How to Improve Your Offsite SEO with Backlinks
By Next Level Pod on June 1st, 2022 in Uncategorized
Tired of SEO yet?
We hope not because, today, we’re continuing the series.
We’ve talked about SEO-friendly content, keyword research, and all the things you need to optimize on your website. Today, we’re shifting a bit and talking about offsite SEO.
We’ll start as we always do with the foundations: what is offsite SEO and why should you care about it? Then we’ll get into the difference between a local and a national focus around offsite SEO. Finally, we’ll teach you ways to get quality backlinks to your website.
What Offsite SEO Means
If onsite SEO is all the stuff you do on your website, offsite SEO is any of the work you do to help the search engine optimization off your website. These are the things you don’t control.
The biggest piece of off-site SEO is getting links to your website from other websites. We use the term backlink to describe this. A backlink is simply a link back to your website from another website but it could also include social media, PR work, directory listings where your law firm is mentioned, and video/audio content like YouTube or a podcast.
Why does offsite SEO even matter? There are mainly two ways for Google to figure out which websites to display: your website content and votes of confidence from other websites (backlinks). In fact, the use of backlinks was one of the original differentiators of Google. Therefore, offsite SEO is essential to getting on the first page of Google’s results.
Local Offsite SEO Tips
Most of you probably focus on a local geographic area. Not many of you out there are focusing on an entire state let alone a national audience. This means you need to optimize your local SEO.
One key to offsite SEO is sending signals to Google that you aren’t just a law firm that practices in a certain area. Rather, you’re a firm that practices in that area in a specific city. You can do this by focusing on getting local-oriented backlinks.
You’re probably already doing a lot of things locally that you just haven’t thought about as offsite SEO. For example, many law firms sponsor local sports teams, local charities, or local community events. These events and teams typically have websites that can link back to you.
Make sure that your law firm is linked on these websites. You may even ask them to adjust some of the words they use to make sure that you’re helping search engines push your website.
Additionally, if you have referral partners, you could suggest they post your resources on their website as a blog post. Just make sure they edit it a little bit to make it different and unique to their website. You could also help answer frequently asked questions and have them link to your website as the source.
Finally, most law firm owners are part of legal associations in their community. Does that association have a directory of people on its website? Do they link to your website correctly? If not, reach out to make sure they do.
If you want to learn more about getting quality backlinks, check out Episode 044: SEO Series 4 – Offsite SEO.