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N° B-01, Industry-playbooks 7 September 2026
21 July 2026 · 8 min read · By Surinder Ahitan

Link building for law firms: what actually moves the needle

Surinder Ahitan By Surinder Ahitan
Small solicitors office on an English high street, illustrating link building for law firms.

TL;DR

  • Link building for law firms is unusual because the strongest links come from places that are already obliged to list you: your regulator, your professional body, your accreditation schemes.
  • Google counts links as part of “prominence”, which is one of the three things it uses to rank the local map pack. So links feed your enquiries, not just your rankings.
  • Buying links is the fastest route to a manual action, and as a regulated firm you carry a second layer of risk that generic link advice never mentions.
  • Twenty relevant earned links will beat two hundred bought ones. The count matters far less than the relevance.
  • Do the free work first. Register entries, directory profiles, local relationships. Outreach comes last, not first.

To be honest, most link building for law firms fails for a fairly dull reason. The firm goes shopping for new links before it has claimed the ones it is already entitled to.

Some of the best links a firm can have already exist:

  • Your regulator lists you.
  • Your professional body lists you.
  • Any panel, accreditation scheme or membership you hold lists you.

My guess is that plenty of firms have never checked whether their entry is complete, or whether it still points at the right website.

So this post is the order I would work in. Owed and free first, local and earned second, paid never.

Because the legal sector comes with a ready-made web of official listings that most industries do not have, and because you are regulated while you use it.

A plumber has to go and find a builders’ merchant willing to link to them. You have the SRA register, the Law Society, accreditation schemes, local authority panels and any professional membership you already pay for. Every one of those is a real page on a trusted site with your firm’s name on it.

The second difference is risk. A plumber who buys a bad link risks their rankings. A firm that lets a lead generator market on its behalf risks a conversation with its regulator too. That doubles the reason to keep this clean.

A hand lifting a red-spined volume from a shelf of old law reports in a quiet

Links from pages a real person might actually read, on sites that would still exist if Google shut down tomorrow.

That is a blunt test, but it holds up. Google’s spam policies name the failures explicitly: buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges, low-quality directory or bookmark links, and paid articles or guest posts carrying optimised anchor text.

Read that list backwards and you have your brief. A link is worth having when somebody put it there because the destination was genuinely useful to their reader.

Volume is not the point either. Ahrefs studied around 14 billion pages and found 96.55% get no traffic from Google at all. A link from one of those pages moves nothing, however many of them you buy.

Before you write a single outreach email, go and collect these. They are already yours, and the only real work is checking that each one points at the correct URL.

Here is the list I would work through:

  • The SRA’s Solicitors Register entry for the firm and for every regulated individual in it.
  • The Law Society’s Find a Solicitor, which aims to include all SRA regulated firms and the individuals who choose to be listed.
  • Every accreditation scheme you hold. Law Society schemes have their own filters inside Find a Solicitor, so a thin entry costs you twice.
  • Your local chamber of commerce, the business improvement district, and any trade body covering your practice areas.
  • Your professional indemnity insurer’s panel page, where they publish one.

Most of these take an afternoon. None of them cost anything. And a stale URL on a trusted page is worse than no entry at all, because it sends both people and Google’s crawler somewhere that no longer exists.

Blank polished brass nameplate beside a weathered red door on a small law office

They feed the third of the three factors Google uses to rank local results. Google’s own guidance says local ranking comes down to relevance, distance and prominence, and it defines prominence partly as how many websites link to your business.

That matters because for most high-street firms the map pack is where the enquiries come from. Somebody searching for a conveyancing solicitor on a phone sees three listings before they see a single ordinary result.

The same page is blunt about the other half of it: there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. So the work is the local SEO basics, a properly completed Google Business Profile, reviews arriving steadily, and links from organisations in your actual town. Reviews carry real weight here: BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found 97% of consumers read reviews before choosing a local business.

Once the free listings are sorted, these are the five I would spend real time on.

1. Local sponsorship with a page attached. Sponsor the cricket club, the school fete, the food bank collection. Ask for a page describing what you did, not just a logo in a footer.

