Internal Linking For Lawyer Websites (& Other Local Businesses)
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone, it's Olga Zarr from SEO SLY. So today I want to talk about internal linking, I want to talk about that aspect in lawyer SEO, because this is a very common problem, especially in lawyer websites and why am I talking about lawyers?
[00:00:16] So i've been in seo for more than 12 years and I have a boutique seo Kind of agency. I don't want I don't like to call myself an agency because there is basically just me and my business partner Two seos. I have 12 years of experience. He has more than 15 years of experience
[00:00:32] and
[00:00:32] the last three years of my SEO career, I've been specializing in lawyer SEO, for a year, I was the director of SEO at the lawyer SEO agency in the U S. Basically for, for one year in my life, all I was doing was lawyer SEO. Now I have a blend of different clients, including lawyers.
[00:00:50] This is a very specific niche and some of the mistakes I see over and over again made me create a very in depth lawyer SEO O Guide. It is available on my website, seo sly.com/blog/lawyer seo. I recommend you read it.
[00:01:05] All the aspects of lawyer SEO are touched upon here.
[00:01:08] But the thing I want to focus on are read more links low value backlinks in the case of lawyer websites. So, let me make myself a little bit smaller because I'm pretty sure you don't want to watch me, but you want to watch the interesting stuff about lawyers.
[00:01:24] What are low value backlinks? So this is one of the points I check always, in my in depth SEO audit. I have a section about internal linking and Low value internal backlinks is one of them. A low value internal backlink is basically the backlink It can be a text link or an image link
[00:01:42] that carries no value for Google for users as well, but mostly for Google for search engine robots.
[00:01:50] Because the way search engine robots operate and discover new content and learn about new content is by following links. And the link can carry a message about what the linked page is about and you can provide that message in the form of an anchor text. So if you have a link to your practice area page, personal injury practice area page,
[00:02:13] you should use the anchor text, personal injury lawyer, I guess. maybe personal injury attorney in some cases to add a little bit more variation but to still stay consistent and do not cause any confusion to Google. And this is the way texting should work. Unfortunately, of course, they don't.
[00:02:32] And before I go into details, there is also an important thing to, to notice about image links. very often on the website, lawyer websites, other websites, you can see image links. I think the most common example is when you have a blog listing. let me check how it is done on my website.
[00:02:49] You have a blog listing, you have images and you have, And you have links to articles. I disabled that functionality, but by default many WordPress websites have the image, featured image. It is a link and then they have, read more link, low value link, or the link like I have, which is like the title of my article.
[00:03:08] And I always make sure that title is short and mostly is composed of the main keyword. And with those image backlinks, image links, you can actually, also transfer the message to, to Google through alt text. So if you have an image link and it does not have any alt text, this is basically an empty link to Google that tells Google nothing.
[00:03:30] But if you have an image link and that alt text says LawyerSU Guide, Then this is a clear message. So you can have two links. I disabled that. I only have one link. This is only like the link through the title. In most cases, you can see two or even three backlinks in many websites. When you have image link, read more link, sometimes also like the date is linked.
[00:03:52] Sometimes the author is linked as well, which totally shouldn't be the case. and then the title. Cool. The ideal situation is, I think, what I have here, which is only one text link. Acceptable situation is where you have an image link with all text and a text link with a rich anchor text. And why am I like obsessing about it so much?
[00:04:16] Because I have seen with my own eyes a ton of websites, lawyer websites, where, they were like beautiful coded by a coder who cooperated with the best designer in the world. But they had no clue about SEO and they implemented the blog exactly in this way. You had the blog listing and in that blog listing You had one link to every blog post and it was read more link.
[00:04:44] So what does it tell Google what you are talking about? Read more, click more. You probably remember, many years ago, people were, I don't know, 15 years ago or something like that, people were linking to I think Adobe using click here I think it was Adobe, doesn't matter. But it was so crazy that at some point, when you typed click here into Google, you were getting Adobe.
[00:05:09] Of course, the algorithms evolved and Google changed that but still, internal links are totally within your control, and you can use internal links to give Google an idea of what the linked page is about, what keyword it should rank for.
[00:05:23] Of course, you need to map the keyword first, you need to know what anchor text to use. But this is something that is totally within your power. Lawyer websites very often have a lot of authority high DR, unless we're talking about the new site, so they have a lot of outside juice flowing to them.
