Introduction
The purpose of this short document is to provide tips on how to optimize the internal linking from the footer to important pages of your website.
Let's look at the below sites:
Doctolib : https://www.doctolib.fr/dentiste/paris-75015
nobo.life : https://nobo.life/femme-de-menage/paris/15
On Doctolib, the footer on the "Dentist in Paris 15" page contains three blocks of links :
one for general information: About us, careers, press, etc.
one for dentists in the surrounding districts: Dentists in Paris 14, Paris 16, etc.
One for similar professions: general practitioners, ophthalmologists, etc.
On Nobo, a section is dedicated to housekeepers in the surrounding districts and another is linked to the other important pages of the site: "Man and Housekeeper" / "Tax Credit", etc.
The objective may also be simply to link other pages that would be "daughters" or "sisters" of the source page, that is to say that if we talk about equity financing for example, we could imagine a footer that contains 3 blocks:
a block dedicated to subsections by business, such as "Agriculture equity financing", "Brewery equity financing", etc.
a block dedicated to sub-sections by city or region, such as "Participatory financing Paris", "Participatory financing Rhône", "Participatory financing Aquitaine", etc.
a block dedicated to the main questions we ask ourselves related to participatory financing: "Tax credit", "How does it work", etc.
We can be inspired, for example, by what Privateaser has done on their bar reservation page in Paris, which is one of the important pages of the site: https://www.privateaser.com/reservation-bar/top-reserver-bars-paris
a dedicated block to refine the search by location: Top bar Champs Elysées, Top bar Saint Germain...
a dedicated block to refine the search by occasion: Top bar for birthday, for EVG, afterwork…
a block dedicated to types of establishments: Top dance bar, top karaoke bar, etc.
a block dedicated to guides, with editorial content, which is there to prove their expertise and to link to pages rich in content. This is useful for Google to understand that you are an expert in your field: "Guide to the best bars in Paris", "Guide to the best bars in Lyon", "Where to find the best bars ..."
Note that this is not a "real" footer because it contains more information than a "classic" footer, which features underneath it with links to general information pages such as homepage, contact, hiring, etc..
Benefits of customizing the footer
It accelerates the indexing of deep pages: the examples of pages with a footer above are often not accessible from the site menu (i.e. they are not accessible from the user's navigation), and so this allows to bring them to one or two clicks from the page from elsewhere and to give them more chances to be crawled frequently by Google
It give SEO weight to deep pages and improves the site's internal linking by grouping pages of the same categories: these footers will be shared by all the pages of the same category, and will be grouped according to a particular theme, thus accelerating the thematization of the content and proving to Google its expertise on the theme
Go further than the footer "full of links":
If we take the example of the Doctolib page: https://www.doctolib.fr/dentiste/paris-75015
We notice that above the footer, they have added a small text that personalizes the content
on the job : "When to consult a dentist?
on the how : "How is the consultation with a dentist in Paris in the 15th district? (a bit far-fetched!!)
on how to make an appointment: "How to make an appointment online with a dentist in Paris in the 15th district?
Be careful not to be "heavy-handed", but this allows you to have very personalized text vis-a-vis the targeted query, and to make links to other pages of the site, which will be more contextualized (because the links are not in a block of links, but rather within the content, which has more weight for Google, which understands it better).
I hope this content has been useful to you!
Do you agree?