Link Building for Personal Injury Lawyers

If you’re a personal injury lawyer, or you’re in the legal field in general, the competition is immense.

Your goal is to put yourself front and center where your potential clients are. In doing so, you want to ensure that you convey the idea that you’re an authority and expert in your arena.

Going where your potential clients are means you need a strong online presence.

People go online to find answers to questions, resources and also to connect with personal injury attorneys. Google tends to be the first stop for all of us, no matter what we’re specifically looking for.

If you’re a personal injury lawyer and you’re not already investing in SEO and especially link building, you’re missing opportunities. Your competitors will breeze past you if they consider the value of their digital presence and marketing efforts.

Even paying for ads won’t position you as the ultimate authority as natural optimization will.

So what can you do?

Organic search is the best way to have a competitive, viable online presence. One area that can especially set you apart is your link profile. Get in touch now!

What is Link Building for Personal Injury Lawyers?

You may have some topical familiarity with SEO.

For example, you might target certain keywords to create your web content and blog posts. That’s only one part of search engine optimization, however.

Link building is a massive and often overlooked aspect that, if you do it well, could potentially catapult you to the first page of Google rankings.

What is it?

The general idea of link building is that other sites are linking back to yours. The benefits of quality links and investment into a strategy of link building include:

• Boost your credibility. Links back to your site and content act as a vote of confidence from third-party sites. These links are like a referral network for Google to see that you’re creating valuable content. Google wants to provide users with the best, most relevant content available. To do that, authority factors into the algorithm. The more high-quality links are pointing back to your site, the more your credibility goes up in the search engine. The premise that Google tends to follow here is that publishers are linking to your content because they feel it will improve their users’ experience.
• Without links, it’s almost impossible for Google even to rank your site, even if you have filled your pages with excellent content. If you’re struggling to make headway in the rankings compared to your competition, they may simply have a more robust link profile than you do.
• When you build authority and have more links, there are two ways you’re going to drive more traffic to your site. The first is what we’ve talked about—you’re going to rank higher so more people will see you and click on your site. The second is that the links themselves are also going to drive traffic to your site.
• More traffic opens more revenue opportunities up to you.
• When someone is looking for a lawyer, they’re seeking an expert who will answer any question they may have. They want knowledge, and they want authority. As you build links and boost your online profile and visibility, people will inherently see you like that sense of authority they’re looking for.
• Once you invest in link building and the links are secured, it’s going to create a continuous source of traffic, compared to something like paid ads, where you’re paying for every click.
• Building links improve your site metrics. For example, domain authority or DA is a big one, as is URL rating or UR. PageRank or PR Is a metric of Google Search’s algorithm. PR is used to rank pages for search engine results. PR is based on the quantity and quality of links to determine the importance of a site.

What if you don’t use effective strategies for link building?

Your site won’t have domain authority. Your traffic won’t go up substantially, but bounce rates will. Your overall online performance will decline or never catch up to your competitors.

So, you’re ready to start building links. Sounds easy enough, right?

Maybe not.

You need to be strategic in how you acquire links and where they’re coming from. You need to approach your link building in an organized, systematic way. You also have to consider that most publishers and admins see countless emails every day from other people who want links. How do you stand out?

EAT and YMML for Lawyers

A lot of websites saw a dip in traffic in 2021. The release of a new Google algorithm significantly affected sites considered “your money, your life” or YMYL. YMYL sites include tech, medical and financial services sites, and also, as you might have guessed, legal sites.

The changes might have hit your law firm SEO strategy and site traffic, but you can recover, and link building has a lot to do with that. It’s important to realize that the YMYL changes weren’t the first algorithm changes to impact lawyers and the professional services industry, and they won’t be the last.

Rather than trying to play catch up and optimize your site for whatever the current trend is in SEO, you should aim to have a strong foundation of the fundamentals that remain relevant. Link building is one of those fundamentals.

In the summer of 2021, Google rolled out a two-phase core update. The update focused on improving the relevance and quality of well-ranked content, particularly giving more weight to legal websites with many high-quality backlinks, among other factors and indicators.

The acronym EAT is also something that started floating around the SEO world. EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. To rank well on Google, you always want to think about these priorities.

