, you can set Google Alerts to receive notifications whenever Google crawls or indexes a web page that contains your brand name. Next, send outreach emails requesting the domain owners to add hyperlinks to your law firm name.

Smart Tactics for Link Building for Attorneys

Besides the outreach strategies mentioned above, law firms can leverage additional tips to secure more backlinks for their website. 

The methods include:

• Engage Local Communities: Organizing or sponsoring local events, charities, and community initiatives can earn your law firm valuable mentions and backlinks from trusted local news outlets and community websites.
• Higher Education Scholarships: Sponsor students in colleges and universities that offer law degrees to get listed in their scholarship resource pages. You could then request the university domain admin to link the brand mention to your website, earning your law firm high-quality backlinks from edu sites.
• Contribute to Local News Columns: Regularly contribute to local newspapers and magazines to boost your law firm's online presence. You could then include an outbound link to your website as part of your writer bio in the newspaper columns.
• Appear on Podcasts: Pursue guest appearances on legal and other niche-relevant podcasts to share expert insight on recent cases or legislation. Usually, most podcasts include guest bios and website links in show notes, earning your law firm a backlink.

Law Firm Link Building Mistakes to Avoid

Here are common pitfalls to watch out for when pursuing backlink placements for your law firm website:

• Overoptimizing Your Anchor Texts: Excessive use of keyword-heavy anchors can signal to search engines that you are spamming your backlinks, potentially harming your website’s perceived domain authority.
• Using Link Farms: Buying backlinks from link farms and private blog networks (PBNs) exposes your website to toxic links that could result in Google manual actions.
• Publishing Generic Content: Some law firms rush to publish low-quality blogs so they have web pages that referring domains can link to. However, this is often counterproductive as high-PR domains will likely reject your backlink requests.
• Not Monitoring Your Links: Failing to track your backlinks' performance results in missed opportunities for improving your link-building strategy. For example, you pass up the chance to identify and remove toxic links before they harm your website’s SEO performance. 
• Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality: Focusing solely on increasing the number of backlinks while disregarding their quality results in a bloated link profile without significant changes in domain authority or SEO performance.

Steps to Track and Measure Link Building ROI

We always advise law firm domain owners to evaluate their website’s SEO performance to determine the success of their link-building efforts. This provides opportunities to refine the backlinking strategy and secure higher-quality links.

Here’s a simple guide for determining your link-building ROI:

1. Define Link-Building Goals: Clearly outline what you want to achieve from your link-building efforts. Sample goals include boosting your law firm website’s perceived website authority or ranking higher on SERPs.
2. Identify Key Metrics: The goals in step 1 should help you determine essential metrics to track. Examples of metrics include link quality, referring domain authority, niche relevance, and anchor text optimization.
3. Select Link-Building Tools: Pick a link building tool that suits the backlinking metrics you want to track. Popular tools include SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz.
4. Monitor Acquired Backlinks: Regularly track the status of your backlinks to check whether they are live, pending, or lost.
5. Analyze Referral Traffic: Evaluate how much of your organic traffic is from the acquired backlinks. Also, check which referring domains contribute the most traffic to your website.
6. Attribute Conversions: Measure tangible results to showcase the ROI of your link-building efforts. For example, Google Analytics can help you attribute signups and sales to specific referral domains. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 

Let’s wind up this guide by answering additional questions you might have about link-building for lawyers:

What Makes a Legal Website Attractive for Backlinks?

Here’s what you can do to make your legal website attractive for backlinks:

• Publish content with topical relevance.
• Make the website mobile-friendly.
• Leverage on-page SEO tactics like keyword optimization.
• Create linkable assets like legal handbooks, case files, and settlement calculators.

How Can Lawyers Stay Compliant with SEO Guidelines?

Lawyers can stay compliant with SEO guidelines by adhering to Google’s link-building policies, including:

• Not using link farms and private blog networks.
• Avoiding keyword stuffing.
• Publishing content that meets readers’ expectations and information needs.

Should Small Law Firms Focus on Link Building?

Yes. Small law firms should focus on link-building to level the playing field against larger firms and attract more potential clients. 

For example, quality backlinks from legal directories, local organizations, and high-PR civil societies boost your brand’s visibility and website’s perceived authority, increasing your SERP ranking.

How Fast Can a Law Firm See Results From Link Building?

There’s no straightforward answer to how fast you can see results from link-building. 

It depends on several factors, including the quality and quantity of backlinks, the perceived authority of the referring domain, and other SEO best practices.

Conclusion

This guide will help you implement a comprehensive link-building strategy for your legal website and secure high-quality backlink placements in authoritative domains. We cannot overemphasize the importance of ensuring that backlinks are high-quality, as this will help protect your website’s domain reputation and avoid the risk of Google manual action.

The best way to secure high-quality backlinks for your legal website is to work with a link-building agency.

Partner with Profit Engine for safe, relevant, and effective backlinks. We leverage AI and link-building tools to implement a results-driven backlinking strategy that helps grow your domain authority, so your web pages appear in relevant searches. 

Grow your law firm website into a lead generation powerhouse—get your link-building strategy today!