Internal links are hyperlinks pointing to pages and posts within a therapist website. These internal links helps users to navigate from one location to another within the website. Not only for navigational purpose, internal links are an important way to improve the SEO of a counseling website. They help web crawlers to find and crawl the pages easily.
When done strategically these internal links provide great boost to the SEO efforts. In this post, I will show you how to make internal links properly to get the best results for your therapists SEO campaign.
What are internal links?
Internal links are basically hyperlinks that connects pages and posts within a website. Using internal links a user can navigate from one page/post to another. For example, SEO for therapists is an internal link pointing to the therapists SEO guide page on this (Therapist Rise) website.
You can think of internal links like hallways in a building. Each room is a page on your site, and the internal links are the corridors that let people walk between them. Without these connections, every page would essentially be a dead end.
Internal links can be of many types. I have listed down the most popular ones below.
1 – Navigational links – Navigational links are the links that helps users to navigate from pages to pages. They are placed in the header menu, footer, or sidebar that let people jump to main sections of your site.
Pages like Home, About, Services, Contact are placed in navigational links. They’re always visible and give visitors a consistent way to get around no matter which page they’re on.
2 – Contextual links – Contextual links are the hyperlinks that are placed naturally within the content. When you’re writing a blog post or creating a therapy service page and you mention a related topic that you’ve covered elsewhere, you link to it right there in the sentence.
These links are added naturally within the sentences without being forced or looking unnatural. These links helps crawlers understand the context of the page.
Contextual links are the most important types of interlinks that are focused upon while performing On-page SEO for therapists.
3 – Breadcrumb links – Breadcrumb links are those links which helps users to know where they are currently in your site’s hierarchy.
You’ve probably seen them at the top of pages, looking something like Home > Blog > SEO Tips. They’re helpful for sites with lots of nested categories because they let people quickly jump back to a parent section without hitting the back button repeatedly.
4 – Footer links – Footer links are those links that are placed in the footer section of the website. These links are useful for pointing to pages that don’t fit neatly in the main navigation. Privacy policies, terms of service, sitemap pages, or secondary resources are generally added in the footer section.
5 – Sidebar links – Sidebar links are those links which usually appear on blogs or content-heavy sites. These might show recent posts, popular articles, or related content. They give readers options to explore without being too pushy about it. These will be shown in your therapy blog section.
How internal links help with therapists SEO?
Google in its SEO starter guide stated that links are a great way to connect users and search engine bots to other parts of your website. Google uses internal links as a great resource to find new pages.
When you interlink among pages, you provide easy way to search engine crawlers to reach to other pages and parts of your therapists website. This is both useful for your On-page SEO efforts and technical SEO efforts. Google also mentions that links help provide more context on the topic to the search engines. This is crucial for SEO. When the search engines have better understanding about your page topic, the better chances of the page being shown in the search results.
Also, if you have read my post on backlinks for therapists you have learned about authority building of the website. When you do internal linking among pages, it helps link juice to flow from the homepage to those pages, helping them gain authority.
How to do internal linking on a therapy website?
Now after learning about how internal linking helps with SEO, its time to actually look at how to implement the internal linking properly on the therapist website.
There are two crucial steps that are required to start internal linking on a therapist website for improving local SEO. These steps are:
1 – Mapping all URLs on the counseling website
2 – Adding the mapped URLs to an excel sheet with their titles.
To start internal linking, first thing to do is map out all the pages you have. I know this sounds like a tedious task, but trust me, it makes everything so much easier down the line. Create an excel sheet of all the pages you have on your therapist website and list the URLs and title of each page.
Internal linking from Homepage
After you have created the excel sheet we can now move on to the next step. For any website, the first internal linking always starts from the homepage. We will also start from there.
Take your Homepage and look at the URLs in the excel sheet. Select the pages you think most suitable for the homepage. For example, when talking about the services that you offer to the clients, you can include the links to their dedicated service page on the homepage. The simple rule is “best links goes on the homepage”.
But don’t just link randomly and generic. Use keyword rich anchor texts while internal linking. Anchor text also called as link text is the visible part of the link. It is placed in the <a> html element which is easily crawled by Google and other search engines. For example <a href=”https://therapyexample.com/anxiety-therapy-page”>anxiety therapy page</a> is a hyper link with anchor text anxiety therapy page.
When you use keyword rich anchor texts it helps web crawlers to understand the context of the linked page. If you are on this stage of internal linking then I am sure that you have done your keyword research for therapists website. Google in it’s SEO link best practices guide says that better the anchor text the better for their crawlers to understand about the page topic you are linking to. Don’t use generic anchors.
