Do Backlinks Still Matter in 2024? A Fresh Look for Law Firms with Bennett Heyn

Episode Notes

Transcript

arin Conroy:

This is Counsel Cast part of the Legal Talk Network, and I’m your host, Karin Conroy. When you face a complex case outside your expertise, you bring in a co-counsel for next level results. When you want to engage, expand, and elevate your firm, you bring in a marketing co-counsel. In this podcast, I bring in marketing experts who each answer one big question to help your firm achieve more. Here’s today’s guest.

Bennett Heyn:

Hello, my name is Bennett Heyn and I’m the CEO of back linker ai. Back linker AI is a way to automate your outreach using ai. What we do is we use the power of AI to automate your reporter outreach and get more organic traffic and backlinks with no additional effort from your end. And so my name is Bennett. I am the owner of this, and I also work full-time at Adobe. And then I’m really interested in entrepreneurship.

Karin Conroy:

Awesome. Okay. Well, that’s a lot to cover. We probably won’t cover everything there, but thank you so much for being here. I know we have a lot to cover, so I’m just going to jump right in. The title for today’s show is going to be Do Backlinks Still Matter in 2024, A Fresh Look for law firms. So Bennett, let’s first start with talking about backlinks in general. What is a backlink and how does it work?

Bennett Heyn:

Sure. I’m going to use the example that I always love giving. So I think backlinks started as a way to show credibility and authority and research papers. Actually, you would have more credibility when someone would cite your research paper. And so let’s say Albert Einstein cited your research paper, you would now be very credible. So Google did the same thing and they said, okay, Forbes links to your website and recommends people visit your website. That will automatically make you more authoritative than just a smaller website recommending your website

Karin Conroy:

Exactly like your mom has a website and your mom recommends you we’re like, yeah, we already know your mom likes you, but we see this all the time when it comes to pr, and the whole point of PR is like, Hey, if you have been featured on CNN and you get a link from CNN to your site, and then you can also support that and kind of go back and forth all of a sudden that really boosts your reputation. We call these trust signals or trust indicators, all of these good things. But that is a big deal, obviously, if you’re featured on CNN, especially if you’ve got a nice little video clip where you’ve got a feature there where you were speaking on some show there, but even if you were featured in a publication where you were writing somewhere and that publication’s website has a higher domain authority than yours, that’s good for you. So explain domain authorities.

Bennett Heyn:

Got it. So domain authority is a metric that I think hres or Moz created to show you how well websites are ranking and how strong they are. So it’s a scale from zero to a hundred and a hundred is the best. Think Facebook, Google, even Adobe is pretty high up there in the nineties. So a smaller mom and pop website might be a DR 20 or DR 10. And when you’re getting these backlinks from bigger DR 90 websites, that’s really going to boost your authority and even push your domain authority score up. So if I had a website that was at a DR 10 and then I got a back link from Forbes and C nnn, my domain authority might increase to 30 and then yeah, something like that. Just

Karin Conroy:

From that one link, you’ve seen stuff jump that high.

Bennett Heyn:

I’ve seen stuff jump pretty high just from these really high profile back links.

Karin Conroy:

Okay. So give me an example of something that could make your domain authority go down. Let’s just say for sake of argument, make things easy, that you’re at a 50, you’ve been around a while, you’ve done some things, and then all of a sudden you check and it has gone down for some reason.

Bennett Heyn:

Yeah, so a couple things. One is if someone removes a backlink on their website, let’s say that I scammed my way into getting a Forbes and then Forbes figured that out and then they removed the backlink, that would lower my domain authority score. If you get hit by a Google penalty, that could also affect it. If Google figures out that you were part of a private backlink network where you’re selling and buying backlinks and kind of gaming the system, then they’re going to penalize you and take away some of your authority score.

