Internal links are the links that take readers to other blog posts and substantive pages of your law firm’s website. They provide value to your potential clients and also improve your ability to be seen by those potential clients as search engines crawl the web collecting and indexing the content that you’ve written.
Internal links add to the structure that helps search engines crawl the information on your law firm’s website. Depending on where the links point, they can help search engines get a clearer idea about what parts of your website have significant value. Internal links provide your potential clients with more useful information on topics that may interest them.
To learn more about internal linking, read our piece on “Why Internal Links Matter On Your Law Firm’s Website”.
By providing additional value to your readers, you help them answer the questions they have about their case or problem and give them confidence in choosing an attorney.
Internal linking can help showcase your online thought leadership by providing easy ways for potential clients and referral sources to see more of what you’ve written on various subjects. That can lead them to spend more time engaged with the content on your law firm’s website and blog.
If you haven’t thought about internal linking before, here are some easy ways to get started.
1. Write lots of informative content on your law firm blog.
The benefits of internal linking come from stitching together lots of relevant content. Without enough content to work with, internal linking can be hard to do. Build content on various topics before you begin.
2. Know what content is on your law firm website.
It’s hard to know what to link to if you don’t know what’s on your law firm’s website. Take some time to go through your website and blog to determine what topics you’ve written about; when you’re done, you may want to group topics together to make it easier for you to add relevant links.
Make a note to yourself about any internal links that you already have on your website. Creating a map of your site may help you see which pages are doing well and which ones could use some attention. You may have a great blog post that few people see because it was a blog written awhile back and there aren’t any new internal links in other blog posts that help readers get to it.
3. Look at the topics you write most often.
As an attorney in a particular practice area, there may be topics that you write about often. Why not create a better structure for these pages? The blogs written on one topic can be grouped into a topic page, which can then be part of a dedicated space for each topic. This can help your potential clients not only access one or two articles that were internal links in another blog, but can also lead them to an entire page filled with content that may interest them and encourage them to reach out to you.
4. Use descriptive words in your anchor text that give cues to your potential clients.
When you’re creating internal links, give your potential clients an idea as to what they’ll read about if they click on the link. Readers have short attention spans. They want their information as quickly as possible without having to think too hard about it. By using anchor text that describes what the link is about, you’ll help your potential clients make better decisions about what they need to read next.
Conclusion
If the above sounds complex, don’t worry, it’s not. At least, not when you’re a LawLytics member. The LawLytics law firm website platform helps attorneys easily manage and grow their firm’s website without having to pay a marketing agency, and without struggling with DIY website software that’s not built for lawyers.
