Law Firm Web Strategy Blog
As you may have heard, links to your website are like votes for your website in search engines. And as you almost might know, not all links are created equal. So how do you get more quality links to your website? The first step is to prioritize link targets.
Prioritizing link targets has to begin with an analysis of your practice. You should start by asking yourself the following questions:
- Is my practice specific to a particular geography? This could be a region, a state, a county, or even a city.
- What are my practice areas?
- Who is my target audience online? Am I trying to reach individual consumers? Business owners? Other legal professionals?
- What types of groups, organizations, charities, and other associations are related to my practice? For example, if you’re a medical malpractice attorney, perhaps there are patient advocacy organizations that might make sense for you to target.
Once you have done some basic brainstorming, the hunt begins. Go to your favorite search engine and start to look for organizations that might serve as good link candidates. Here are some very general examples:
- Law schools in your state.
- Your alma mater and other universities in your state.
- Local news organizations
- Professional organizations including your state bar and other local bar associations.
- Special interest bar associations.
- Social justice or other topically relevant advocacy groups.
Once you have compiled a pretty thorough list, the next step is to prioritize these targets based on relevance and overall authority. To assess authority, there are many tools available. I prefer the excellent tools available at SEOmoz. However, there are a host of free seo tools that can give you a general sense of a site’s authority.
Another strategy is to prioritize link targets based on difficulty of acquiring links. If you have had any experience in link building, you’ll recognize that while some links are very easy to acquire, others will take much more nurturing. Sometimes, it makes more sense to shoot for the easier links right away and put the more difficult link targets on a more long-term link list.