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Advantages and Disadvantages of Using a Backlink Service

Advantages and Disadvantages of Using a Backlink Service

Have you been considering hiring backlink services?  When law firms start to think about using a backlinks service, it's often because their search engine optimization efforts just haven't yielded the results they want.  However, a backlink service isn't a one size fits all solution.  Before you decide to hire backlink services, read this guide—you'll learn both why you may want one of these services, and also why you might prefer to keep your backlinking work in-house.

Advantage: Spending Less Time On Your SEO

The single biggest advantage that a backlinks service can give to your law firm is that it frees up a great deal of time.  Backlink building can be extremely time-consuming, especially if the links you're getting are very high quality links.  A backlink service takes these chores out of your hands so that you can focus on your actual legal practice and building your business in the offline world.

Spending less time on backlinking means that you can devote more time to other aspects of your search engine optimization efforts.  For example, if you're keeping a blog (something you should be doing whether or not you hire a backlinks service), this leaves you with substantially more time to actually create new entries and do research for other entries.

Disadvantage: Less Control Over Your Backlinks

When you use backlink services, you're also giving up a substantial amount of control over exactly where and how your backlinks are placed.  This means that in some cases, your backlinks service may create backlinks that are on irrelevant websites or that otherwise don't meet standards that you would have set for yourself.

To avoid this problem when you hire a backlink service, you should make your expectations and guidelines very clear from the outset.  Your backlinks service should be willing to accept your guidelines—after all, it's your business, and backlinks services are changing the way that your business is portrayed to other people.

You should also make sure that you're periodically checking up on the work done by your backlink service.  You need to know enough about backlinking to be able to understand whether their methods appear to be working.  If you don't know enough about backlinking to capably check up on backlink services, read a few more backlinking articles on our site.

Advantage: Backlink Professionals Handle Your Account

Odds are, if you're working for a law firm, you've never been part of a backlinks service or done backlinking as your full time, year round job.  The people working at backlink services have done so much backlinking that it has become second nature to them.  That gives your backlink service a much greater efficiency in creating new links and finding new resources for backlinking.

Disadvantage: Some Backlink Services Lack Adaptability

This isn't a disadvantage of every backlink service, but it's a problem with enough of them that you should be aware of it before you make a decision.  The internet is changing every year, and as it does, search engine algorithms are evolving.  Someone who has done backlinking the same way for a long time may not be as adaptable if their favorite tips and tricks no longer work.  You may want to ask your backlink service about their adaptability and how they have changed in the past to meet new search engine guidelines.

Advantage: Get More Backlinks Faster

Some backlink services advertise that they can get you dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of total backlinks within a short period of time.  This type of backlinks service was substantially more common before 2012.  In 2012, new updates to Google made it so that this type of backlink service was now more likely to hurt your website than to help it.  Even with these changes, there are still a few backlink services advertising big total link numbers.

Disadvantage: Less Backlink Diversity

When a backlink service promises high quantities of links to every client, it's usually at the cost of quality and diversity.  Both quality and diversity now matter very much to your search engine rankings, so you should be taking these factors into account even if your backlinks service isn't.  It can be very short-sighted to hire a backlink service that uses a lot of low-quality links: even if you see short term gains, it's very likely that you will lose all of those gains and more when the next search engine algorithm update comes out.

You're better off looking for a backlinks service that offers a smaller amount of relevant, high quality, contextual links.  These links, even when they're created by backlink services, will always help you to climb the search rankings ladder.

Advantage: Easy Profile Creation

One of the most mind numbing tasks associated with link building is creating new profiles.  Because so many of these profiles ask for the same types of information, this is a great job to give to your backlinks service.  Backlink services can make profiles for several social networking sites and directories every day.  This is one of the ways that a backlink service can dramatically shift your web traffic in a fairly short amount of time.

Generally, you'll need to tell backlink services the basic information that you want included, but your backlinks service can also create a great deal of the actual content for these profiles.

Disadvantage: Where Does the Data Go?

Not every backlinks service will keep your data for themselves, but some will.  As a law firm, you probably don't want all of your data being used later on to aid your competition.  You should seek out only backlink services that have a history of keeping their clients' data safe and secure, and which have clearly stated privacy policies.

One of the biggest advantages of keeping your link building efforts in house is the ability to keep this data.  Give data security at least some thought before deciding to hire backlink services to handle your backlinking, or you could end up with a privacy breach on your hands.

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