Internal linking is an unsung hero in the SEO world. Yet ironically, it’s also low-hanging fruit. Even though it’s vital for ranking success, it’s often missing from SEO strategies.
Most marketers are fixated on building new links from external sources, solely relying on strategies like HARO link building.
But without a good measure of well executed internal links, these new backlinks aren’t anywhere near as effective as they could be.
But what are internal links?
They’re links from one page or blog post to another on the same domain. In other words, these links connect two pages on the same website.
Optimizing your internal links is helpful for 3 main reasons:
- It’s easier for Google and your users to better understand the context of each page on your website.
- People and Googlebot spend more time on your website and discover more relevant content, as it’s easier for them to find this content through internal links.
- It creates an effective network of related pages that helps to distribute “link juice” throughout your site, which boosts search rankings.
Think about it — just one page, blog post, or product page is hardly enough to convey everything about a service, product, or topic. Chances are, you will end up publishing more of these to expand on different topics.
Some of these will naturally rank well while some won’t. So it makes sense to reroute the existing traffic and juice from your high-authority, high-ranking pages to your just as important, yet underperforming pages.
Why internal links should be optimized
Internal linking is a quick-win task. It’s a must, even for an ‘okay’ SEO strategy. By linking to pages internally that you want to rank with the appropriate anchor text, you can tell search engines what that page is about, and send additional link juice to it.
Like many things in SEO, there’s a lot more to it than that. Here are some other reasons why you shouldn’t ignore internal linking…
Information hierarchy
Internal links help you to create a hierarchy of information on your website. You can link to subcategory pages on your website through your homepage and then link to other pages even deeper in your website’s architecture.
This makes it easier for people to navigate your website, learn more about your business, and improve the overall user experience.
Help readers find the next useful page
A relevant link gives readers somewhere useful to go next. It might explain a term, answer a related question or connect an article with the service it describes. Choose destinations that help the reader continue their task.
More pageviews
A healthy number of internal links also helps to increase the total number of pages viewed on your site.
If your visitors like what they see, they’re probably going to want to stick around for more. To do this, you need to send them to contextually relevant pages through internal links.
Passes authority between pages
When used correctly, internal links help to pass authority between pages on your website. Different people have different names for this, such as:
- backlink authority
- page rank
- link equity
- link juice
It’s all the same. The number of internal links pointing to a page is an indication of its relative importance.
The first step is finding out what pages exist on the web. There isn’t a central registry of all web pages, so Google must constantly search for new pages and add them to its list of known pages. Some pages are known because Google has already visited them before. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page.
Google
This is why pages without any internal links pointing to them are unlikely to rank. If they aren’t a part of your sitemap and don’t have backlinks from external sites, they certainly won’t rank because Google has no way of finding them.
Google also considers the anchor text of hyperlinks. Anchor text provides additional context about the page it’s linking to. This is beneficial for both Google and your readers.
If page a is ranking well, it probably has great link authority from other websites. If that same page a links to a low performing page — page b — you end up passing on some of that authority to page b.
A practical internal linking process
Our internal linking process is simple — we scrutinize the keywords that your pages are already ranking for, then we review your existing site content to find relevant opportunities to link to that page.
The anchor text that we use is typically an ‘exact’ or ‘phrase match’. This isn’t rocket science, it’s time spent executing!
Start with a crawl or inventory of the site and a list of important destination pages. Review related articles for natural opportunities to link. Use anchor text that describes the destination, and make sure the linked page fulfils that promise.
Quality matters more than a target number of links. Do not add links where they interrupt the sentence or send readers to an unrelated page. Check for orphan pages, broken destinations and links that pass through unnecessary redirects.
After an update, check the live links and keep a record of the changes. Revisit internal linking whenever you publish, consolidate or move content. Our guide to fixing broken internal links covers the maintenance side of the work.
Turn the findings into a stronger website
If technical issues are holding your site back, our Technical SEO Audit & Fix service takes the work from diagnosis through implementation. For earned media coverage and editorial backlinks, explore our managed digital PR service.