Law Firm Link Building: How Law Firms Can Dominate the SERP

A solid understanding of SEO and, importantly, of local SEO, can take a law firm to the top of the search engine results page. 

It can be a lot easier for lawyers to increase domain authority and reach the top of the SERP while targeting high value keywords because of the inherent specialized expertise that lawyers and law firms have.

Combine this with a good link building strategy and understanding of foundational SEO concepts, and you have the recipe for search engine success. 

Link building for law firms

There are a lot of ways for law firms to build backlinks. What’s more, because of the specialized knowledge and authority, law firms often find it a lot easier to build backlinks because many websites (especially high authority websites) are more willing to link to them. 

The law falls firmly into Google’s YMYL category (your money, your life), which is a broad label applied to niches that have anything to do with subject matter and topics that could have a material effect (negative or positive) on a person’s life. 

Search engines have higher demands for credibility when it comes to the kinds of content and backlinks sites in these niches use, so they are, in essence, obligated to link to experts. 

Some of the most effective link building strategies for law firms include creating resources on complex legal topics, guest posting, digital PR and edu link building. 

While it is entirely likely that websites will link to a law firm’s content organically–i.e., through Google search–law firms are well positioned to do effective proactive link building to increase their ranking and organic traffic quicker. 

Criteria when selecting link building targets

During the initial prospecting phase (the stage of the link building process where you select viable link building options), it’s important to have a few key criteria in mind. 

Not all links are going to be worthwhile or appropriate for your niche. They are: 

• Site relevance
• Site authority
• Site quality 
• Your existing backlink profile 

Site relevance

Site relevance is important for law firm link building because the law is hyper specific. 

That isn’t to say that there isn’t niche overlap, but relevance is one of the most important deciding factors when link building. 

A high domain authority backlink from a website dedicated to fishing and outdoor life is not going to be as good as a link from a lower domain authority website that covers legal news and new legislation.

The more relevant to your legal practice, the better. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should not try to build links to a variety of website or that, in the natural course of things, you won’t acquire links from sites that are not exactly in your niche. 

All of that is part of a natural backlink profile, which is ultimately what you want in order to please Google and get your pages shown at the top of the SERP. 

Site authority

Site authority refers to how credible, respected and trustworthy the website linking to you is. 

High authority backlinks from relevant websites are the holy grail of link building. A backlink from a place like the New York Times, for example, is going to be much more valuable from an SEO perspective than a brand-new blog that just started publishing a few months ago. 

Site quality

Site quality is another determining factor when deciding where to get backlinks placed. 

It’s important to note this because there are a lot of seemingly high authority sites out there that lack quality, especially when it comes to content. Their content is thin, poorly written and, in many cases, exists solely to sell low quality and spammy links. 

These sites are very often what are typically referred to as link farms. Quite frequently they are built on expired domains that still have residual domain authority left over, which gives the illusion of quality. 

Google doens’t like these sites and will either neutralize and SEO value from them or, if you build enough links to these places, perhaps even penalize you with a manual action penalty for unnatural link building. 

Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to law firm link building, or any other kind of link building for that matter. 

It’s better to have fewer high quality links than many low quality ones. 

Your existing backlink profile

You also need to factor the makeup of your existing backlink profile into current and future link building decisions. 

What this means is you need to know what kind of links you currently have and, therefore, what kind you could stand to build. 

Your backlink profile is the total number of links you have pointing to your domain or to a particular page. Ideally, it should be made up of a wide variety of different link types, including both organic and built links, pointing to a wide range of pages on your site. 

Too many keyword match anchor text backlinks pointing to a specific page on your website and Google could assume that you are attempting some sort of link manipulation tactic. 

With that said, your link building efforts should always take your current backlink profile into account.

If it looks like you need more branded anchor homepage links (which we will go into shortly), then build those. If you are lacking deep links to important resource and thought leadership pages, then you should be focusing on the link building tactics that target that category of backlink. 

With that said, below we will delve into some of the top strategies for law firm link building and how you can put them into practice yourself. 

Link building for law firms 101

Below are some of the highest ROI and effective strategies for law firm link building. 

Link building strategy #1: Linkable asset and outreach combination

Linkable assets are those pieces of content and pages that, well, are linkable. They are the kind of thing that other websites would want to send their visitors and customers to because it adds a lot of value. 

This is also the kind of content that tends to attract links naturally once it starts to rank on Google and people come across it as they search for authoritative resources. 

Once you’ve created the linkable assets, you can’t just rest on your laurels and hope for backlinks. Yes, they probably will come in time as more and more people come across the resource, share and link to it. 

Ultimately, however, you want the link building and SEO process to go a lot faster than that. 

Here are a few of the top-performing linkable assets.

In-depth guides

In-depth guides are the ideal linkable asset for law firms because of the sheer amount of specialized expertise they have at their disposal to write such guides. 

The law is arcane and impenetrable to most lay people, so making concepts and new legislation easy to understand is a surefire way to garner attention and links. You can often find yourself with backlinks from high authority sources like newspapers and magazines, as journalists and writers reference your guides and breakdowns. 

Tax lawyer with a good summary of a recent development in the tax code? An in-depth breakdown that ordinary people can understand and apply to their lives can quickly find itself circulating around the web and building link after link. 

FAQ Pages 

FAQ pages that provide a comprehensive set of questions and answers for a given topic are a great way to attract backlinks from non-experts wishing to appeal to your legal authority. 

FAQ pages are quite easy to put together and can be a great source of valuable links for years to come. Just make sure to update the FAQ as the law changes. 

Tools

Tools refer to things that allow users to do something specific. 

The High Desert Law firm in Oregon has created a settlement calculator that purports to indicate, based on your inputs, whether it makes more sense to settle an personal injury case or higher a lawyer. 