Make sure to never write generic texts like click here, check now, etc. on the service. These generic words are meaningless and does not help in helping search engine crawlers understand the page topic.
Other pages internal linking strategy
Now when the homepage is done it’s time to move to other pages. And for a counseling website the most important pages after homepage is service pages. Doing proper internal linking is also important for doing SEO for therapists service pages. The process of internal linking the pages and homepage is given below.
To start internal linking start with a page. Don’t take multiple pages at once. Let’s say you have a page on anxiety therapy. You want to start from your anxiety therapy page. The first task to do it is read the content of the page completely. As you’re reading, think about what other pages on your site naturally connect to what you’re talking about. Maybe you mention stress management techniques, therapy modalities, etc. and you actually have a blog post about stress management exercises and dedicated pages about different therapy modalities. That’s a connection worth making which feels natural.
Also make sure to keep the link contextual. Google in it’s SEO started guide mentions to pay attention to the words before and after the links. This helps them understand the context of the link better.
Select which URLs can be good fit for that page. The key word here is fit. It has to make sense for the reader and should be contextual. I’ve seen therapist websites where someone clearly just linked random pages together because they heard internal linking was good for SEO. That doesn’t help anyone. If your anxiety therapy page talks about how anxiety often stems from past trauma, linking to your trauma therapy page makes perfect sense. But linking to your teen therapy page just because you want more links? That feels forced and readers pick up on that.
A simple tip to make this task easy is to keep the excel sheet open on one monitor and the page you are working on in the other. When you find a natural spot for a link, note it down. Something like “paragraph three, mention of sleep problems, link to insomnia and mental health blog post.” Then go back and actually add the links once you’ve mapped everything out. It will help you keeping things organized and prevent chances of missing anything.
As I already said above, to make sure the internal linking works best for you use relevant anchor texts. Don’t use generic anchor texts like here, click now, etc. Because generic anchor texts doesn’t help search engines to understand the context of the page. Keyword rich anchor texts helps search engines to understand the context of the linking page.
Mistakes to avoid while doing internal linking in a counseling website
There are several common mistakes that you can do while doing internal linking on your therapist website. This section covers those mistakes.
1. Don’t use generic anchor texts.
As I mentioned above the first mistake that you can make is using generic, meaning less words like click here, read more, learn more, etc.
When you make these generic words as anchor texts such engines get no clue from these words.
Instead use keyword rich anchor texts which have a meaning and provides clue to search engine crawlers about the topic of the page.
2. Do not leave any page as orphaned.
This is a very big mistake which many therapists make. An orphaned page is one which is not linked by any other page.
For a powerful therapists SEO campaign this can cost you page authority.
When you leave a page unlinked and orphaned you let the page authority to not pass on the whole website. This is because one of your pages is not linked and cycle is not completed.
This cause authority to leak. Also leaving pages orphaned can also differ crawlers from indexing those pages which is not good if these pages are important.
So make sure each page is linked at least single time to keep the link cycle in motion. Put green background in the URL column of the Excel sheet when a page is linked to other pages. This helps you to know which pages got linked and which ones are left.
3. Don’t overstuff the page with links.
This is the third mistake that counselors make while internal linking pages. Many therapists think that giving too many internal links from a single page will help them with SEO but the truth is opposite of it.
Having too many internal links on a page which doesn’t look natural and contextual can harm your SEO efforts.
So don’t just aggressively inter link between pages. Think about context. If after internal linking a thought comes into mind that I have done too much internal linking then this thought is true. So don’t internal links aggressively and randomly. Make sure to link only when you feel that the link is required at that point to increase the context.
4. Don’t chain up links
You might have seen many websites linking to other website pages in this way: this is a <a href=”#link1″>link1</a>, <a href=”#link1″>link2</a>, <a href=”#link3″>link3</a>.
This is a very bad practice of internal linking pages. This you mostly see when linking out to location pages, or modalities. This makes harder for the audience to distinguish between links. Also it sends bad user experience to the user which is a big reason for high bounce rate.
So, make sure to not chain up links next to each other in a line.
Final thoughts
Internal linking is a great way to boost SEO of a therapist website. It is one of the most underrated SEO technique to gain topical and domain authority. Interlinking not only helps users to reach and navigate to website pages easily but also helps crawlers to crawl your therapy website pages. Not only this internal linking also helps in passing the page authority from the Homepage to other website pages.
Internal linking also helps in understanding search engines the website content better. Search engines use internal links to understand the context of the topic.
If you have just started your therapist website or have an old one with poor internal linking structure it’s time to look at it and do a proper internal linking of pages.
Make sure to use correct anchor texts while internal linking. When done properly you will get to see the benefits of internal linking in your search rankings.