Dec 17, 2024

The early 2000s called… they want their navigation menus back!

This outdated SEO strategy could be costing you traffic.

I just got a great SEO question that a lot of law firms tend to overlook.

A lawyer asked me:

“Does it matter what order I put links and categories into in my menu? I just like to go alphabetical.”

I almost choked on my coffee when he said that, and had to stop him right there…

Because listing your website’s menu alphabetically is a technique straight out of the early 2000s!

I can’t give him too much grief, though.

Around 15 years ago, this was a popular strategy, and everyone was using it.

But it is definitely not what you should be doing right now!

The long and short of it is:

The way you set up your navigation menu (how you order your links and categories) is extremely important.

When Google’s indexing bots come to your site, they crawl through your menu, link by link.

Your menu’s structure tells the bots what keywords, pages, and categories are most important to you.

So you’ve got to keep your top-level items tight and focused.

You don’t want to put ten random navigation links in there.

It’s better to have four or five items, containing the most important info about your firm — like practice areas, “contact us”, reviews, etc.

Put the top-level items you care about most up top, with subcategories below them prioritized in order of importance.

For instance:

If you’re a personal injury lawyer, you might put “car accident lawyer” as the first one.

(If those are the types of cases you want.)

Or, if you’re a family lawyer and make most of your money from divorce cases, you might have “divorce lawyer + (your city)” at the top.

The bots are always going to crawl it in that order — top to bottom, category to subcategory.

So always bear that in mind when structuring your website menu!

If you’d like help optimizing your website, to increase your organic traffic and convert more of your ideal leads into cases…

Our team at ApricotLaw can perform a FREE audit on your site, and give you suggestions on how to improve it.

This is the quickest and easiest way to take advantage of our expertise, with no obligations on your end.

Plus, we’ll give you a personalized revenue growth plan (also free) to give you a clear roadmap of what to do next.

And if you’d like to bring in the big guns to overhaul your current website…

We’ve just launched our:

“Get in the Game Trust Bundle”

This is for attorneys practicing in:

Within 14 days of onboarding, you’ll get:

A detailed website audit highlighting critical errors and opportunities for improvement
Competitor analysis to uncover their best-performing keywords, backlinks, and content strategies
A custom content map packed with dozens of the most important topics and keywords for your practice area
10 pages of custom, keyword-optimized content tailored to your practice area
20 fully optimized legal directory listings, with backlinks to your site
AI-generated content prompts based on your ideal client profile (plus a content framework) to simplify creating your own website content in the future

There is no long-term contract, no need to share website access with us, and a 30-day, no-questions-asked money back guarantee.

To focus on delivering exceptional results, we’re limiting signups to the first 10 law firms.

Only 6 spots remain.

Once they’re gone, we’ll close the doors until capacity opens up again.

The price is two payments of $999.

To lock in your spot:

See you in Thursday’s issue of The Trusted Law Firm!

— Kellen Bachman
Head of Client Strategy at ApricotLaw