You fill in several fields

As well as 

And then hit “calculate” and the tool tells you what you could stand to receive if you go it alone vs hire a lawyer

Tools like these become not only widely known go-to resources over time as more and more people take note of them, but are also the kind of thing that reputable websites want to link their visitors to. 

Link building strategy #2: HARO

HARO stands for Help and Report Out and it is one of the best ways to build high authority organic links to your website’s homepage. 

The links are organic because there is no solicitation involved like there is with most other forms of true link building. 

We’ve written an in-depth guide to HARO link building that is well worth a read, but basically, HARO is a service that connects journalists and writers with sources. 

You, as the expert legal source, simply sign up for HARO’s free thrice daily email

Complete the simple email verification process and you are ready to start answering queries and earning extremely valuable branded homepage links. 

We’ve built our clients some amazing backlinks in the web’s most trusted and reputable publications over the years. 

Scan the emails that come in at 5:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. (EST) every day for viable opportunities (ones where you have authority and expertise). 

A family lawyer, for instance, would be all over the below: 

HARO is very likely the best way for law firms to build natural homepage links (which are fantastic for SEO). 

Here’s a a January 2022 article published in Verywell Health (one of the biggest health blogs online) about workplace vaccine mandates: 

In it, they quote expert opinion from Holland & Knight, a U.S: law firm: 

These are the kinds of backlinks that are very common with HARO. A journalist (in this case from Verywell Health) posts a query in one of the HARO emails asking for expert legal opinion. 

Lawyers with the expertise to answer the question chime in, and, voila, the quote and a backlink to the law firm’s site appear in a super high authority publication like Verywell Heatlh. 

Link building strategy #3: Guest posts

Building links with Guest posts is another fantastic link building strategy for any law firm’s website because, unlike a lot of other businesses online, legal expertise is always in demand. 

It can be quite hard for a lot of site owners to get their guest posts published because they don’t really bring anything special to the table. Very often, the only way to get inbound links from guest blogs is to pay for them, and paid links are usually against Google’s guidelines.

As a legal expert, on the other hand, websites are usually eager to publish verifiable expert legal opinions in the form of a guest post, which makes building links this way easier. 

Some of the best ways to build guest post links include:

• Provide expert opinion on legal blogs and related websites. 
• Opine on law-related topics for other industries. 
• Suggest interesting takes and opinions on the law for more general interest sites. 

What a good link building strategy really boils down to, however, and this holds true regardless of industry, is relationship cultivation. 

At dofollow, we’re able to build the kind of user-centric, high authority guest posts we do because we’ve put the hours in building our relationships with site owners and quality websites. 

Free directories

One of the easiest ways for law firms to build quality backlinks is to take advantage of the myriad industry directories out there. 

This is a local link building tactic that lets you place a link to your site on legal industry directories that actively solicit law firms to create profiles. 

Some popular free directories include: 

1. Justia
2. Avvo
3. Cornel Law School 
4. Find Law

A quick Google search will turn up dozens upon dozens of options for you to take advantage of. 

These directory links offer less overall SEO value than the other link building strategies we’ve discussed above, but having your link hosted on reputable legal directories is a great way to build your brand, increase referral traffic and show up in local search results. 

Scholarship link building

Scholarship link building is a link building strategy wherein you offer law students money (in the form of a bursary or scholarship) on your website. 

You create the page offering the scholarship and then reach out to law faculties and financial services pages at colleges and universities, letting them know of the scholarship. 

These are very often homeruns because post-secondary institutions are always looking for ways to add value for their students in the form of financial assistance. The idea is that the school then links back to your scholarship page. 

Links from universities and colleges are very powerful because they are high authority. Google looks very favourably on them, so they are great links to have in your backlink profile. 

A quick search of “financial services” + the name of the institution will usually turn up the page and contact information you’re looking for when advertising your new scholarship. 

Unlinked mentions 

Unlinked mentions are probably one of the most underutilized link building tactics across industries, but they are an especially powerful law firm link building tactic. 

If you spend some time tracking down all of the places online where your firm has been mentioned, but not provided with a dofollow link, it is very often possible to convert a good number of those into high quality links. 

You can either do this manually or using an SEO analytics tool like Ahrefs. 

Manually

There are basically two ways to find mentions manually. You can use Google Alerts, or search terms in Google. 

Google Alerts is a free service Google offers that lets you know when certain keywords are used in newly indexed pages. 

You set whatever alerts you want and Google will send you an email as it finds them. There will be a lot of irrelevant messages, but there will also be unlinked mentions that you definitely want to capitalize on. 

You can also search for your target keywords in Google and use a date modifier. 

For instance, if you wanted to see all of the times the firm Holland & Knight were mentioned in pages indexed by Google since January 1, 2023, you would search the below: 

If you were Holland & Knight, you would then have to go through each one and check to see whether you were mentioned, whether there is already a backlink provided, and whether it makes sense to pursue the unlinked mention. 

Sometimes you are mentioned in publications that you don’t actually want a backlink from (they’re low quality or irrelevant), or you are mentioned in a negative light (it happens), in which case it’s best to leave the publicity as just a mention. 

Law firms are ideally poised to build great links 

Law firms should consider themselves lucky. Their expertise and credibility make them backlink magnets. 

Legal opinion is always in demand, and, best of all, the only credible legal advice comes from legal professionals. 

With the right strategies in place and an understanding of how to create a diversified backlink profile, law firms are well-positioned to reap major benefits from link building campaigns. 

Of course, it’s easy to tell you what you need to do. It’s another thing entirely to put it into practice. If you want to know more about how a reputable, experienced, performance-based link building agency builds amazing backlinks, get in touch with dofollow today.