A Guide On Internal Link Building For Massive SEO Results

There is a golden rule that SEOs follow – build internal linking for all costs. It is a well-known fact that internal links help both people and search engines find content on your website.

These links create bridges that lead from one page to another on the same domain. 

You might think that internal linking is all about website navigation. And you will be correct. 

However, have you ever thought if internal links can be another source of traffic? 

Moreover, do internal links have an impact on SEO? 

In this guide, you’ll get answers to these questions and find out how to use internal link building for massive SEO results

Let’s get to the meat! 

The Importance of Internal Links in Terms of SEO

As you already know, internal links serve to help discover new content on your website. But what is going to happen if you forget to create internal links to your new page?

If this page doesn’t have any backlinks from third-party resources and isn’t in the sitemap, Google won’t find it.

What’s more important, internal links have an impact on PageRank of your website. In other words, the more internal links a page has, the higher PageRank. 

It should be stated that Google takes into account the anchor text you create for internal links. It helps Google understand the context better. John Mueller from Google confirmed this fact in his tweet.

For instance, you created a page about content design tips. This page has many internal links that point to it with anchors content “design tips”, “tips for content design”, “design tips for content”, etc. These anchors help Google understand that the page is about content design tips and may rank for these keywords. 

You might think that you can add as many internal links as you want and it helps rank the page for “content design tips”, right? 

Unlikely, this type of linking will lead to building low-quality internal linking only. Instead, focus on building a smart internal link structure. 

Create a Smart Internal Link Structure

If you review the structure of other websites, you will see that it resembles a kind of pyramid. The most important pages (about us, blog, products, etc) are on the top. Each of these pages has subpages – blog posts, services pages, etc. You can notice a certain hierarchy between pages. 

Does it mean that you should build internal links based on this hierarchy? 

Not at all. The only rule that you better keep in mind is to follow the relevance. 

For example, you have a website about music instruments. There a few main pages – guitars, drums, etc. The “guitars” page falls into two pages – electric guitars and bass guitars. In the same manner, these pages are split into subpages with the guitars by brands – MusicMan, Warwick, Ibanez, etc. And this division continues further. 

Each “main” page links to the “brand” subpages creating a topic cluster. A topic cluster is a group of interlinked pages that are related to the same topic. 

It helps people navigate your website. Web-crawlers will understand both a site and content structures. The most important pages will get more authority. You can use Sitechecker site crawler to detect all technical SEO issues in your website 

NOTE: Easy website navigation won’t work properly without a well-optimized website speed. Plus, site speed is one of the ranking factors that Google takes into account. You’ll need to have a great web hosting provider in order to improve site speed.

Internal Links Audit

To keep internal linking under control, you should run an SEO audit. You can do this with the help of the best SEO software. In this case, it will be a Site Audit tool from Ahrefs. 

There are five analytical reports to draw your attention to:

  • Broken internal links
  • Internal links to redirected pages
  • Lost on internal links (unimportant pages)
  • Deep-linked internal pages
  • Orphan pages

Let’s review each of the reports one by one. 

  1. Broken internal links

Broken internal links harm your website in terms of user experience. 

First of all, it makes sense to sort the “No. of inlinks” column from high to low. It will help you see pages that have many internal links pointing to them.

How to solve this issue? 

You can reinstate the broken pages at the same URL. Or you can choose one more option – redirect the broken page to another relevant URL and delete all internal links. 

  1. Internal links to redirected pages

By exploring this report you will get all redirected pages of your site. 

You should know that not all these issues are critical for your website. 

Let’s say, you have a few internal links that point to moved and redirected pages like http://domain.com/blog –> https://domain.com/blog. Such an internal link doesn’t harm your website. However, it would be better to fix this issue anyway. 

In the other cases, keep an eye on these redirects. If you see that the internal link redirects to a page that is not related to the topic, you must remove or update it ASAP.

  1. Lost on internal links (unimportant pages)

By reviewing this report you’ll get the list of working pages on your site. 

Click on the “Success (2xx)” green tab and sort the pages by “No. of inlinks” as you did previously with the other reports. Explore unimportant pages that have many internal links. Remove these links or delete the pages at all. 

  1. Deep-linked internal pages

Use the same report as shown above but filter down the results by applying the “Depth” filter. 

Pay attention to the pages that get more clicks compared to your seed page. If you noticed that any of the selling pages has more than three links hops from the homepage, you should reconsider an internal linking structure.

  1. Orphan pages

Review this report and you’ll stumble upon pages that don’t have internal links. 

Your task is to find orphan pages and get rid of them. 

Why is it important to do? 

Google can’t find them and these pages won’t get PageRank because of the absence of internal links. 

How to Use Internal Link Building to Force Up Pages

When it comes to increasing PageRank of the pages, internal links prevail. But what about backlinks? Do they have any impact on the page authority? 

Let’s find out!

For example, if you review the strongest pages on the Visme blog, you will see that they have tons of referring domains.

As you can see, a page with the highest URL rating has lots of referring domains along with backlinks. 

How is it connected with internal links? 

By building internal links from topic-related and high-authoritative pages to the pages with low results, you will be able to boost these pages easily. 

How to do this? 

Here are two ways that will help you out.

  • Find internal link opportunities on your site manually

For example, you have published a blog post on how to create an eBook. You know that this blog post is strategically important for you because it leads people to one of your product pages. In this very case, it is a free eBook creator

Your goal is to boost this blog post with the help of internal links. How to find out what links to use?

Go to Google and type – site:yourdomain.com “keyword related to the page”

Run through the results and see where you can apply internal linking. Here is an example of the chain for the “eBook” blog post.

Repeat this process for the rest of the posts that need a boost. 

  • Analyze your strong pages

This way is opposite to the one you have just got familiar with. Now, your task is to skim through the pages that are leaders in terms of backlinks. 

Go to Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs and review the report called “Best by links”:

This blog post has 485 referring domains. It means, it is highly authoritative and drives a good portion of the traffic. Use this post to build internal links to topic-related posts on your blog with a low level of authority. 

By the way, you can use this way on internal link building to boost some of your product pages. 

Let’s assume you own an eCommerce store. You sell spray fertilizer. Your goal is to push this product page to rank higher in Google for the query “buy spray fertilizer”. However, you realize that it is pretty challenging to build backlinks to the product page using outreach. 

Likely, there is a blog post about using spray fertilizer that is quite authoritative. Build an internal link from this post to your product page. It will boost its ranking drastically. 

To Sum Up

Do you still believe that internal linking can’t be used for massive SEO results?

Internal link building can be a powerful weapon that helps boost whatever pages you want. Just take care of creating a logical structure of the site and keep internal links following it. 

Other than that, a few reminders that you should never forget:

  • Do not use the same anchors all the time
  • Do not build internal links from the irrelevant pages

Internal link building is worth your time. Don’t neglect to do it!

If you have any suggestions on the topic, feel free to share them in the comments. 

1 comment

Leave a Reply

Previous Post

8 Professional Email Signature Templates To Use To Drive Sales

Next Post

How to Create Effective Diversity Training Programs for Sales, Marketing, and Tech Teams

Related Posts