To sign up for our daily email newsletter, CLICK HERE
So you have started working on improving your search engine optimization (SEO) and getting your name going through the Internet. That’s a great start! But you may be concerned about whether you are getting as much out of these services as you could. One thing that people sometimes have trouble dealing with is whether your backlinks are doing as well for your business as they could. When you do backlinks to your law firm, there is a very real chance that a poorly done one may produce reduced, if not no results, for your law firm, so figuring out if your backlink is good is important.
What Are the Qualities of a Good Backlink for Your Law Firm?
First off, let’s define a backlink. A backlink is, basically, a link that goes back to your website on a different website. Another name for backlink is an external link, which is perhaps a clearer term. Now that that is out of the way, let’s talk about what makes a backlink good and what makes one bad. There are certain things that a backlink should be, and it is relatively easy to understand why. Relevance is a hug boon for an article, and the more relevant it is to the webpage in which it is being linked, the more likely someone is going to be satisfied with having clicked on your link. For example, as a law firm, having a backlink about slip and falls to something completely unrelated, such as a pet blog, will not only make the person clicking through confused, but they will also feel annoyed, making them that much less likely to even consider you for a law firm should they decide that they need a law firm. After all, no one likes being deceived with a bait and switch, even if that is not the intention of the backlinking. If you backlink on the wrong webpages, or even the wrong websites altogether, it can make the money you spent to set up that backlinking get you nothing out of having done so.
A backlink can also be made worthless just by virtue of the website linking to yours being of too low of quality to get any merit out of it. So, for instance, if you are working with a company with a rather low-quality website, or a website that has poor traffic, you are not likely to get very much out of this deal. Worse yet, if you are backlinking to them yourself, your law firm may suffer by association with a poor website. Of course, there is more to backlinks than just “good” and “bad”. True, they do have categories of backlink quality on Google, but it’s not a binary one. Google considers extremely low-quality backlinks to be spam, which is deeply frowned upon by them and will be de-prioritized as a result.
A medium-quality backlink is something that a lot of people aim for, regardless of whether it is for a law firm’s website or otherwise. This is in part because it is simply easier to successfully get a medium quality backlink and may be more affordable for a smaller law firm to aim for. Ideally, a high-quality backlink is something that every law firm wants to have attached for their website, but the problem is that it can be somewhat tricky to successfully pull it off. This is especially due to the stringent editorial requirements for a high-quality backlink is… well, high. It absolutely needs to be able to fulfill multiple qualities.
We covered relevance, but you also have to make sure that the article linking to you and the article being linked to are both reputable and natural. On an algorithm level, Google will check to see how often your site receives backlinks. The more, the better (from good websites, of course). Next, Google will look at how natural the backlink is. If Google determines that the backlink was bought rather than created because the website owner deemed your link to be of interest to the readers, it will not be well-considered by it. Repeated offenses can even ultimately damage your website in the long run, so you need to be careful as this can create long-term harm for your brand. Going back to relevancy, this is actually pretty multifaceted. While the above-mentioned example of a law firm site on a pet site is a more obvious example, you also want to consider that your backlinks are accurate in multiple facets of the site backlinking to your website. For example, an article on a food business website linking to a food review website would obviously have the food relevance, but because it is not a business site, it loses out on that aspect. A website that also touches on food reviews, however, will have that relevancy. Do the best you can to make that relevancy clear.
A quality SEO Agency for law firms is a huge factor for getting high-quality backlinks, as they will help you navigate through these issues, so if all of this feels overwhelming, there’s no need to worry.