Link Building For Law Firms: 11 Tactics For 2025

What is Link Building For Law Firms?

Link building for law firms is getting other reputable websites to link to your law firm website’s content. This digital marketing strategy is part of search engine optimization (SEO) which aims to increase the credibility and trustworthiness of your site. When done successfully, your site improves its search engine rankings, visibility, and traffic.

If you prefer a video tutorial, here’s our CEO breaking down how to build backlinks for your attorney website:

Why is Link Building Important For Law Firms?

Link building is important because it’s essential to a successful SEO campaign. When you’re targeting keywords that are difficult to rank for due to their competitive nature, you need backlinks.

One of our clients, Jeandron Law, was struggling to build an online presence and attract clients for their Orange County personal injury firm. With the help of a link building campaign by us, the site’s referring domains went up:

As a result, Jeandron Law achieved an increase in domain authority, website traffic, keyword ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), and leads.

What Kind of Links Does Google Link?

A recent Google API leak sheds light on how links (and their quality) can affect search engine rankings. They are:

• Quality. Google values high-quality links, even though few, than a thousand links acquired from black-hat methods or those from low-quality, spammy domains.
  
  The leak revealed that the following factors determine the value of an outgoing link:
  • sourceType – The source page has to be an authoritative website with fresh, high-quality content
  • topURL – The source page should have high traffic
  • localCountryCodes – Links from websites in the same country as the destination website are more valuable
• Relevance. Backlinks have to be relevant and used in high-quality, well-written content. A metric called “anchorMismatchDemotion” suggests that Google downgrades links when topics in the source content and the destination site are unrelated.
• Anchor. The anchor text, which is a text with a link, should provide the right context about the page it is linked to. References to “”phraseAnchorSpam” and an “anchorSpamPenalizer” indicate that Google detects and penalizes over-optimized anchor texts.

Four Link Building Techniques to Warm Up Your Website

Getting your law firm website’s domain rating up with effective link-building strategies involves multiple tasks, but here are the top four things you should get started with right away:

1. Create Citations in Local Directories

Legal directories like Avvo, Lawyers.com, Martindale-Hubbell, Justia, Nolo, and FindLaw, are reputable websites. Your law firm should have listings in these free directories to boost your firm’s online presence and get high-authority backlinks to your site.

2. Get More Customer Testimonials

Online reviews signal Google’s algorithm that your business is trustworthy. Getting more positive testimonials and reviews for your legal services helps establish your firm as a trusted business, and people are more likely to trust your brand and hire you. This credibility can contribute to boosting your pagerank and online visibility.

Online reviews on platforms like Google allow businesses to include a link to their websites, which is a great way to acquire backlinks. Reviews published on other platforms like social media and legal review platforms like Avvo are also sources for referral links, which helps earn more good links to your site.

3. Sponsor Community Events

Supporting community events are great for connecting with potential clients and building partnerships with other businesses. When it comes to link-building and local SEO, these events help with brand awareness and can result in media coverage, which can lead to getting high-quality backlinks.

In the example below, The Button Law Firm sponsors a back-to-school event to promote daycare safety while giving out free guides and giveaways to attendees.

4. Guest Post on Industry Websites

Guest-posting on legal blogs is not just a smart content marketing move, but also great for growing your website’s ranking. Reach out to influencers and legal bloggers whose audience might benefit from your expertise.

For instance, if your practice area is family law, you can pitch articles to divorce or adoption blogs where your target audience can potentially become leads or clients. 

An example would be this article about marital and non-marital assets in divorce law by divorce attorney Liz Felt Wakeman published in the blog Divorced Girl Smiling.

When guest posting, the hosting website usually includes a link back to the guest author’s website in their bio. This is why being a prolific guest author can improve your backlink profile, which, as a result, strengthens your law firm SEO strategy.

Six Intermediate to Advanced Link Building Tactics For 2025

Here are more advanced techniques to build backlinks for your law firm’s website.

6. Claim Unlinked Brand Mentions

Search the internet for instances where your firm was mentioned but didn’t have a link back to your site. You can use a free tool like Google Alerts or paid ones like Mention or Brand24 to do this.

For this example, we used Brand24’s search option, typing in a California-based personal injury firm Binar Chase.

