Today’s digital marketing climate consists of numerous push and pull strategies. Between social media, landing pages, branded apps, and content campaigns, it can be difficult to surpass the status quo—let alone surpass client expectations.
Law firms sell services, helping clients resolve complicated legal hurdles which they, themselves, have no skills or knowledge about. Services sold by law firms are based upon a lawyer’s skill, experiences and comprehensive legal knowledge.
As such, law firms have a niche place in the marketing world. To stay relevant, effective and successful, they need to employ a solid inbound marketing strategy—which is a pull strategy. Pull strategies focus on attracting customers via service advertisements. If you’re a lawyer, or if you market for a law firm, there are several inbound approaches that surpass all others. The most important of these is link building.
What are Inbound Links?
Whenever a website links to your website, it does so via an inbound link. If someone clicks their link’s anchor text, they’ll enter your law firm’s landing page. They’ll be presented with content, service options, contact information and more.
Modern inbound linking is a big business venture—as increasing inbound link numbers results in high-standing search engine rankings. Appearing on Google’s first page for a query of “law firms in my area” is an example of this—presenting your service as authoritative, trustworthy and effective.
Building Strong Inbound Links
In the inbound marketing world, quality is better than quantity. If you try to boost your inbound link traffic with inorganic techniques—like spamming websites, forcing social media page views or posting relevant URLs across forums—Google may flag your website. When this happens, Google may reduce your PageRank—or your overall search engine rank—due to suspicious activity.
So, how do you build a strong, organic inbound link architecture? Let’s take a look.
Content Creation
Content is your primary source of inbound links. By creating a blog, posting informative articles on social media and crafting intuitive email campaigns that offer insight and value, you’ll attract high-quality impactors who will share your website with others. As long as your content is high-quality, provides credible sources of information and stays relevant—other bloggers, e-magazines and even law specialists will reference your website’s content. This is the first, and most important, step in learning how to build inbound links for law firms of any size.
Local Website Outreach
Another great way to build inbound links is to contact providers in your community. A majority of Internet users browsing for goods and services tend to search in their area. Local websites don’t have as much competition as big, global websites—and Google can tell when you’re linked by local sources. When this happens, your ranking will increase radically across geo-locational law firm searches.
Guest Posting
Guest posts published through another organization’s websites is a powerful approach. Not only will you get to choose your own anchor text—for SEO purposes—but you’ll have optimal real estate for providing a direct link. From here, learning how to build inbound links for law firms is much easier—because you’ll know who to reach out to in the future. You can network, too, connecting with sites relevant to your legal industry specialty.
Law Firm Directory Participation
Legal directories, such as Avvo, are fantastic for building links. They let attorneys create profiles, answer potential client questions and offer further services via a direct link to their law firm. These platforms often feature free Q&A sessions which open the floor to sincere, long-lasting relationships with prospective clients. Even better: Building authority on these websites will make your law firm more relevant in common searches, compounding your link visibility.
Learning how to build inbound links for law firms is all about social syndication, comradery, outreach, and valuable information. Once you’ve bolstered your link-building campaign with high-value content, promoting it to prospective clients is rather easy. Reach out, extend advice and connect with prospective clients who need your firm’s help the most—and the links to your practice’s website will grow.
