Lawyers and law firms have to worry about marketing themselves to the public more than any time in the history of the industry. Law firms need to compete for attention on the web. Given this environment, it can be difficult to be seen apart from the crowd. Therefore, law firms should pay particular attention to their rankings in search results. The higher the ranking, the higher the chance of searches clicking on your law firm’s website.

One of the first things to do, to improve search rank, is to improve your law firm’s website. Savvy lawyers who understand online marketing and proper SEO practices know that when creating web content, it is advantageous to link to quality, relevant outside sources. But often, those savvy lawyers forget about the power of internal links. Having an internal linking strategy is very important for defining the structure of your website and allowing search engines to more easily index and rank your web site’s pages. Having robust internal linking also increases click through and conversion rates, and allows visitors to find things more easily on your site.

To have a robust internal linking strategy, you first have to understand the basics of internal linking and why it is important.

A page’s “Google value” increases the more links a particular page has, even if the links come from within your own website, as opposed to outside links (which are also helpful).

 

Google has made internal links so important that it considers a reasonable number to be a thousand links.

 

Having links coming from and to new content will make the Google search bots scan the material faster.

 
Increase Page Rankings by Limiting Click Depth

The first way law firms can boost their search rankings is to reduce click depth. Click depth refers to the number of clicks it takes to get to a page starting from the home page. Google does not pay as much attention to pages that have large click depth. The closer the page is to the main page, the higher ranking Google gives it and the more attention it gives the page when fresh material is added. Here are ways to reduce click depth:

Take some of the deep pages and add them to the main category section on the main page.

 

Reduce the number of browsable pages in a category’s listing. This can be achieved by increasing the number of items per page, but can also be addressed in part by the increased number of high-level categories, which results in fewer items in each category. If a category’s seven pages are reduced to five, the URLs listed on the sixth and seventh pages all move up at least two clicks in depth.

 

Increasing the number of internal links between deeper pages within the same category. This will bring deeper pages closer to the top.

 
Once the page depth is reduced overall on the entire website, then the Google bots will scan the pages faster, which will continue to increase your page rankings.

Boost Rankings by Creating Content Hubs

A content hub is made of multiple pages of content that have closely related topics or key words. The pages are structured around a pillar page, which is a page of authoritative content that establishes you as an expert in a particular area of law. From this pillar page, internal links are sent out to the pages in the content hub. These internal links will reinforce the relationship between the pages in the content hub, especially when the links use keywords that closely relate to the theme or area of practice on the content hub.

The secret behind using content hubs that contain pillar pages is that pillar pages are usually well ranked and are given authority by the search engines. If the internal links sent out from the pillar page are done correctly, then the authority garnered by the pillar page will be passed onto the secondary pages of the content hub.

Having a robust internal linking strategy is both necessary and easy to accomplish. Without these strategies, a law firm’s website is not being used to its full potential. Reducing page depth and the proper use of content hubs will make your website an authority in your area of law, thus making you an authority to the potential clients searching for a lawyer.