Karin Conroy:

So most of what you’re describing is what we call black hat. So you’re doing super suspicious, questionable, not even questionable, but in a lot of times knowingly doing bad things. And I get these questions, you’d be surprised, I work only with lawyers and I get these kinds of questions all the time. Do you think I’ll get caught if I do X, Y, Z? And it’s like if you’re starting the question like that, why are you even thinking to do this? Do you understand what’s at risk? All of this money and effort and time and reputation that you’ve put into this website are potentially going to be damaged by doing something dumb. What are some other dumb things that people can do in terms of damaging their Rankings, damaging their domain authority, just backlinks in general? I feel like there’s a lot of confusion around backlinks for one, and there’s a lot of scammy stuff around backlinks. So what are some other things damaging dumb things people can do specifically around backlinks?

Bennett Heyn:

So on backlinks, one of the things that you might think is, oh, Bennett already said higher domain authorities better. So I’m going to go on Fiverr or Upwork and buy one of those services that say, I will take your website from a DR zero to DR 50 in a week. So basically what they do, they automate some sort of thing that sends you hundreds or millions of backlinks from poor sites. Forums you can tell a backlink is spammy if it’s from somewhere that’s not relevant to you like China or Russia. And that’s kind of also similar, the authority part that Google was talking about before. If my mom was recommending someone else to visit my site, that would make sense. If someone overseas in China that I’ve never met recommended to visit my website, that’s kind of like a red Flagg, how is Bennett’s website that’s in the legal niche related to this casino website in China? That doesn’t make sense. We’re going to penalize that.

Karin Conroy:

Right. Okay. And then that’s penalizing typically is hitting the domain authority, or does it also hit just overall ranking?

Bennett Heyn:

Yeah, I think it’s actually going to damage both overall traffic and ranking those two.

Karin Conroy:

Okay. So man, there’s so many different things we could talk about. Let’s go back. You mentioned one red Flagg a minute ago. This doesn’t really make any sense, just logically, not to mention Google’s having robots look at your site, not logical humans typically, but what are some other red flags that you typically can see in terms of backlinks that just mean just once again, we’re just kind of in the dumb category. It doesn’t make any sense, but I still get these questions all the time. Do you think this is a good idea? And it’s like really, if you have to ask.

Bennett Heyn:

Yeah. So some indicators, one is called spam score. I think SEMrush, if you put in a back link, it’ll tell you their spam score of the overall website. And so you definitely don’t want to go with a website, say over a 10% spam score, because if you’re getting a back link from a site that looks legit. But when you take a look behind the scenes at their backlinks, those are all created badly and then that reflects poorly on you. Another thing to look for is bad. You don’t want to get comment backlinks that you just spam a bunch of comment sections and say, visit my website, visit my website, visit my website. The thing with forum backlinks, maybe to an extent, but if you’re spamming thousands or millions of forums with Visit my legal website, that’s going to look poor.

Karin Conroy:

So honestly, I feel like one of the short version answers of a lot of what you’re saying is that, and in my experience, the quality backlinks take time. So honestly, I feel like people who are looking for some to go from zero, we just launched this law firm and this website, we weren’t even online last week, and we want to go from zero to a score of 50 by next week, that’s not going to be a reasonable expectation to do it in a legitimate, clean, solid way. Do you think that’s accurate?

Bennett Heyn:

Yeah, I think it’s accurate. I guess you could start off by buying, I don’t know if I’d recommend buying, but

Karin Conroy:

No. Yeah, it just seems like such a, once again, that just seems like you’re trying to cheat.

Bennett Heyn:

So these cheating short-term things are probably going to hit you in the long term. Yes. But if you want to go from zero to 50, you can buy it, but it’s not going to help you in two years when you’re trying. No, you got to do something more organic. That makes sense. And so one thing that makes sense for me and my clients is doing something called Reporter Outreach.

Karin Conroy:

That was my next thing I was moving towards is, okay, so that’s all the bad stuff and the dumb ideas and all of that stuff. Let’s move into what is good, what does work and what you’ve seen that is quality.

Bennett Heyn:

Yeah. The best bang for your buck in my opinion, is reporter outreach. So I started Is that

Karin Conroy:

Harrow Help a reporter out? Okay.

