Link Building for Law Firms: The AI-Powered Advantage

John Maher and John McDougall break down why backlinks are still critical for law firm SEO and AI search, even as algorithms evolve. They discuss how to use AI tools and vibe coding platforms to research link opportunities and create interactive ‘link bait’ assets, how to automate smart outreach, and the risky link schemes and AI‑generated content that can actually damage your rankings.

John Maher: Welcome to AI SEO For Law Firms, the podcast that cuts through the tech noise to give you the exact roadmap for dominating search everywhere optimization and landing high value cases. From McDougall Interactive, I’m John Maher, and with me today is our founder, John McDougall. Today we’re talking about link building for law firms.
Hey, John.

John McDougall: Good morning.

Do Backlinks Still Matter for Law Firm SEO and AI?

Maher: So John, do backlinks still matter for modern SEO and AI search optimization, or are they kind of a relic of the past?

McDougall: Yeah, backlinks are still crucial for algorithmic SEO ranking and a signal of authority. Really from Google, their first patent in 1997 was Google PageRank, and it looked at what sites link to you, especially big sites that have a lot of links pointing to them, like say the Huffington Post or AVVO, or something like that, big websites that have a lot of links pointing to them. One link from one of those sites is worth its weight in gold.

So just because AI doesn’t necessarily directly use links in that exact way doesn’t mean it’s not still important. So in order to come up in Google AI Overviews, you want to be ranking well in organic SEO. You want to do all those same things to build trust and authority. And if you’re indexed in Google and you’re doing well in Google, you’re way more likely to do well in Google AI Overviews.

And then, if you’re in Bing and you’re doing well in Bing, and you have links and authority, again, you’re going to do better potentially in ChatGPT. And I think Brave browser is connected to Claude. So you still want to think about traditional SEO factors like links in general, because it’s still tied to AI.

And AI uses links for finding content and enhancing topical authority, and then you’re more likely to get cited because of that.

Using AI to Find Quality Link Opportunities

Maher: Okay. So if links still matter, how can we use AI to find link opportunities without maybe needing expensive tools?

McDougall: Yeah, I mean, you can get good general guidelines of categories of places you’d want to get links to, links from using ChatGPT or Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, whatever. So that kind of overview type of link building research is great with AI. Getting hyper specific with what’s called a “gap analysis”, where you look at the backlinks of your competitors and find links that are pointing to two or three of your competitors, but not to you. Those are common links. That’s better done by SEMRush or AHREFS, tools like that. I have not found AI to be able to do exactly that. Maybe there’s a way to do that.

So again, combining overall research for link building from AI with tools that have those advanced link databases, I think that’s a good way to go for a stack of how to do it.

And you can identify common factors in winning content. So what content on your competitors’ sites is doing really well. So that’s another thing you can use AI to guide you in what would work for your site to attract links.

Using Vibe Coding Tools to Build Linkable Assets

Maher: Right. How can lawyers use what we call “vibe coding” tools for link building?

McDougall: Yeah. So I like Replit, and it’s a vibe coding tool where you just talk to it like you’re talking to a robot, or when you’re searching ChatGPT, you’re using long prompts. It’s basically programming using a conversation or prompting with natural language instead of having to type every line of code and being a programmer. So it’s pretty incredible.

We’ve already created numerous link-bait pieces of content for law firms, an interactive dog bite map, mesothelioma location map, hospital map relating to medical malpractice. And you just literally tell the robot like, “Hey, I want to make an interactive map of where people can report accidents,” or something like that, and it will make it right in front of your eyes.

Replit and Lovable is incredible how in the interface…I think Replit’s about 25 bucks a month. But you’re talking to it and you’re seeing right in front of your eyes, not just the code it’s generating, but the front end. You see the design and you can say, “Oh, make a logo for that,” if you wanted to make it your own SaaS company, you could make a software, which we’ve done many. I think at mcdougallinteractive.com/free-seo-tools, we have a page of free tools that we made with vibe coding.

And then that’s a great way to attract links to your site with content that’s not just the typical link bait, that’s just more like a good blog post. It’s really tough to convince people to link to you. So if you can make interactive stuff that is more widget like or like a little app on your site or a calculator or a map, these kinds of things are really unique and different, especially if you feed it unique data, your own custom information, and then make a map out of that. If you have a database of certain things, you’re just going to have something that people just don’t have online.