[00:05:40] But what if you use that juice to help your internal pages. So homepage, let's say hypothetically has the most backlinks and your most important pages, I guess, are your practice area pages.
[00:05:53] So on your homepage, You shouldn't have just images of your practice areas with an arrow backlink to them or empty image link. You should have blocks of text you can have images, of course, but you should have text links to your most important practice area pages. And in those text links the anchor text should actually say, should actually contain your practice area main page, probably personal injury lawyer, workers compensation lawyer, criminal defense lawyer and all that stuff on homepage.
[00:06:25] Of course, you should also have it in your main menu as I have it. of course you should also have it in other pages this is where we go into the territory of siloing using your internal links intelligently. So your practice area could link through internal text links to supporting blog pages or supporting blog pages, for example, about personal injury.
[00:06:45] could link to your personal injury practice area page, of course, using this anchor. Some people say it is okay to just use one anchor text throughout your entire site, but usually there are variations you can use and I think it is better because at some point Google may start ignoring if all your internal links say personal injury lawyer.
[00:07:05] So you can, for example, use sometimes personal injury lawyer. At other times, it can be personal injury attorney, or it can be personal injury lawyers maybe, or personal injury lawyer in Chicago, or Chicago personal injury lawyer. Some variation, but of course within that area of relevance, being variation, being synonymous, and the best way to know what anchors to use, what variations are still within your Target keyword is to use Cora, a Cora SEO tool.
[00:07:36] I'm talking about this tool a lot because this is the, I think the game changer for lawyers and for basically every website, but you need to know how to use it because if you open Cora and you say that, it doesn't help me. it doesn't make any sense. I already knew that you don't know how to use Cora and you need to learn Cora.
[00:07:53] Cora tracks 1, 128 ranking factors at this moment. A lot of local SEO factors. It statistically correlates those factors so that, uh, When you are looking at your competitors versus yourself for a given keyword you are given very concrete instructions on what to improve And those instructions are very often about keywords, keywords, variations, entities.
[00:08:16] Let me quickly show you that. here is the personal injury lawyer. Here I can see variations and some of those variations I can use in internal links, like personal injury attorney, personal injury attorneys, personal injury lawyers.
[00:08:29] those are the variations that Cora is showing you are the things that Google bolts when you type personal injury lawyer. This isn't my client. I simply run the report for a random page just to kind of be able to show you, but this is not about Cora. Let's get back backlinks.
[00:08:45] So
[00:08:46] I just wanted to randomly review the pages that are ranking and see if they have the read more back links.
[00:08:52] I assume that the ones that are ranking in top, on top may not have them. I may be wrong. There may be some examples of good implementation, bad implementation. So, there is a compromise possible with read more links. I will talk about that in just a second. So let's review. this is personal injury lawyer for Washington DC.
[00:09:10] none of those lawyers is my client. If I'm showing a specific lawyer here, my, my, intention is by no means to discriminate them, to say they're doing something wrong, there are hundreds of ranking factors in Google and just because one of them is not done correctly doesn't mean the site is bad because there are a lot of factors.
[00:09:31] Depending on a ton of circumstances, a given factor may be given a different weight. So, for some cases, read more may have a huge impact. In other cases, it may have Smaller impact, but generally internal linking, bad internal linking, especially if you have a lot of external links, I think can make a change, especially if you fix it.
[00:09:52] So,
[00:09:53] there are tons of cases where it may have bigger, smaller impact. Generally, I have a holistic approach and I always recommend taking care of everything in SEO that is within your control and that you do not have to spend months fixing.
[00:10:06] Internal links can be a big project, but sometimes it can be a quick fix and this is the case I had with one client. personal injury lawyer, I think it was. They had exactly the setup, everything, every link on the blog, I think on practice area pages. Everything was linked through read more links. So what I did I removed more than 1, 000, 1, 000 thin old blog posts.
[00:10:31] Irrelevant news, they were like news types of posts, we removed all of that. Then I asked the coder to remove, read more links and make sure the title of the blog post is the link. we also worked a little bit on improving those titles so that they are not like gigantic sentences. They are mostly like shorter, keyword focused.
[00:10:52] We mapped keywords to at least the best blog posts we could. And within I, I think a couple of weeks or even less, the site like skyrocketed. So it was probably the effect of removing bad content and improving internal linking because this lawyer had a lot of external backlinks, a high authority, and finally those external backlinks kind of had a chance to work.
