Backlink Auditing Basics For Law Firms
Updated: Jul 26, 2022
How to conduct a backlink audit for your law firm's website and how does it help boost your Lawyer SEO?
Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors on Google and other search engines. They can boost your domain authority, traffic, and overall search rankings. However, there can be bad backlinks, and they can cause the opposite of what you want for your Lawyer SEO.
So, in this article, let's talk about SEO link building, managing law firm websites, and how to easily do a backlink audit to analyze other SEO strategies.
When you conduct a backlink audit, you basically examine every link that leads back to your law firm website and then develop a strategy to manage them better.
You can check your backlinks manually by using Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. You can view your links through these tools, and manage them one by one. However, if you want to save more time, investing in paid auditing tools might be a good idea.
Remember: The size and ranking of your law firm website are relative to how time-consuming backlink auditing is. Therefore, the larger your website, the longer the backlink audit will take.
The number of high-quality backlinks is a measure of your website's authority. Even if you have thousands of them pointing back to your domain, it won't help your Lawyer SEO if they're all spam and irrelevant. A thorough link audit can lead to the discovery of potentially dangerous links as well as the improvement of your SEO strategy.
More importantly, auditing is also a crucial part of Link Building for law firms. Backlinks for lawyers need to be from high-quality sites, and the low-quality ones should be weeded out. And even after then, you need to keep managing your backlink profile to keep it as optimized and as beneficial to your SEO for Law Firms.
Managing Your Law Firm Website's Backlink Profile
The first step in backlink auditing is to create a profile and analyze the data. This data is usually made available for you by most SEO tools, including those from Google and Bing.
This backlink profile should feature the following:
Total number of backlinks pointing to your domain
Your most linked pages
Websites that link to your domain the most
Anchor texts used in backlink pointing back to you
Of course, you still need to process and analyze this data for it to become helpful to you and your law firm.
The obvious use you can have for this profile is to evaluate the current status of your backlink strategy. Do you have enough? Should you try writing more guest posts and claiming more unlinked mentions? Knowing where you're currently at with your link-building strategy helps you where you're lacking and what you can do to fix it.
To get great backlinks for lawyers, you should start creating "linkable" content, submit guest posts, or get on law firm directories. Whichever way you go, make sure the links are coming from high-quality websites that'll help your rankings in the SERPs.
Sorting Link Quality
Not all backlinks are good for your Lawyer SEO. Some of them can be considered "toxic backlinks" and can do more harm to your rankings instead of help. To ensure you don't have toxic backlinks pointing to your domain, you should determine the link quality and decide whether you want to keep it or disavow it.
To determine if a backlink is high-quality, you should look at the domain it's coming from. Here are some important metrics to consider:
The total number of backlinks. How many backlinks point towards the domain? Is it getting cited by other trusted websites?
Domain Authority. DA is the measure of a website's overall popularity and reputation. This is measured by a site's rankings, backlinks, average traffic, and content. Websites with high domain authority tend to be established, well-optimized, and have high traffic.
Type of backlink. This refers to the material your pages are linked to (i.e., images, articles, blogs, news, business listings, etc.).
Anchor texts. Crawlers can detect what's written on the anchor texts. They should be relevant to your site or the content on the page it's pointing to. Otherwise, search engines will think the backlink is spam.
While a few bad backlinks will not cause a penalty, failing to monitor and manage them might lead to a buildup of toxic links over time. You shouldn't wait for search engines to hand down a penalty by reducing your ranking or de-indexing your pages altogether.
Getting Rid Of Bad Backlinks
You can get rid of toxic backlinks in two ways:
Have the host manually remove the links. Contact the owner or host of the website and request that the link be removed. You can do this by writing them a formal email and politely asking them to remove the links.
Disavow links. This involves adding it to the Disavow list, then exporting it to the Google Disavow tool.
Disavowing links should be a final resort. Hence, you must prove that you tried everything you could to remove the link, but the web host ignored or refused you. Furthermore, you will need to document all of your actions and give them to Google as evidence before you begin the process of disavowing.
Auditing Competitor Backlinks
It's important to look at what your competitors are doing after you've assessed your backlink profile. Because backlinks are such an essential aspect of search engine rankings, it makes sense to learn about your competitors' link-building strategies so you can better assess your own profile.
Remember: These competitors are who you're trying to rank against in the search results. Seeing how they're doing can help you assess and improve your own Lawyer SEO. You can also use this data as a reference or inspiration for better managing your own website.
What Can LawyerLeadMachine Do?
Lawyer SEO can boost traffic and conversions on a law firm's website, and off-page SEO for law firms strategies (like getting backlinks) is the best way to increase your site authority. However, link-building is more than just getting as many links pointing to your site as possible; it also involves thorough auditing, quality checking, and management.
LLM is a Lawyer SEO Agency that can provide top-notch law firm SEO services. We have link-building specialists, SEO experts, and legal content writers ready to help you. To get your law firm started, review your options here.
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