How to Promote Linkable Assets and Earn Backlinks

Maher: And once we build that great link bait, how do you get people to actually link to it?

McDougall: So you have to do what’s called link building outreach or basically emailing people. You could call, but more often than not, link outreach is emailing, and you can use AI to say, “Hey, go look for resource pages that have broken links on them,” or authoritative pages that are mega lists of a certain thing like interactive maps or whatever we were just talking about. And then if those pages, especially, have broken links on them or they’re just relevant, then you have to find the email address on those sites.

You can use a tool like hunter.io, but you can also even technically just ask AI to find the tool. Or you can get really extreme and have Replit or an agentic AI tool like N8N, or similar type of tools, even Zapier — you can make an agentic workflow to API tie into hunter.io, like get a little code that connects Replit to your software to hunter.io to more easily find email addresses of the sites that you want to link to. And then you can connect Gmail to the tool as well, through Replit again, by giving your API key for your Gmail account.

And then you can actually set up a workflow to find the right places to email, that you want to let them know, journalists and media sites, or just resource pages that should be linking to your tool. You can automatically do outreach easier than ever before. We used to have six full-time people doing exactly that, and now some of that’s automatable with AI, so it’s a huge change.

Link Building Risks and Tactics to Avoid

Maher: And what are the biggest risks and mistakes to avoid in link building today?

McDougall: I mean, just avoid spam in general. I mean, some people are still buying crappy backlinks on Fiverr or like, “Oh, we need all these local citations,” so they buy some pack of a thousand local directory links or whatever. But that’s not authoritative. For local, you want to get a certain amount of local links, but I would rather have a good local interactive map or something. Get the local journalists and good people to link. After you get the most important directories, you want to be in AVVO and FindLaw, and key directories in the local chamber of commerce and things like that.

But after that, don’t get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cheesy backlinks, or God forbid someone’s selling a blog network of dog bite blogs that are fake, just for linking, that kind of crap. Or even just getting on article directory sites. Back in the day, we would get people on Ezine Articles. As an agency before anybody knew that that was a bad thing, we did that. Article link building, where again, we were writing articles, putting them on Ezine Articles. That backlink was a signal because of how Google’s algorithm worked. Nobody knew that was bad until Google Penguin came along in 2012 and just crushed the whole SEO community, the people that were doing that. And then everybody had to recover and start getting good, more authentic, legitimate links.

And now it’s even more extreme because AI is good at looking at the links that come pointing at you, looking at their context. Are they relevant? Do people even click those links? Are you getting traffic from a link? So the old days of just being able to artificially inflate the number of backlinks are gone. If you’re doing those sketchy, easy things, you’re probably going to go backwards. That includes AI slop content. So bad links, like lots of crappy content, all of that kind of goes together with taking the easy way out, pushing the Staples “easy button”. “That was easy”. Now we crashed our website. That was easy to ruin our rankings.

And that’s what we see, people coming and they’re like, “Yeah, we got 40 articles a month from our last agency and we’re going backwards.” And they’re like, “What happened”? And we’re like, “How much were you paying a month?” “Oh, 2, $3,000 a month for SEO”. And you’re getting 40 articles a month? Well…

Maher: Yeah. If it seems too cheap and too easy, there’s probably a reason.

McDougall: Right. They got you a thousand backlinks and 40 articles a month for a couple of grand a month, and you’re wondering why it’s not working. That’s because things done to the extreme like that are actually a negative ranking factor. So it’s actually just as important in SEO…I think I said one day, I came up with a little quote like, “SEO is as much about what you don’t do as what you do.” I mean, if you do a bunch of stupid crappy things, you’re going to go backwards. If you do almost nothing and you have a legitimate website, you’re better than having done a bunch of crap.

But yeah, to really excel, you’re going to need to add regular, fresh content, keep the content updated, curated, get regular links, get regular good links, and get reviews and build trust. So all those things go together. And avoid the other, cheesy stuff like the plague, because it will just destroy all your authority efforts.

Maher: All right. Well, that’s really great information, John. Thanks again for speaking with me today.

McDougall: Absolutely.

Maher: And thanks for joining us on AI SEO For Law Firms. If you’re ready to stop losing high value cases because of outdated SEO, subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And for a deeper look at your firm’s current AI strategy, visit mcdougallinteractive.com for a free audit.