2. Commentary a journalist can actually use. Legal stories break constantly and reporters need somebody qualified to explain them in plain English. A named partner who replies quickly, in usable sentences, gets quoted and credited.

3. Explainers on your own site that are worth citing. Pages answering the questions clients really ask get linked to by advice charities, forums and community sites. That is the whole idea behind how I approach SEO content: write the thing worth citing, then the links follow on their own.

4. Non-competing local professionals. Estate agents, accountants, financial advisers, surveyors. Everyone on that list refers work to a solicitor eventually, and a “who we work with” page is a perfectly normal thing for them to publish.

5. The things you already do. Talks at the business breakfast, guest lectures, pro bono clinics, charity trusteeships. These nearly always produce a page somewhere. Ask for the link while you are there.

Hands at a laptop keyboard with a dark screen

No. Not because it never works briefly, but because the downside is lopsided and it lands on the one thing you cannot rebuild quickly.

Google treats buying or selling links that pass ranking credit as a spam policy violation, and the manual actions report in Search Console is where you find out. Cleaning up afterwards means identifying the links, removing or disavowing them, then submitting a reconsideration request and waiting.

Paid placements are not banned outright. They just have to be tagged with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored", which Google spelled out plainly. Tagged that way they pass no ranking credit at all. In other words, the version that is allowed is the version that does not do the thing the seller promised you.

My honest view is that agencies sell rankings and firms want booked work, and bought links are where that gap shows up worst. The invoice is real. The enquiries usually are not.

Most link building advice was written for online shops. You are regulated, and several of the standard tactics collide with that.

The SRA’s warning notice on public marketing makes firms responsible for how third parties acquire clients on their behalf. If a lead generator or claims company is building your links and your enquiries, you have to be able to show they did not use cold calling or door-knocking to get there.

Promotional material also has to steer clear of misleading statements about success prospects, likely awards, testimonials and credentials. That rules out a good deal of the puffed-up copy link vendors tend to write in your name.

Referral arrangements are a separate trap. Referral fees in personal injury cases are prohibited under LASPO sections 56 to 60, and outside personal injury the arrangement still has to be disclosed to the client.

None of this stops you building links. It means the person doing it needs to understand your rulebook, not only Google’s.

Hands annotating a printed document with a fountain pen beside a notebook with a red bookmark

Fewer than you think, and far fewer than a vendor will quote you.

For most high-street firms, a handful of genuinely relevant links a quarter, sustained over a couple of years, is a realistic target. Twenty earned links from your regulator, your town and your practice area will beat two hundred bought ones.

Two things matter more than the count. The first is that the linking pages are relevant to what you actually do. The second is that your own site gives anyone a reason to link to it at all.

That second one is where the SRA’s transparency rules quietly become an advantage. You already have to publish price and service information for things like residential conveyancing and uncontested probate, including what is included, the key stages and the likely timescales for each. Most firms bury it on a page nobody can find. Published clearly, it is one of the most useful and most linkable things a firm can put on a website.

There is real appetite for that clarity. The Legal Services Board’s qualitative research found consumers struggle to judge the quality of legal services and lean on registers and ratings to do it.

With an honest look at what you already have, not with an outreach list.

Here is what I would actually do, in order:

  1. Check every regulator and professional body entry, and fix the URLs that point to the wrong place.
  2. Claim and complete every free directory profile you are entitled to.
  3. Publish your transparency information properly, as a page worth citing rather than a PDF in a corner.
  4. Pick two local relationships and ask each for a real page, not a logo.
  5. Then, and only then, start thinking about outreach.

That order is deliberate. The first three cost nothing but an afternoon each, and they are the ones that stick, because nobody can take them away from you later.

One caveat worth saying plainly. If the site itself is the bottleneck, no amount of link building will fix it, and that is an SEO consulting problem rather than a link one. Slow pages, a thin service-page structure and missing schema all cap what links can do for you.

If you want to know where your firm sits right now, book a call and bring the URL. I’ll show you what the site looks like from Google’s side while we talk.

If you want me to look at your specific site and tell you what's broken, that's twenty minutes in my calendar and it costs you nothing. Book a call. Tell me what's going on.