Guest Posts for Attorneys & Law Firms
You might be wondering what exactly is a guest post and why on earth should I bother with this?
Fair enough and there are enough things to worry about these days with your lawyer website.
Yet guest posting is the #1 way to get backlinks from other relevant legal web sites.
Backlinks are the #1 factor in getting better Google SEO Rankings.
This, in turn, can help build your law firms website authority and then help improve and earn new Google SEO rankings for keywords that bring potential clients to your site.
How Guest Posting for Lawyers Works
The idea with a guest post is that YOUR firm will create a unique piece of quality content, usually 750-1000 words on a relevant topic. So if you’re a personal injury attorney, you want to create articles related to car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, and other personal injury topics.
You will then have that unique article posted on a relevant high authority website and you will include a link to your website from within the body of the content, and then usually in the author bio at the end of the post.
This process makes sense all around IF you can find the right website to do these guest posts on. Not every website will allow this and you want to try and focus only on websites in your legal niche.
All legal sites are good, but specific legal sites like a divorce directory or personal injury blog might be better. Also, other high authority sites that are close to your niche can work as well, they might not be as relevant BUT if you can get a link from a high DA(Domain Authority) site, you usually will want to take it.
Anchor Text for Guest Posting
In the old days you could just use as many Exact Match anchor texts as you wanted and rank #1! Yet now its more about establishing your law firms brand first and building trust with Google.
Let Google know that you are an expert and an authority in your legal field but mainly let Google know that you are indeed a BRAND.
Anchor text are the keywords that are linked, so if you have a link from another website that reads Lawyers Court, you can see the words Lawyers Court are the ones linked and thus the anchor text keywords.
That example is also one of a BRANDED Link, this is simply where the keywords of the link are your law firm or brand name. THESE are what MOST of your firms website links should be.
Usually you want to have a high % of branded anchor texts pointing to your homepage. You then want to have other links pointing to your subpages, usually your most important practice area pages, results pages and other key pages or posts that you want to rank with Google.
With these pages, you want to use more of a blended anchor text strategy and then maybe 1-3 exact match anchor texts for really high authority sites.
Obviously its ok if you have some exact match links and its natural that someone might link to your legal site using personal injury lawyer keywords or your location and what you do, like Chicago auto accident lawyer.
Different Kinds of Anchor Texts
There are a number of different types of anchor texts you could and should have.
- Branded Anchor Text
- Blended Anchor Text
- Naked URL Anchors
- Exact Match Anchor Text
Branded anchors is the main one, but there are also URL Anchors, Blended Anchors, Exact Match and a number of others. The key is having the right mix of all of them.
You do NOT want to have a high percentage of exact match anchor texts because this could raise a serious RED FLAG with Google. Usually, you only want to have 1-2% of exact match anchors, so that means for every 100 links you get, you only want 2 with the exact match of keywords that you want to rank for.
Yet the key here is that those 2 links that you get using the exact match anchor text, those should be your two TOP authority links if possible.
This almost doesn’t make sense because you might be thinking, “well how the hell am I going to ever rank for these keywords?” and its all about being patient these days with Google.
You need them to recognize your brand name and have them see you getting links from other sites using your brand name. Then you need to create a lot of unique content for your site’s blog and do a lot of good on-page SEO work, and then combine that with a few other things to get higher SEO rankings with Google.
If you were a Newport Beach California personal injury firm with the firm name of the Smith Trial Group
Below would be some examples with suggested ratio percentages of the different links you are getting to your site. Most of the time you will not have any say in what the anchor text is, so you need to know what your current anchor text rations are before getting any new links.
When you do have a say in what the anchor text is, you need to be careful that you do not go overboard and just have all the links say the same thing, or have them all be exact match anchors because you think that will help you rank faster (it will not).
Make Your Exact Match Anchors From The Top Sites
For your 1-3 % of exact match anchor texts, you want those coming from your best possible links. So if your firm is getting a link from a law review article, or from Forbes or some other high authority site. You want this link to be an exact match anchor text link.
For this example, you would want this top quality link using the keywords of “Chicago personal injury lawyer” in the anchor text. The next 10 or more links though that you have any control over should be BRANDED links, so here the law firm would use “Johnson & Johnson” as the anchor text.
Exact Match Anchor Text = “Newport Beach Personal Injury Lawyers” (1-3 % of links should be like this)
Branded Match Anchor Text = “Smith Trial Group” (70-85 % of links should be branded) (Also The Smith Trial Group, Smith Trial Group in Newport Beach, etc)
Blended Brand Anchor Text = “Injury Attorneys at Smith Trial Group” (5-8 %)
Naked URL Anchor Text = “www.smithtrialgroup.com” (2-4%)
You might also want to use your pages TITLE as the anchor text. This means that the anchor text would read the exact same thing as the page your linking. For example, Newport Beach CA Accident Attorneys | Smith Trial Group would be the anchor text and title on the page.
Where Do You Find Legal Sites That Accept Guest Posts?
That is the hard part of this process sometimes, finding legal related websites that are good matches. Yet Ive been building a list of sites that will accept guest posts and are in the legal niche. I also have a list of closely related sites like business sites, general news sites and other high authority sites that will accept a guest post.
Some sites will just accept a guest post for free and have no strings attached. A lot of sites, in fact, will do this these days. This is because they know that they are adding more relevant content to their site that is unique and never published before.
Yet if it’s not great content, forget about it! They will just not accept it and this shows how key good quality content is. If its great content, you can get a free link from a great high authority site, but if its not, there’s zero chance.
Also, if its indeed really good content that people like, there is a chance you could get more links from other sites that will link to your article. This is why guest posts work really well, not only do you get one link from a good relevant site, but you might get traffic from that article, as well as additional links over time.
How Much Do Guest Posts Cost?
There are also websites, including legal websites, that will accept guest posts for a fee. Sometimes they will come out and ask for it, other times its not the actual site who is charging, but instead, it is the law firm seo expert consultant who is creating the high-quality content and setting the whole guest post up.
The bottom line is that you need links from other websites, branded links to your home page, and then blended keyword links to your sub power pages. This can wind up being a lot of links being needed. I mean if you have 10 pages that you want to get ranked, each page is going to need links to it and not just one link, but at least 5-10 links. That might be 100 links you need to get, and not just generic links from legal directories.
You need real links from real sites that get real traffic. This is not easy at all and why you should use the guest posting link strategy to obtain quality links that matter.
The links can get expensive any way you look at it. Most of the time you need to pay for the creation of the high-quality content and that adds up. Then you probably will need to pay for an infographic, and then possibly for the single guest post as well.
Law Firm SEO Expert
If you are looking for an SEO expert for law firms, look no further! We can help your legal practice rank higher in Google by creating unique long-form content, and also creating high-quality articles to use for guest posting on other top legal sites.
Call us at 312-620-6190 or fill out the online contact form below and we will get in touch with you.