EAT ties back into many of the benefits you’ll get from link building, so you can see how these all interrelate to one another.

As part of authoritativeness in general, ask yourself if you have backlinks from reputable sites, in addition to regularly updated and credible content created by authorities.

Along with the benefits of link building for law firms, there are SEO benefits. When you perform well in search engines, you can:

• Outrank your local competition
• Drive more phone calls and leads
• Generate traffic
• Get more client reviews to build your brand
• Solidify your reputation as the best law authority in your niche

Acquiring High-Quality Links If You’re a Personal Injury Attorney

By this point, maybe you’re convinced that it’s time to start building your link profile. You’re ready to bring your site up-to-date with current Google algorithms and see your traffic soar.

So how do you get started?

This is where things can get challenging.

Link building is highly labor-intensive, and it’s a specialized area of work. It’s so technical that many SEO agencies will outsource this part of their client projects to experts like us.

Link building, along with being time-consuming, requires that you pitch your content well and know how to get attention in the emails you send. You also have to create guest posts and content that will align with publisher requirements so that it’s accepted.

Tracking and analytics will help refine your strategy to see what’s working and where you can improve.

You’re not likely to get a yes right away from many publishers and sites when you do outreach, so you’ll also need to log the responses you get and follow up regularly.

Do you or anyone on your in-house team have time for this amount of work? Probably not.

Link building can also be frustrating, especially if you don’t have existing relationships to facilitate the work.

What’s the solution?

Outsource it to the Upper Ranks.

Why You Should Outsource Your Link Building If You’re a Personal Injury Attorney

Link building is a process and an investment of time, and as far as your online strategy, one of the most important you’re going to make. With that being said, if you were to try and do it in-house, it would be costly. When you outsource it to an individual freelancer, they’re probably going to overpromise and under-deliver.

At the Upper Ranks, we specialize in working with legal industry clients. We understand your SEO goals as a professional services provider in a competitive area, and we know how to help you achieve them.

Whether you’re in the conceptual process and you’re not sure what you need as far as link building, or you’re ready with metrics you’d like to achieve, and you just need help fulfilling them, we’re here and able to help.

How Our Link Building Services Can Help?

We’ll build out a link-building strategy that’s unique to your law firm and in line with your goals and budget. The general process might look something like the following:

Analysis and Research

We start every new client relationship with in-depth analysis. We take the time to get to know your business, your targeted audience, and what makes you unique or distinctive. The research team at the Upper Ranks helps our link prospectors target the best sites for you.

That’s one of the defining characteristics of custom link building compared to how everyone else might do it. There will never be a link-building campaign the same as yours.

Tired templates and standard approaches won’t get you where you want to be. High-quality, relevant links require that human element and the individualized approach we offer, built on our analysis and research from the start.

Prospecting

One of the areas where the most work is required is prospecting. We identify high-quality sites relevant to your niche, and from there, we set out to vet them and ultimately get link placements.

We use our search engine skills and link prospecting tools, and our database of sites we’ve gotten links from previously.

We take the approach of emphasizing authority and relevance because every link and target site has to make sense for your firm.

From there, we perform outreach.

Outreach

When we contact publishers, editors, and site admins, every email is written by hand.

There aren’t templates because those generic outreach emails are something these people see in their inbox every day and often ignore. You have no choice in link building except to stand out.

We also leverage existing relationships with bloggers and site admins, so we proactively have an idea of some of our contacts who might be interested in your content and resources.

Content Creation

We have an experienced content creation team that takes over after the outreach phase of the process. Our content creators deliver guest posts that meet any editorial or publication standards of the site and are compelling and engaging for the site’s audience.

Reporting

Finally, we’ll report to you with all the links we acquire and tell you how your campaign is going. Transparency in reporting and communication is essential to ensure we stay on track with getting short-term links and long-term SEO goals.

Personal injury is a competitive area of the law, but people go online to find answers and help from people like you. It’s crucial that you’re there as they search.

Let us help you position yourself front and center as the top authority in personal injury law through our comprehensive, tailored link-building solutions that will allow you to move upward in search engines.

In addition to building links for hundreds of personal injury lawyers, we also specialize in link building for SEO agencies, startups, affiliate websites, drug rehab centers, and much more.