If you’ve been writing quality content for your law firm’s substantive pages and blog on a regular basis, you’re on the right track to bring more traffic to your law firm’s website and improve your search engine rankings. Producing detailed material that helps potential clients understand the issues they’re facing is the key to increasing your visibility and reaching more clients online.
If you’re interested in taking visibility for your content one step further, you may want to start thinking about internal linking on your law firm’s blog and website.
Internal linking can provide more information — and more value — to your potential clients. As new content fills your blog, internal linking can bring new life to older content that has been pushed down in the timeline by more recent posts. Internal linking can benefit your law firm’s SEO, too.
What is an internal link?
An internal link is a link that points back to another page on your website. As an example, if I put a link here to help you learn more about the features of LawLytics, and you clicked on that link, you’d be taken to another page within LawLytics.com. That link points you to another page within the same domain. And if you’re interested in learning about our features, you might click on that link. The anchor text of that link (“learn more about the features of LawLytics”) is informative and gives you an idea of what you’ll see if you go to that page.
Why is internal linking good for law firm websites?
Internal linking is valuable for attorneys for a number of reasons, but the chief purpose is that it provides additional value to your readers — your potential clients.
Internal linking benefits your potential clients.
Google wants to provide search engine users with the most relevant information in search engine results pages. If a potential client finds a piece your content through a search engine and clicks that link, that page may answer the questions that they have. (The more detailed the information you provide to them, the more likely it is that your post will provide satisfactory answers for them.)
But adding internal links to that page provides a potential client with even more useful information. An external link might draw their attention elsewhere — outside of your law firm’s website — but an internal link may keep them engaged with the material that you’re providing.
Let’s use the example of a divorce attorney. Perhaps a potential client is searching for what to do if they’re considering a divorce. Maybe they ask Google a query such as, “What do I need to do before I file for divorce in [my state]?” You’ve written a blog about that topic, and the potential client clicks on the link in their search results to read what you have to say.
But what if that potential client wants more detailed information about topics related to divorce? If they’re feeling ambitious, perhaps they’ll find a way back to your blog’s homepage and scroll through your blog’s timeline. But most people aren’t that driven. They may be more likely to go back to a search engine. The solution, then, is to link to other valuable pieces of information within the post they chose to read.
Let’s use the divorce attorney as an example again. Within that blog, maybe you’ve added internal links pointing them to pieces on how to handle family vacations when you’re divorcing and there are children involved, or why you should exercise caution in sending text messages if you’re in the midst of a divorce. Finances are often a hot button issue in divorces, so perhaps you also link to a piece about how to handle your taxes now that the marriage is ending.
All of these informative extras help a potential client answer the questions they have, and may answer aspects of their problem they hadn’t yet considered. This helps potential clients feel more confident about what they need to do next and feel confident to contact your firm when it comes time to choose an attorney.
Internal links help your potential client spend more time on your site and makes them more likely to engage you as a result of consuming additional information that may encourage them to take action.
Internal linking tells search engines about your law firm website’s content.
Internal links are good for potential clients who need more information about their case or problem, and they’re good for search engines. Search engines use bots to crawl the web, but internal links can give them more information about your site. Many people who want to improve their website’s authority and rankings try to get links from elsewhere on the web, but they may be overlooking the value of internal linking. Attorneys who strive to become online thought leaders will want to be a resource that others cite as an authority (and link to), but internal links can signal to search engines that your content is important, too.
Internal linking can help search engines get a better picture of what’s on your law firm’s website. Search engines rely on robots that crawl the web for new content, and those robots rely on structures they can crawl to help them find available material to index. Some of the structure these robots rely on is linking. Without internal links, some content on your law firm’s website or blog may get buried in a way that renders it inaccessible to search engines. That, of course, is a problem when material that may be relevant to a potential client gets passed over by a search engine because it can’t find the content, or when there’s no easy way for your client to access that information.
If you want to learn about how to implement internal linking on your law firm website, read “How To Use Internal Linking To Your Advantage On Law Firm Websites” next.