[00:11:16] One trick you can also do is if you, one of your pages became very popular because, I don't know, you created something that, that became popular, And it has a lot of backlinks, you can check pages best by links in SEMrush, in Ahrefs. You can also use that page to kind of help other pages you want to help.
[00:11:37] So on that well linked, externally linked page, you can add backlinks to internal pages that you want to help. But of course, you have to remember about the reach anchor text let's review a couple of pages. Those are top rankings, so I expect they probably are doing it right.
[00:11:53] First one. and those are like the first result for Washington DC the first page. So those sites are doing great. They're doing great SEO, high authority, so they're great, but I'm just looking for probably small things.
[00:12:07] they could improve. So if they watch this video, they can take that tip and improve and even become better for maybe more other searches. Or if they're on position five, maybe they can become position one.
[00:12:20] the first one let's see if they have a blog. I have never seen those sites before. Resources blog.
[00:12:28] very often, lawyers have this like resources and under resources, they have those things and there is a blog. I usually recommend having the blog like a separate item to kind of give it more I would say more power, making it a main navigation element instead of like sub. Not sure if it matters, but that's kind of how I like doing it.
[00:12:49] our blog. Huh. Okay. I had problems clicking that. Okay. So this is their blog. okay. They have image links. Probably those images are stock images, but that's a different story. Image links. this is also a link. let's make it bigger. So bigger, bigger, bigger.
[00:13:09] So this is image link one. And it goes to the, to this specific URL. Yes, it goes to that blog post. Maybe this is not the best example, maybe this one. More of a, like, informational blog post. So they have image link, okay.
[00:13:24] Then they have they have text link. This is a link as well, yes. blog, so this goes to the blog category uncategorized, probably, it could be better, criminal defense category, okay, criminal law category, and read more, and read more goes to that, one thing I'm already not really liking is this is a blog post, and, I feel like I'm on the homepage.
[00:13:50] And this is actually the blog post, but that's a different story. So we have three three backlinks. So one, two, three, and two backlinks to category pages. Unless you really want your category pages to rank, I think in most cases you don't, because my recommended setup is to have the category pages which correspond to practice areas exactly.
[00:14:11] So, like, you have criminal defense. lawyer, practice area, and you have criminal defense, category. There may be instances of cannibalization. It kind of depends, but I usually recommend having that category, but, adding a canonical tag on that category pointing to the practice area, criminal defense.
[00:14:30] practice area. Not necessarily linking that category too much. You can have a link to that category on, for example, on the sitemap for Google Scrolling Understanding or on the blog, but I wouldn't add links on the blog to those category pages because I'm not sure if they need internal links and I'm not sure if users need them, you would probably have to check whether users are actually clicking them, viewing those.
[00:14:56] You can use Microsoft Clarity for that. This is a great tool. Let me quickly check if this image link has an old text. So I'm using a Chrome web developer images alt attributes. now shows me alt attributes and I don't see anything here.
[00:15:14] And it may mean that those images are not even implemented.
[00:15:18] Like, images, they may be in some div tag, like background implemented. Let me check how they are implemented. Inspect href, href, .
[00:15:30] That's it. Log. Huh. Okay. So this is the link, blog content here. Yeah, so these are not even like, they're not even implemented like images, so, I would probably, if they're not implemented like images, I guess Google is not crawling those, so we can keep them. Because there is a chance users may click on them.
[00:16:09] But I would really recommend changing them into normal images. maybe I'm making a mistake. Maybe I kind of didn't notice something here. Maybe they are. Maybe they are added with JavaScript, which is also quite possible. so. Let me disable JavaScript. I hope my video will not die if I do it quickly.
[00:16:28] JavaScript disabled very quickly.
[00:16:33] Okay. Yeah. So they're not added with JavaScript. So this isn't probably the issue. So I would add them as images and make sure that all text has the main keyword. I guess this may be the main keyword, but definitely I would remove those. Read More can stay if users are really clicking on it, but we can add the underline here, so it will look like a link, and I think users will click.
[00:16:59] If you really need to have this Read More, you can now follow it. I know there are different theories regarding whether it is okay to have multiple backlinks on a page, or whether multiple linking is a problem, or it isn't, that it is okay to have multiple backlinks to one page. But for the sake of, like, best practices I would probably remove that read more and those for sure.
