Link building for law firms, corroboration before volume

The work of earning relevant, authoritative links to a practice, mostly from legal directories, business and financial media, the professional profiles of your individual lawyers and the office listings that confirm where each of your offices actually is. It is corroboration as much as authority.

A search engine is trying to establish that the firm is real, is where it says it is and employs the people it names. Links that confirm those things do more than links that merely mention you.

No, and we would decline the work rather than do it, because a bought link is a short lived gain that has to be explained to somebody later and the firms that most need to look trustworthy are the worst candidates for it. Every link is pursued on editorial merit.

The test we apply is simple. If a link would be awkward to explain in a year, it is not worth having now.

No, and it is the most common thing we ask firms to stop doing, because hundreds of unrelated listings add nothing to authority and routinely introduce the inconsistent addresses and firm names that undermine local visibility. A small number of accurate, relevant listings is worth far more.

Cleaning up a package somebody bought three years ago is often the first month of work. It is unglamorous and it usually moves things.

On topic and verifiable ones, which means legal directories, the business and financial press, genuine professional profiles for your individual lawyers and accurate office listings in each emirate where you have a physical presence. Relevance does most of the work.

A high authority link from a site with nothing to do with law or business does very little for a practice. We would rather have four of the right ones than forty of the wrong.

Considerably, because there are no postcodes in the UAE and each office has to be recorded accurately in its own right, with Dubai and several northern emirates using Makani while Abu Dhabi uses Onwani for the same purpose. One listing per office, with the firm name spelled identically each time.

Firms lose local visibility to small inconsistencies far more often than to competitors. A name that differs slightly between two listings is enough to do it.

They count as something more useful than a link, because a professional profile that matches what your site says about a lawyer is corroboration, and corroboration is most of what a search engine and an assistant are looking for in this sector. They also rank in their own right for named searches.

Since a legal buyer checks the individual before making contact, keeping those profiles current is doing two jobs at once. Most firms are letting both go to waste.

Digital PR earns coverage and links through commentary and stories, while link building is the broader discipline of growing authority, including the directories, listings and professional profiles that will never be newsworthy but still have to be right. They overlap and we run both, usually together.

See Digital PR for Legal. It also pairs directly with our SEO for Legal work, which is where the benefit shows up.

The corrective part is quick, because removing inconsistencies and fixing office listings is a fix rather than a campaign and it can be done inside the first few weeks, while earned authority accumulates across months like the rest of search. Neither half is fast in the way paid search is fast.

The compensation is that it holds. Authority built properly in a legal market tends to stay built, which is why short engagements rarely make sense here.