Learn Why Linking To Internal Pages On Your Website Is Smart

Your landscape design firm's website is often the first point of contact potential customers will have with your company. The beauty of content marketing is the ability to actually see, through metrics, if your site is attracting the right customers for your business, as well as your ability to determine the effectiveness of your image and message.

Your goal should be to engage those visitors for as long as possible, giving them relevant content that will keep them on your website and tell them who you are, what you do, and why they should hire your firm for their next project. One key metric that can tell how long a visitors stays on your website is your “bounce rate.”

What Is A Bounce Rate and How It Affects SEO?

The definition of bounce rate is:

“ The percentage a visitors who navigate off of your website after viewing one page.”

Through metrics you have the ability to see exactly how long they stayed on the page, which pages they visited, and what they engaged with on your website. Knowing this information can help you to understand what is working on your site and what isn't, which allows you to refine and improve your site's effectiveness.

There are several ways to reduce bounce rate. First, by knowing what is working on your website, you can create similar content that better meets the needs of your readers. Another method is called internal linking. Internal linking can help to keep visitors on your site by bringing them from the content they were reading to a related piece of content within your website. As visitors browse thru your site via internal links, they stay on your site longer and learn more about your company. This can lower your bounce rate.

The Benefits of Internal Linking

Internal linking not only works to keep visitors on your website, lowering your bounce rate, it also
can work to improve your user's experience by making it easier to navigate around, define the hierarchy of your website and improve your search engine optimization efforts by distributing page authority and ranking power throughout your entire site.

Google uses internal linking as a factor when ranking websites. The basic theory is that internal links strengthen the search-optimized value of a website by providing spiders clear paths to crawl when indexing. Internal linking creates a tightly knit network of pages and posts that the search engines value.

Internal Linking Best Practices

Internal linking can drive traffic to your landscape design firms website by working to improve your SEO efforts. Incorporating difficult keywords and phrases specific to landscape design can increase the authority of your content by combining your newest content with your best performing content. The benefits of internal linking along with inbound links from other websites makes your site more visible to the search engines, improving your SERP ranking, making your site easier to find and driving traffic.

Here are a few best practices to follow to maximize your linking effectiveness.

• Create relevant, keyword rich content.
To create a lot of internal links, you need a lot of content! Develop a strong content marketing strategy and publishing calendar. The more information you post, the more you can connect that content in a meaningful way. Blogging is the best way to create online content and quality content is the best way to improve your SEO and lower your bounce rate.

• Keep links natural, related, and easy to follow.
Use a focused approach to extract value from linking. Keep your links natural and relevant. For example, if you are writing about the best use of hardscape when creating pool decking, linking to an article about using seasonal plants to create a colorful landscape year round probably isn't a “natural informational progression.” Maybe linking to that content about the various stone options for hardscaping might be more natural.

• Always anchor links to text, not images.
Anchoring links to text is always more effective than linking to images. Images can often be overlooked as links. Anchoring to text allows you to build logical related content chains that will take your visitor deeper into your website.

Internal lining is the perfect method to reduce your site's bounce rate and offers a lot of benefits for very little effort. It will improve your SERP ranking (Search Engine Rank Position) making your landscape design firm's website easier to find, engage your visitors, provide a more valuable user experience and can help you to build trust, increase conversions and generate more leads.