The search returned one instance of unlinked brand mentions in a new article:

Once you find these unlinked mentions, the next steps would be:

• Decide whether or not to pursue linking to your site. Not all unlinked brand mentions need to be linked. Choose relevant websites that will give you more credibility and bring high-quality leads to your site.
• Start your outreach. Reach out to the website’s owner and politely ask for a link back to your site. You can offer additional content or resources to encourage site owners to accept your request.
• Monitor unlinked mentions and repeat the first three steps.

7. Be a Source for Journalists

Be an expert that gets interviewed or mentioned in the press and become a thought leader in your space. Platforms like Featured.com offer a way for experts to connect with publishers as a source for a specific topic. 

Consider signing up for one or two platforms in the beginning, adding more as you see results. One way to ensure that journalists use your content is to pitch a great story that perfectly ties in with your practice area.

Digital PR expert Fery Kazoni reveals that Top 10 lists or statistics-based content (i.e., Top 10 Accident-Prone Cities in the US, Top 10 Cities With Most Car Accidents in 2025, etc.) are great examples of information that news publications share or link to. 

He also says that even in highly competitive niches like personal injury, it’s easy to earn backlinks with compelling content. “Give them a story so good that they have no option but to publish it,” he concluded.

8. Get Interviewed in Podcasts

Podcasts have risen in popularity over the years, and it would be a great time to jump in and participate in podcasts within the legal industry niche like this one called Workers Comp Matters, a podcast that talks about worker’s compensation. 

Podcast hosts gladly share information about their guests during or after the podcast, including their website and social media profiles. This adds to your link-building efforts while gaining more visibility to potential clients.

9. Publish Books

In addition to demonstrating your expertise on a legal topic, publishing books will help with establishing yourself as a topic expert. Google’s algorithm recognizes authors as entities, which is a term used to define “ a single, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable thing or idea.”

Authors are included in Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is a large database of information about people, places, things, and concepts. The Knowledge Graph can appear on the right-hand side of the search results page for popular entities.

In addition to being on the Knowledge Graph, Google may build an author profile for authors with a strong online presence, which shows their biography, books, and affiliations (see search results for estate law attorney Lisa W. Hanks below).

Lastly, authors have more advantage in getting recognized by Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) framework, which evaluates content quality and reliability.

10. Build a Free Legal Tool

You can create free tools like calculators to help address a common question among clients. 

An example is an alimony calculator made by Sterling Law, which helps calculate alimonies in the states of Illinois and Wisconsin. 

Free tools like these are not only helpful for the firm’s target audience, but provide more ways for the firm to earn links from other website owners that mention their tool.

One example of a popular tool that gets tons of backlinks is CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer tool. An Ahrefs article revealed the tool’s backlink profile: 

As you can see, helpful tools help you get a good link from reputable websites even without asking (natural links). 

11. Get Legal Awards and Recognitions

Your awards and recognitions in your practice area should be part of your online brand and profile. Whether you’re guest blogging or blogging on your own site, your author bio should always include your accomplishments as a lawyer.

Remember that Google uses the E-E-A-T framework to evaluate the quality of content in web pages. Showing that you are a recognized expert in your field helps meet this standard.

Final Thoughts: Balance Quality and Quantity

The value of backlinks depends on their quality and quantity. High-quality backlinks take longer to acquire but are more valuable, while low-quality backlinks are quicker to build but less effective. 

If you’re a new law firm or just launched your legal website, it makes sense to focus on quantity to boost your online presence. But if you’re a seasoned firm, you may want to focus on quality to enhance your brand authority. The best approach depends on your firm’s stage and goals. It’s not about choosing between quality or quantity but finding the optimal strategy for your specific situation.

Ready to begin a successful link building campaign? Contact us to get started.

If you’ve already started a link-building campaign, check out this resource to learn how to track your link building and SEO results.

Frequently Asked Questions About Link Building For Law Firms

How Do I Track My Link Building Campaigns?

You can use a free tool like Google Search Console for basic backlink tracking or paid ones like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush. Ideally you want to keep tabs on metrics like your domain rating (DR), organic traffic, referring domains, anchor text of incoming links, your ratio of do-follow links to nofollow links, etc.

How Long Before You See Results From Link Building?

It can take anywhere between 3 to 12 months to start seeing results from link building. Some factors that dictate this include competition in your industry, the quality of the backlinks you acquire, and the current health and authority of your website.

How Much Do Lawyer Link Building Services Cost?

Link building services can cost from $300 up to $5,000 a month or even more, depending on your marketing strategy, goals, current link profile, and the kind of links you’re looking for.