7 Reasons Your Law Firm Needs a Link Popularity Checker

Running a free link popularity check tool isn't difficult, but most law firms aren't using a link popularity checker yet. Why not? It may be that many lawyers haven't yet really grasped how important link popularity is for their websites—so they don't even know that a link popularity check could be useful. If you're not sure whether a link popularity check would be beneficial for your firm, this guide can help steer you in the right direction. Here are seven different ways that a free link popularity check can make your firm's website easier to find for potential clients.

#1: Learn What You're Doing Right

When you run a link popularity check for the first time, you may be surprised by how many links you have. It's very likely that the link popularity checker will reveal not just links that you've deliberately built for your firm, but also many other links that other people have made with or without telling you. If you haven't run a free link popularity check in some time, or have never run one before, you're going to find out which of your pages tend to get the most links and which get the fewest.

By finding out what other people are linking to with a link popularity checker, you'll be able to understand which topics are most interesting to your viewers and which don't get as much traffic. You may not have known that a particular niche was making so many waves for your firm online—this kind of understanding is one of the biggest advantages of running a link popularity check.

#2: Investigating the Competition

Knowing what your firm is doing right is only part of the battle. The reality is, you've got competitors, and some of them may be doing a link popularity check right now—on both their website and your own. Once you've already run a link popularity checker on your own website, do a free link popularity check on your competition's site as well.

The results from running a link popularity check on your competitor can be a veritable gold mine of information. In many cases, you will find through your link popularity checker that they're listed on directory websites or other types of sites that you haven't yet built inbound links from. You can get your links on the same sites, then re-run a free link popularity check on your own website to make sure they're showing up.

#3: Finding Different Websites For Links

When you use a link popularity check, you can find brand new websites to start posting on. Maybe you'd never even heard of reddit.com, but now you find out through the link popularity checker that the social bookmarking website already includes three different inbound links for your blog. Because of your free link popularity check, you can now start using websites where it's clear you or your competitors have had success.

#4: Learning Who's Following You

Having a great network of people is one of the best ways to build inbound links. By using a link popularity checker, you can find out whether there are a few people or websites that are linking to you repeatedly and seem to be following you. By identifying these people with your free link popularity check, you can start actually interacting with them and following them as well.

When you use your link popularity check in this way, you're actually building a small web community all of your own. Make sure that when you reach out to these followers after running your link popularity checker, you don't just seek them out as a source of better links. Treat them as people deserving of respect and consideration, and you'll have much better results and can possibly make a lifelong career networking connection because of your link popularity checker.

#5: Checking Reciprocal Links

If you've asked somebody for a link exchange, you may have used a link popularity check at the beginning of your arrangement to make sure they put up the link they promised. But have you checked with a link popularity checker since then? If not, running a free link popularity check can give you peace of mind and help you see whether anyone has broken their agreement.

If you run a link popularity check and find that someone is no longer running the link that they said they would be, you can talk to the webmaster and ask them to reinsert the link on their website. If they refuse, you can take down the reciprocal link from your site.

#6: Making Sure Your Links Are Up To Date

When you redesign your website it's imperative to run a free link popularity check as soon as you can. If you don't run a link popularity check periodically after a site revision, it's possible that your inbound links will direct to pages that you no longer maintain or update. This means that people trying to follow these links won't get what they're coming for, and they probably won't search all over your site to find it.

When your free link popularity check reveals that some links are going to outdated pages, you have two options. You can either alert the webmaster of the site where the link is hosted, so that he or she can change the link based on your link popularity checker results, or you can include a new redirect page on your website so that people don't get lost.

#7: Learning Where You Need Expansion

Your link popularity check can show you not only where you've already got links, but also where you haven't got them. If a free link popularity check reveals, for instance, that you have few or no links from social networking sites, you may want to start pursuing a social networking strategy. If the link popularity check reveals that you're not yet taking advantage of any type of commonly used link, you should definitely at least consider adding those links to your site.