How Law Firms Can Get Local Links And Press Coverage

Link building is crucial for your law firm's local SEO success. Quality matters more than quantity, with high-authority contextual links from relevant websites being most valuable for improving Google rankings. This guide will show you how to get high quality links to help improve your local rankings.

Local link building is a hot topic for lawyers for a couple of reasons: historically, "bad" links could lead to your law firm's website getting penalized by Google, and most agencies that law firms hire don't really do much link building (they say they do, but they don't).

That doesn't change the fact that high quality links for your law firm's website remain one of Google's most important ranking factors.

Links are the foundation of SEO success for law firms, acting as "votes of confidence" from other websites. When authoritative sites like Forbes, legal directories, or local news outlets link to your law firm's website, they signal to Google that your content is trustworthy and valuable.

Think of links as digital referrals – just as lawyers rely on referrals from other attorneys, your website relies on links from respected websites to establish credibility.

Research shows that links remain one of Google's top three ranking factors, alongside content and RankBrain. Law firms ranking in the top 3 positions for competitive terms typically have 3-4 times more quality backlinks than those ranking on page two. However, quality matters more than quantity – one link from Forbes carries more weight than 100 links from low-quality legal directories.

Why Are Links Important For SEO?

If sites like Huffington Post, Forbes and Miami New Times are all writing articles and linking back to your website, Google will crawl those links. It's how it can discover your content faster and it associates you with those authoritative websites.

Here's an example of Tiffany Hughes' law firm mentioned in a Huffington Post article:

Google looks at links like this almost like votes in a popularity contest. The more votes you're getting from relevant authority websites, the higher you're going to rank. If your SEO is not working, it could be a link-related issue. But not all links are created equal.

Types Of Links To Earn For Your Law Firm

The key to good link building is making sure that the links you're getting are on relevant, authoritative websites – websites about law, your local area, or general big press websites like Huffington Post and Forbes.

Links from social media, blog comments, unauthoritative websites, or link farms don't count anymore. They won't improve your law firm's SEO, and worse, could get you into hot water with Google.

Here are the three tiers of links we build for our clients:

Tier 1 Links: High-Profile PR & Press Links

These links come from your local press and authoritative news publications. Tiffany Hughes has been mentioned in Yahoo News, She Knows, Pure Wow, and other top tier publications:

These types of links aren't as hard to get as you may think. They're just expensive. That's why we keep these links to a maximum of 10% of our client's portfolios. To get a link like this:

• Find an author who writes about law on a high tier publication
• Check out their profile page to gather their contact info
• Send an email asking if they're covering topics in your area of law
• Offer to be an expert resource they can interview or quote

Tier 2 Links: Contextual Links

Contextual links are those in the body of content and are among the best links you can get but without the cost of high-profile websites. For example, divorce.com is a very relevant website for a divorce lawyer to be featured on:

Since it's easier and cheaper to be featured on these, we spend at least 60% of our efforts building these types of links by brokering exchanges, getting links for event sponsorships, guest posting, sponsoring posts and content, and submitting quotes on behalf of our clients.

Tier 3 Links: Manual Links And Citations

Manual links and citations are the kinds of links you can get by being featured on websites like Super Lawyers, Avvo, Justia and similar. This strategy is sometimes referred to as parasite SEO.

These are the easiest links to get and in most cases, they're free. We call them foundational links because they're used by customers to find law firms, they show Google you're a real active business, they build your brand online, they cover visibility gaps in search engines, and they can rank on Google for very competitive terms. We spend a maximum of 30% effort on these, usually creating around 50 profiles as a foundation.

How To Build Valuable Links For Your Law Firm

1. Reverse Engineer Your Competitor's Best Links

Before we take on any new client, we analyze their competitors' links and identify gaps. We use Ahrefs for this. Enter your website to get a baseline, then check out your competitors' SEO performance and backlinks.

Look at their Backlinks (total links) and Referring Domains (total different websites). Even if a competitor has 6,900 links, if they only come from 163 websites, it won't be too difficult to catch up.

Most competitor links will be from Tier 3 directory sites (very easy to get). Then there are sites Google ignores (often with "SEO" in the URL). Which leaves only a small amount of Tier 1 and 2 websites to reach out to, making it a manageable list.

2. Build A List Of Website Targets

Finding competitor links is easy – any SEO tool can help. Knowing which websites are worth reaching out to is where your success lies. Here's the checklist our team uses internally to validate any website as a link target:

This checklist helps evaluate the website's relevance, authority, and quality. For each website that passes all the checks, add it to your list of targets.

3. Reach Out To Those Websites And Their Authors

Find the best person to email by checking who wrote each post that linked to your competitors, or use Ahrefs' Linking Authors report:

Find their contact details by checking their author page, reaching out on social media, or using a tool like Hunter. Here's an example pitch:

You'll either offer to create an expert piece of content or sponsor a piece the publication might already be working on. You could also try offering an expert quote for any topic they're working on.

4. Negotiate For Optimal Placement

Most of the time, you'll have to pay a fee to earn placement. On top tier publications, the fee can be over $2,000 while on smaller publications it can be lower than $100. The final fee comes down to how well you negotiate with the authors and website owners.

The challenge with link building for attorney SEO is that it's not complicated or difficult – it just takes a lot of time and money. Even with brilliant negotiation skills, there will always be a hard cost. The question is whether you're prepared to pay for it.

5. Track Your Progress

Track the entire process in a spreadsheet or CRM. It's the easiest way to stay on top of who you've contacted, who needs a follow-up, and what your agreements ended up becoming. If you're working with an agency, they should be keeping track of the links they're building. If they're not, it could be a sign they're either not building any links or building low-quality links.

We Can Get Your Law Firm Featured On Forbes

Link building is essential for lawyers who want to improve their brand's visibility through search engines. If you need help building your authority online and earning links, or you'd like an audit of what your SEO agency might be doing (or not doing), book a consultation below.

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Ryan Stewart

Founder, WEBRIS

Ryan Stewart is the founder of WEBRIS, a digital marketing agency exclusively serving law firms. With over a decade of experience in SEO and paid media, Ryan has helped hundreds of attorneys grow their practices through data-driven marketing strategies.