In talking about what it’s necessary to do to make a law firm website perform, in order for Google in particular, and I believe increasingly large language models that were used in place of Google in recent days, to find your website in order for them to decide that of all the hundreds of millions or however many websites out there, that it’s your website that is the right one that is going to make the searcher find what they need and feel happy and come back to Google so that Google can continue to sell advertising. They got to figure out what are the best websites. They got to figure out what are the ones that are most likely to meet the search intent of the searcher. And certainly part of that is speed and part of it is your Google business profile and having good content. And there’s a lot that goes into this, but something that a lot of people don’t know, and I certainly didn’t know until I started playing this game eight years ago, is that when another website out there links their site to yours, that is viewed by Google and I think the large language models as well these days, even though we’re sort of in frontier times with AI search, that is viewed as a vote of confidence from the other organization in favor of your website.

Essentially, they’re saying that Jeremy’s website has got good enough content and he’s a reputable enough player that I am going to include a link on my website back to Jeremy’s website. It’s called a backlink. And this is one of the most important things that Google uses to decide which are the good websites and which are the bad websites. And not all backlinks are created equal. There’s a lot of Charlottes out there that are going to sell you a thousand backlinks for $100. And there was a day before my time when you could buy those cheap backlinks and Google would say, “Oh, look at all these other sites that link back.” But now Google can tell if it’s a legitimate link or not. And so I spend quite a lot more time than I would’ve ever imagined when I went to law school or when I was working as a partner in the large law firm that I used to work at, caring about getting other law firms to link back to mine.

And so when I give a speech or when I write an article or when I write a book chapter, whenever I do anything for another professional organization, it is an absolute requirement of mine that if they are going to advertise the speech or the book chapter or whatever it is, if they’re going to try to sell it, if they’re going to try to get their audience there, their website that trumpets that event or whatever it is, it must have a link to my law firm’s website. If people aren’t willing to do that for me, I’ve historically been able to unwilling to dedicate my time speaking and writing for their organization. It’s generally not that hard to sell. If you’re going to do any kind of a work with another organization, getting the backlink is not that hard. Certainly if you’re able to get the New York Times to link to your website or if you’re able to get some extremely high value website that has a lot of domain authority to link to your site, that’s different than having a local neighborhood organization do it.

But as long as it’s not a spammy link that you’re buying from some charlatan that is linking you to some terrible website, which will actually hurt your page from what I understand more than help you, as long as it’s a legitimate organization out there, more is more. And so I never in a million years when I went to a law school or when I was working at the large law firm would’ve thought that I needed to care about things like this, but it is actually extremely important. And so if you are going to create a website and you are going to try to send signals out into the universe that it is a good website and it is the kind that should be served up in search results, in addition to getting a Google My Business profile set up in addition to having reviews from whoever you can get to give you a five-star review and say something nice about you, in addition to having it be a fast website with good content and having the backside of it properly coded and turned on so that people can see it’s there and it’s indexed and it’s crawled by Google, you also want to have as many backlinks as you can.

And this is so valuable that there are a lot of law firm owners I know that are going to incentivize their staff 50 bucks per backlink they can get, or it’s sometimes 50 bucks per review. And ignore this at your peril.

I am currently working very hard. I’ve got pages on my website that are professional organization for design and construction pages that are aimed at professional organizations that are intended to be educational resources. And I am about to start an email marketing campaign that encourages the president and secretary or treasurer of these dozens of organizations. So look at this thing that I’ve created for your members. Won’t you please link your site back to mine? And so as much as it’s a little bit distasteful and as much as I never thought that I would need to care about this as a lawyer, if you’re going to play the website game, getting back links is unfortunately something that you’re going to have to think about, at least for the next little bit. The conventional wisdom in the last six months is that now the LLMs AI is able to discern between the good websites and the bad websites in much more sophisticated ways.

It might be the case that this video won’t age well because you fast forward a couple years, people might no longer care about backlinks, but where we are right now and where I have been for the last eight years is having to care about getting backlinks. And this is something that you should think about as well if you’re going to spin up a website and you wish to be found in search results.