[00:17:24] let's see another example. This is a directory, so it doesn't matter. here we have a lawyer, an older website. I often like older websites because sometimes those older websites with, with all those, like effects, they often are better in terms of SEO.
[00:17:40] Let me see if they have a blog, yes, here is a blog. Okay, so this is the link, they also link to category this is kind of okay, but probably I wouldn't link to a category, but this is like very case specific. Another one, let's see how, They are doing this menu like, oh, I don't like this menu, but maybe users like it about us Do they have a blog?
[00:18:08] I don't see the blog man. They may not even have a blog Let me see if they have a sitemap
[00:18:13] in robots txt
[00:18:14] that may make it easier for me to Learn if they have yeah, they have a sitemap. post, post. Yeah, so they have a blog, maybe I just wasn't able to find it, Load more so google is not clicking on those load more links Google may not see all of that content.
[00:18:35] Google may render just some of this content It is possible. Google may not even see all of those pages. I don't know. I would have to see that in google search console
[00:18:43] how they link so from what I see they link to the entire element But probably with Dave tags. yes. So they're linking the entire element with the Dave, which is not the good solution for SEO.
[00:18:56] Uh, because again, you are losing the potential of internal links and the value they could carry. So what I would do is the same thing. Make sure this is. basically the only link, text link. You can have the rest, but do not put them in div tags. Yeah, there is some work to be done on that site.
[00:19:17] Okay. the next one, a personal injury. This is a lawyer website.
[00:19:24] Oh, they have location pages. I'm wondering if they're doing it right. Okay, doesn't matter. do they have a blog? I may have it probably because some, some lawyers. Kind of hide their blog a little bit. Yes. They have a blog.
[00:19:38] Okay. We have a blog. Oh, yeah, we have we have it . We have the blog. This is the example what I wanted to show you blog Articles this isn't a link. This isn't a link. This is a link Yeah Read more read more and Google thinks this is read more read more read more and on top of that I think this is Just a button, am I correct?
[00:20:04] Uh, a blah blah blah No another thing Google doesn't really click on buttons, depending on how they are implemented. But in that case Google maybe ignoring those blog pages, and those blog pages may not really be even indexed.
[00:20:19] I don't know. There is pagination, but the same story. here it looks quite okay, but car accidents, this is also something I often bring up. do you want to rank for car accident or car accident lawyer? Car accident is a totally different search, so maybe you shouldn't.
[00:20:39] Use it as your anchor text car accidents. Are you talking about car accident or a car accident lawyer? I see they have some internal linking here. Probably not, still not sure how it is implemented. but at least in the case of the blog they have some homework to do. They have a lot of locations, yeah, that may be an interesting case I think for locations.
[00:21:05] There will be a different video just talking about local SEO for lawyers. The last example and this one the last one. I'm checking, pre locations, attorneys case results.
[00:21:19] Do they have the blog or they don't?
[00:21:25] View sites. I don't see the blog. Some lawyer sites do not have a blog and this is a very huge missed opportunity. We'll see if they do a post. Yeah, they do. I probably didn't like notice, or maybe they have it. Okay, so they have a blog . Yeah, it is JavaScript, so we'll probably have to see how Google is seeing them.
[00:21:51] this is very bad. You don't want to have archives. this fucks up internal linking, totally. they link through the title, and they have this view article. So I can live with that, probably, but but I cannot live with that, definitely. They probably have a ton of low content archive pages, is this archive page?
[00:22:17] Yeah, it is, it is blocked from indexing, okay, so that's okay, I can live with that, but It is internally linked, and internally linking through to archives, old archives, like 2013.
[00:22:30] It is a waste of internal linking, basically. Okay, that's all.
[00:22:33] So, the bottom line is Use Keyword rich anchor text for internal links.
[00:22:39] Avoid read more, click more links. When using image links, make sure they they have alt text. Map the right keywords. This is also important. Map the right keywords. And the last thing, This is just a preview of what I'm sharing, what I could share. I don't have, I cannot talk about some of those things publicly because because I can't.
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[00:24:16] That's all from me. Make sure to read my Lawyer SEO guide and watch the video, the corresponding video, because there is a ton of stuff there. See you soon. Bye bye.