Bennett Heyn:

Definitely. I started SEOA couple years ago when Harrow was still relatively untapped. So I would go on there and find things that were relevant to me as a student or a business owner, and I would reply to them. And I actually got backlinks from Wall Street, Journal, business Insider and other places, and that was just me manually typing in answers to reporters questions that they had. And so that was working pretty well. And then about a year ago, I decided maybe I could scale this and help other clients do this easily. And especially now with the advent of automation and ai, I can figure out some way to save time on my end and also provide value for my clients.

Karin Conroy:

And what did you do?

Bennett Heyn:

So what I did was Hara would send out emails every single day, and I would have a bot that said, okay, let’s look through all of these things that reporters are asking for. Are any of them relevant to my client? Like a legal business owner? Oh wow. This person from Business Insiders asking for lawyer tips. And then, so what I did is I would manually reply to them and send it out for these ones that are relevant to the reporter and to my client. And my clients got backlinks that was,

Karin Conroy:

But which part was automated? So you said that you had automated this whole system, but one part was which part was automated?

Bennett Heyn:

So I took it step by step in the automation flow. I believe in doing everything manual to start, and then once it works, automated a bit of it. So the first part that took me a while is every day I would have to read through a hundred different things that reporters are asking for. So I had a bot that would just read through all of them and just send me an email saying, Hey, here are five things that are relevant

Karin Conroy:

To my client. So it would filter those out.

Bennett Heyn:

And then the second thing I did once I was getting backlinks is that’s when Chachi PT came around. So basically I had this thing that would send me the, Hey, here are the five things that reporters are asking for. I would put it in chat, GPT, copy and paste it, and then send it to the reporter. Awesome. And that was getting back links. Reporters thought that these natural sounding quotes were written by humans and nice. So they were using it, and I got back links from ZDNet, go banking rates lead reader.

Karin Conroy:

Nice. So is that integrated into your backlinks AI system?

Bennett Heyn:

Kind of. So haro, I think about three or two months ago, December 31st, they shut down the email service. They were getting too much spam and they pivoted to something called Connectively, which is now a paid platform where you have to pay to pitch. And they also have, and

Karin Conroy:

You’re talking about haro, right? Yeah. Okay.

Bennett Heyn:

So HARO switched to connectively, they charge money now. So in my opinion, it’s not as good of a deal. I use something called feature.com and I automated the process for that. Featured is similar to haro, where they’re asking for sources to reply on behalf of the clients, and then it answers the report’s questions and we get back links.

Karin Conroy:

Nice. And so you’ve got that kind of a new automated system for that too. Yeah. That’s amazing because I will say I’ve used Taro over the years, but it is tedious. And when I’m busy, that is the first thing that falls to the wayside because it’s tedious. There’s so many that you have to wade through and just kind of simplifying the things that you described would make it so much more likely to happen. And it’s so valuable when you get those kind of links. If you’re able to get a Wall Street Journal link, that’s amazing. That would be worth all of that effort just by itself, not to mention any of the other ones that you’re getting.

Bennett Heyn:

Definitely. And I think the great part about my service is I’m kind of disrupting the bigger agencies that are charging two or $3,000 a month to do this. Sure. And by charging 250 to $500, that’s really undercutting the market. Totally. And I don’t need to pay someone overseas to write and respond. I just have AI do it, which is super cheap.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay, so we were talking about kind of the quality. So coming back to the dumb ideas in terms of buying links, trying to think you can do it super fast and just getting all of these bad, potentially black hat damaging back links versus the quality. So one idea is to use stuff like haro, go out, get good backlinks from these reputable high authority sites. What are some other quality ways of getting backlinks that typically, I will say, in my experience, it’s taken me years and years and years to build up a library of backlinks, and in theory, this is kind of how it should work. That’s the whole point. Years of experience and expertise are being reflected in this number.

