Backlinks Are the New Elbow Bumps: Building Online Relationships in the Age of Social Distancing

Even if you are an introvert, all these weeks of staying home with no one to talk to except your immediate family is probably making you miss your co-workers, your former co-workers, and your law school classmates. In many cases, online socializing does not lead to anything good. Looking at the social media profiles of people you used to know just makes you feel insecure about your personal and professional accomplishments. The coronavirus pandemic seems to be changing everything in our society, including the role of online social connections. When you are stuck at home for the foreseeable future, and so is almost every lawyer in the United States, reconnecting with your lawyer acquaintances, former acquaintances, and frenemies just might be the best thing for your law firm marketing strategy.

You Don’t Have to Be a Tech Whiz, You Can Just Call or Email

Learning SEO and making your law firm’s website into a more effective marketing tool is a worthy goal for the age of social distancing, but watching video tutorials and poring over keyword data is not everyone’s cup of tea. Yes, SEO trends change all the time, but link-building is a time-tested SEO strategy. When other websites link meaningfully to your site, and yours to theirs, everyone wins.

Therefore, you have nothing to lose by emailing lawyers and colleagues in other fields and proposing a link exchange. Show them the pages on your site that would interest their target audience and offer to link to their site. Just seeing their names in your email inbox when they respond will break the monotony of social distancing, and if you actually score some link exchanges, then everyone wins.

Your Ideal Link Exchange Partner

The more backlinks (links on other people’s sites that lead to your site) you can get, the better. As long as Google does not have reason to suspect that this was a meretricious exchange of backlinks (the link-building equivalent of robo-clicks), the links will enhance the SEO rankings of your law firm’s website. The best places to link your site are to sites that already rank highly by themselves and where the people who follow the links are likely to spend time on your site. Therefore, the best link exchange partner is another law-related blog about your state, perhaps even belonging to another law firm.

If your link exchange partner is in another city in your same state, even better, because the same state laws apply, but you and your link exchange partner are not in direct competition for clients, and therefore the other firm has no incentive to reject your link exchange proposal. For example, if you are family law attorney in Philadelphia, you should contact a former classmate who now practices family law in Pittsburgh.

Legal Content Writers for Law Firms

Another solution is to entrust the link-building to professional legal content writers. You can count on Law Blog Writers to compose blog content that links to sites your target audience will want to read.