People enter search terms into Google for a variety of reasons; Google’s ranking algorithms even factor user intent into their calculations. Informational, recreational, and purchase-oriented searches require different responses from Google’s bots. It goes without saying that playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and trying to find a lawyer who will help you after the insurance company offered you a paltry settlement for your car accident injuries or after your former employer threatened to sue you for breach of contract are not the same thing. Google should enable you to find the information you need in a single click. One way to show Google that it should place your site at the top of the list is by filling it with content relevant to the desired search term, but content is not the only thing that matters for search engine optimization (SEO). Links are also important, and you should focus on getting inbound links to all the pages of your site, not just the home page. Therefore, updating your law firm’s website regularly with professionally written, link-worthy legal blog content is an investment in your website’s organic search rankings.
Shallow Links and Where to Get Them
Shallow links are links that require three clicks or fewer (ideally one) to reach the desired content. If you wrote a blog post about noneconomic damages in car accident lawsuits, a shallow link would lead directly to that page. A deep link would lead to your law firm’s homepage; to reach the blog post, the user would have to click on “blog” and then the “car accidents” category, and then the desired post.
More importantly, shallow links boost the SEO rankings of the individual page, in this case the blog post. Links to the homepage direct all their SEO boost to the homepage, which presumably already ranks highly.
You can build shallow links through white hat means by exchanging guest posts with colleagues and organizations whose audience would be interested in your content. Your guest posts should include links directly back to the blog post (or practice area page) for which you are trying to build backlinks.
Sitelinks: The Ultimate Goal
Your goal in building backlinks to multiple pages on your site, including the homepage, is for Google to create a sitelink for your website. A sitelink is an SERP listing of a website with a link to the homepage at the top, and below it, a “table of contents” of links to various subheading pages on the site. You cannot bribe Google to make a sitelink of your law firm’s website; the only way to achieve it is by creating a website where multiple pages contain authoritative content and shallow backlinks.
Creating Quality Content Is an Ongoing Process
The only way to get a sitelink is by consistently updating your website with awesome content. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will create blog content that will attract backlinks from colleagues and strangers alike.