Bennett Heyn:

Definitely. One thing that it’s helpful, aside from reporter outreach, you can look at your competitor’s websites and look at their backlink profile. Nice. And you can even do that for free. I can give you the tool to put in the comment, but yeah, you look at someone’s backlink profile and then you have a virtual assistant reach out to all the websites that are linking to this website and you say, Hey, I saw you’re linking to X, Y, and Z. I made a resource or article that would be really helpful for your readers and your audience. Can I post it or can I make a guest post on your website that your readers would love? Yeah. So that’s a good, let

Karin Conroy:

Me do an update. The one that posts that they have on your website is three years old. Let me do something that’s fresh and let’s make it better. If we’re going to go straight head to head with a competitor, let me tell you how I can do a better job. That would be

Bennett Heyn:

Cool. There’s a lot of SEO tools out there, and one is called hres, and you can actually look at your competitor’s backlink profile and then go to that website itself and look at their outgoing links and see, okay, are any of these links that they’re going to, other sites are broken. Let’s say for example, Forbes was linking to a resource about the law and that resource was broken, and that website doesn’t exist anymore. You could basically make the same resource and then pitch Forbes and say, Hey, I have an updated copy of what you’re linking to, and your link is broken. Can you just link to me instead?

Karin Conroy:

Nice. That is so smart because you are coming in, coming in from a really different perspective and pitching in a unique way to say, Hey, I noticed there’s a problem. Let me help you fix it. Not just like, Hey, because Forbes is getting millions of pitches every day to be featured on their site. So that’s an interesting way of doing it. Okay. So we covered whether they met, well, we covered quality versus quantity. The garbage that everybody thinks that they should be able to do right out of the gate versus it takes time and the quality of links is going to take some effort, and you’re not necessarily going to get a link from Forbes and CNN and Wall Street Journal in week one. What other methods do you know of that you’ve seen really work for some of your clients?

Bennett Heyn:

Yeah, I’d say reporter outreach is the number one method for some of my clients because they’ve seen traffic go from, let’s say, a thousand monthly visitors to 10,000 monthly visitors in a couple months. And there’s really a big correlation between getting a backlink and improving your SEO. Yeah. One thing that my clients don’t necessarily do, but I’ve heard is really smart is you can use a source like Google Trends to find some sort of exploding topic or unique angle to a story, and then you can just go out and pitch reporters on that. So you’re not waiting for reporters to come to you, you’re providing them with the story and saying like, Hey, did you know that this law term is exploding by 500% in the month of February? Here’s why, and here’s an expert comment on that. Nice. And then they’ll write the article up and link to you.

Karin Conroy:

So that kind of ties back to the whole title of the show, which is whether backlinks even matter, because I swear I get this question all the time, that SEO approaches are really downplaying backlinks and that it’s not as much of the focus, or it’s kind of being pushed to the side, or things are changing because of the algorithm or whatever the question might be. But let’s respond to that directly in terms of whether they matter and what you see, because you see this with your clients on a daily basis about how their numbers are performing, how their site overall is performing. And when you’re looking at it, it’s specific to the backlinks, right? Yeah. So tell me, in terms of the title of the show, do backlinks matter?

Bennett Heyn:

Yeah, I might be biased, but I a hundred percent think that they matter. And one thing that is interesting is it depends on your niche too, for those really saturated difficult niches like law real estate where you’re competing with a lot of other people who have the same style website, like a cookie cutter website where it’s just trying to get you to fill out a form. That’s when backlinks are really important because it’s not like you can just have a bunch of content that’s unique to you. But for example, with a blog though, you might not need as many backlinks to rank for some of those really long tail keywords. But if you’re trying to rank for something like lawyers in New York or buy a house Florida, you’re going to need backlinks. It’s impossible to rank for those big terms without links.

Karin Conroy:

And you were showing me some graphs before we started recording where before and after backlinks, there’s just no question that if Google was changing their algorithm to somehow not care as much about backlinks, you wouldn’t be seeing those kind of results. So it clearly matters. How could it not matter if you’re featured on Wall Street Journal or CNN and they’re basically giving you a vote? Why would Google not care about that? Of course, that’s just logical.

