Hyper Local Links

Gyi Tsakalakis
November 20, 2013

If your law practice services local legal services consumers, you should probably consider the local search marketing channel. If you're already familiar with local search, you have undoubtedly seen David Mihm's (Moz's) Local Search Ranking Factors Survey.

According to the 2103 survey, link signals make up 14.4% of the ranking factor pie:

local-ranking-factors

So while getting a quantity of quality, consistent local business citations is very important to local search visibility, local links still matter, a lot.

Link-building takes time, effort, and strategy. Learn how we conduct link-building for our clients.
Download Our Guide

One of the first steps in acquiring local links is to identify local sites/businesses/organizations from which you actually want to acquire links. On slide 37 of Don't You Know I'm Local, I offered a couple suggestions:

Avvo Webinar: Don't You Know I'm Local? Straightening Out the Google+ Local Insanity from Avvo

Local Blogs

Relationships with local bloggers can be exceptionally valuable to your web presence. Here are some ideas for finding local blogs:

Local Community Organizations

Participating in local community organizations is not only great for links, it's great for meeting people. And some of these people will have legal issues or know other people who have legal issues. Here are just a handful of examples:

  • Political organizations
  • Local charities
  • Volunteer opportunities
  • Spiritual organizations
  • Local counseling groups
  • Neighborhood Associations

Schools

Getting involved with local schools can be a huge opportunity for lawyers. Whether you volunteer for a student organization, coach a team or participate in a career day, working with local schools is powerful for building awareness for your practice and earning local links. We've found speaking and scholarships to be particularly effective.

Local Government

Depending on your location and practice, getting involved with local government can help you build name recognition, as well as, local links. But start hyper-local. Think municipalities first. Work your way up through counties to state government. In our experience, you're going to get better results in terms of engagement at the hyper-local level.

Local News

If you have something newsworthy to share, local reporters are on the constant look-out for interesting stories. Links from local news sites will not only help you build search authority, they'll actually drive local visitor traffic. In fact, for all your link building activities, you should concentrate on finding sites that are active and are likely to drive visitor traffic.

Professional Organizations

Hopefully, you're active in your local legal community. This means getting involved with local bar associations and other lawyer groups. Building relationships with local lawyers is part of the foundation of growing a professional referral network. Further, you might find that some local lawyers are blogging or otherwise publishing stuff online. Many of these sites and blogs will be both locally and topically relevant to your practice. These can be some of the most helpful links in terms of building search presence.

These are just a handful of ideas for finding local sites for links. Of course, once you find the sites, you have to do the work to earn the links.

Start by building the relationship. Shoot an email. Make a phone call. Grab some coffee.

Always remember, it's people who decide whether or not to link to your site.

Gyi Tsakalakis
Co-Founder of AttorneySync
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Let's Discuss Your Growth

Helping law firms grow profitably with digital marketing and can prove it.

Barry Conybeare

We are so impressed with AttorneySync and their digital marketing services. We started with an audit of our digital presence and hired them thereafter. Fixes to the website and other platforms quickly followed and we have seen a substantial increase in online traffic, new client calls, and new client contracts. Strongly recommend AttorneySync!

Let's Talk

How can we help?

More From Our Blog

June 8, 2023
On Local Law Firm SEO Rank Tracking and Reporting

Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]

Read More
June 7, 2023
On Attribution

John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]

Read More
March 22, 2023
I asked ChatGPT to Recommend a Personal Injury Law Firm

I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]

Read More
February 17, 2023
My Take on Google Search's Guidance on AI-Generated Content & Law Firm SEO

If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]

Read More
February 16, 2023
Google Adds New SEO Best Practices for Links

If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]

Read More
February 1, 2023
Authenticity & Engagement

The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]

Read More
January 19, 2023
ChatGPT for Legal Marketing

The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]

Read More
May 26, 2022
SEO Expectations for Law Firms

How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]

Read More
May 6, 2022
Who Should Do Marketing?

And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]

Read More

Let's Discuss

Questions or comments? Let's discuss on social!
envelope
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram