If you’ve ever read an online article for pleasure, business, or otherwise, odds are you have run into a backlink: the highlighted text that, when clicked, takes you to a new website, and often cites the original source of information. As innocuous as they may seem, backlinks that exist on other websites and lead to your own can have a huge impact on your business law firm, both positive and negative.

On one hand, quality backlinks from well-maintained publications with high authority can make your brand more recognizable to a new, untapped audience. However relying on cheap tricks to obtain these digital recommendations can do more harm than good, and may eat your team’s time and resources. Knowing how to identify the difference between a helpful backlink and a detrimental one, along with how each can impact your business law firm, is key for navigating a successful SEO and digital marketing strategy.

How Do Backlinks Help Your Law Firm?

With high-quality backlinks supporting your firm online, a world of opportunity opens for new client acquisition. From increased traffic and higher brand awareness to improved Google search result rankings, backlinks afford your website a simple way to get in front of more potential customers than ever before.

1. Increased Traffic

Landing backlinks from valuable sources can do wonders for your firm’s overall digital marketing goals, especially related to achieving a higher visibility online. With backlinks scattered across relevant online legal publications, potential customers have direct access to your website. This in turn leads to increased site traffic. Your team can track this metric in Google Analytics to determine where your site’s visitors are originating—social, paid search, or in the case of backlinks, referral! This is also helpful when trying to bring in more clientele for a certain practice area, such as estate planning; focus on your estate planning content and pitching your resources to relevant sites, and you can watch the traffic roll in to the corresponding practice area page.

2. Improved Brand Awareness

Going hand in hand with increased traffic is improved brand awareness. While a bit harder to track, making potential customers aware of your firm’s existence is the first step to landing a new lead. Any backlink inherently helps spread the word on your brand, as it shares your content with a brand new audience. However to really make an impact, consider what sites your target audience would frequent for news, advice, or recommendations, and aim to collaborate with those publications, either through resource sharing or guest posting.

3. Domain Authority and Google Rankings

When considering your website in an SEO (search engine optimization) setting, having a high domain authority is one indicator of success. This can be reached, in part, with the help of backlinks. Think of a backlink as an endorsement for your site—the more votes of confidence you receive from other reputable sources online, the higher your domain’s authority (and domain authority score) will be. This is something that other sites may look at before collaborating, but also a factor that Google considers for rankings. To take full advantage of your site’s SEO potential, having your firm’s content and pages ranking high on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) is key to reaching new audiences and landing new clients.

Can Backlinks Hurt Your Law Firm?

If backlinks can bring all this new clientele to your business, how could the possibly be harmful? The reality is, not every backlink is relevant to your firm. When time and money are spent on a surplus of these inappropriate redirects, it can be a red flag to search engines, detrimental to your team’s workflow, and may lend you results not aligned with your goal.

1. Backlink or Spam?

When backlinks are obtained in an unethical manner, or are irrelevant to the main point of the origin article, they are considered spammy backlinks. Often times, these come around from poor practices, such as buying links in bulk. While it is important to build a vast backlink profile for your business law firm, it’s important to prioritize quality over quantity when it comes to landing backlinks. A common goal is to have backlinks from multiple reputable and relevant legal sources, otherwise these shady purchasing habits and low ranking sites could negatively affect your website’s domain authority.

2. Taking Away from the Team’s Time

In order to find great link opportunities, you’ll have to do some digging. And pitching. And following up. The work it takes to source and land intentional backlinks—i.e., an article or journalist that cited your firm’s content by your influence—can be overwhelming for teams, especially those at small- to medium-sized firms. The legal work must always be prioritized for partners, which means the researching, content creation, and follow-ups necessary to land backlinks will fall on the wayside.

3. Look at the Bigger SEO Picture

While backlinks are an integral part of SEO practices, they are not the only solution to improving your rankings online! From keyword research and prioritization, to optimizing meta tags and increasing your website page speed, there are so many pieces to the SEO puzzle. If your business law firm is really hoping to nail down its digital marketing and rankings, especially when expanding a practice area, backlinks will not be the sole solution. It can be easy to get caught up in a dream solution, but ensuring you incorporate a wide spread of SEO practices into your strategy will help you see the most payoff.

Call in an Expert

Knowing how backlinks can impact your business law firm is just the start of your SEO journey. If your firm is looking to attract more customers while letting the partners focus on the legal work, it may be time to bring in an expert. Learn more about how our digital marketing and SEO services can help your website soar to the top of Google results by contacting us today.