Bennett Heyn:

And another thing I think is really interesting is a good backlink. What makes a good backlink? People are going to ask? One thing is authority. So if you’re getting a Dr 90 backlink from Wall Street Journal, that’s great, but if you don’t have that, it’s okay. If you have backlinks from things that are really in your niche. You have a lot of, let’s say Dr. 40 lawyer backlinks, that could honestly help you just as much as one main Wall Street Journal.

Karin Conroy:

I’ve always heard that the domain authority should at least be as high as your own. Is that true? So even let’s say your domain authority is 35, you probably don’t want to accept a link or really go after links that are lower than wherever are,

Bennett Heyn:

I would think, yeah, don’t prioritize going after those links, but if you get those links, it’s not necessarily going to hurt you unless they’re spammy sites. Sure, there are good websites that have a, let’s say D 20 or Dr 30 authority score, but just don’t prioritize them. But if you get them, it’s not going to hurt you necessarily.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Alright, so it is time for the Thought Leaders library. Remember, our website has a curated collection of top book picks from our guests. So what’s the one book that you believe every lawyer should have on their bookshelf?

Bennett Heyn:

I think how to Win Friends and Influence People is really important.

Karin Conroy:

It’s such a classic. Why do you love that book?

Bennett Heyn:

Well, one thing I like is that they advocate for building authentic relationships with people. That

Karin Conroy:

Totally relates to everything we’ve been talking about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you being the audience and whether it’s a good idea to try to build a relationship with these sites that you can just look at and see are spammy versus should I try to seek out guest posts on CNN? Yeah. That’s kind of a no-brainer.

Bennett Heyn:

And it takes relationship building skills to do that.

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. You have to have a reputation. You have to know how to talk. CNN’s not going to just have people on that don’t know how to communicate. What are some of the best takeaways that you got from How to Win Friends and Influence People?

Bennett Heyn:

I think one, providing value, understanding people’s interests and making that feel important and winning people over to your way of thinking.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, that’s rough. I mean, especially it feels like over the last, really since the Pandemic, we’ve become so divided, and that seems like such a challenge, but that’s a different show. Yeah. Awesome. So Bennett, what do you think is one big takeaway that you’d like people to get from this overall episode?

Bennett Heyn:

I think one thing is that if you need help getting backlinks from authoritative real sites, that is something I can help you with my service called Back Linker ai.

Karin Conroy:

We will definitely link to that on the show page, the show notes, and it’ll be tagged in all of the social media places and posts and all that stuff as well. But yeah, I think that we covered a lot. There is so much out there about backlinks and there’s really a lot of bad press because there’s so many scammy sites that I know a lot of clients who have backed away and they’ve just kind of taken a pause because they’re worried about all of that garbage that’s out there. But when you take a perspective on just getting these quality links to notice you and recommend you and have the link and then be able to put that link on your own site, that makes it seem pretty clear and obvious. And I can’t tell you the number of clients that we’ve had where they are featured in big publications or they’ve been on the news or whatever, and they’re not even putting it on their website. It’s like you’re missing out on such a great opportunity for all this SEO work. So definitely make sure that you’ve got that interaction going on. Obviously, when you’re being posted on these news organizations, you’re busy, but find somebody to get it done. Yeah, Dhir. So Dhir, you can get the credit

Bennett Heyn:

And it can even be as easy as going on Upwork. There’s a lot of people that can help you with virtual administration tasks.

Karin Conroy:

Totally, absolutely. Awesome. Bennett Heyn is the founder of backlinks.ai, and thank you so much for being here. This was an awesome conversation.

Bennett Heyn:

Thank you.

Karin Conroy:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Council Cast podcast. Be sure to visit our website at council Cast dot com for the resources mentioned on the episode and to give us your feedback. If you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate if you could rate and review the podcast on Apple and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform. See you on the next one.

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