Anyone who knows anything about SEO will tell you that, if you are a lawyer with a website or manage a legal website and you want that website to rank higher on Google, then you must acquire backlinks. Although ranking factors such as user experience and having quality, relevant content on your website are extremely important, backlinks act as a booster that feeds rankings, and the more and better the backlinks you have, the higher you should rank.
This is why link building plays a huge role in SEO, and the subsequent aim of getting a legal website ranked on page one, and if possible position number one. Unfortunately, many do not fully understand how to create a link-building strategy, so we thought we would give you some simple pointers as to how.
Link Building Defined
The simplest explanation we have of link building is it is the process of gaining links aka backlinks from other locations online such as websites and social media pages to your legal website so that when someone clicks on one of those links they arrive on whichever page of your website the inbound link goes to.
The Importance Of Link Building
Whilst Google keeps much of how it calculates rankings very much clouded in secrecy, they release enough information and there has been enough SEO research, for us to make reasonable assumptions. One is that backlinks are one of the three most significant factors that Google assesses when ranking website pages.
Google regards a backlink as an endorsement, and the more authority a website has that links to another, the stronger that endorsement is. It is akin to a budding actor being praised by an Oscar-winning actor such as Anthony Hopkins. When Google sees that a backlink goes from a high authority website, the website it links to gets credit for that, and a lot more credit than it would for a link from a one-page website with zero authority.
Another important element of a backlink is if there is any anchor text. What happens with anchor text, is that specific words within text content are clickable, and Google uses those words to determine what keyword the link is relevant to. For example, if within an article about divorce law, you had a link to your website with the hypertext ‘divorce lawyers’, Google regards your website as relevant for divorce lawyers when someone enters that search term.
Why You Should Not Rely Solely On Link Building
One mistake you must not make is to rely solely on link building for ranking to the detriment of other ranking factors. A legal website with lots of backlinks will not gain better rankings if it has no content or the user experience on that website is poor. Content and user experience are high on the list of Google’s priorities, so make sure you also optimise these whilst building links.
3 Ways To Build Links
We are about to show you how you can acquire links but first, we must warn you of one way that you should never use, and that is to buy them. You can genuinely risk your legal website being disregarded by Google if they discover your backlinks have been purchased.
Manually Add Them: You can manually add links from online legal business directory listings that you create, legal forums, social media, blog commenting on other legal blogs, and legal Q&A websites.
Earn Them: This is when other website owners, including those in the legal niche, like your content and website so much that they create a link to them without you probably even knowing until it shows up on your backlink analysis. Regard these links as a compliment and a vote of confidence.
Ask For Them: There are plenty of websites and online locations where you can ask for links to your website. Examples include guest blogging where you write blog posts in return for links, testimonials and reviews where you request that a link is included in them, and resource sections of websites where you request being added as a resource.
