Internal Linking Optimization: How to Optimize your Internal Links for SEO

Welcome to a new edition of Calling Mondays. Today's edition is about a topic that I see how it is somehow very overlooked in our SEO processes and efforts, and it should be one of the top priorities. Internal linking, internal linking optimization, identifying opportunities. Where is the gap of those meant to be ranked pages that are not able to rank because they are not well internally linked? And internal links is something that we can easily influence. much more easily than backlinks. So to talk about this topic, I have invited 2 SEOs, very well-experienced SEOs in this area. On one hand, I have the wonderful Natalie Arney. She is a freelance SEO consultant. Hello, Natalie, how are you?

Hi, good to see you. I'm good, thank you. Yeah.

Great to have you too. And on the other hand, we have Jeff Kennedy. He's the head of marketing at Sitebulb. Which is one of our favorite SEO crawlers. Hello, Jeff. How are you?

Hello. I'm great. Thank you.

Before starting the conversation today, I want to thank the sponsor of today's episode of Crawling Mondays, ContentKing, which is an amazing SEO alerts tool, real-time alerts. If you want to be notified if anything goes wrong with your content optimization or technical configuration, this is a tool that you should be using. So take a look at the link here below. You have a special offer waiting for you so you can test it with a little bit of more time and start being alerted every time that something goes wrong, even internal links. Go and check them out. And now we can start today's conversation. Of course, you cannot link every single page on your website. Sometimes we work with websites that have millions of URLs. You have a hierarchy, you have a web structure, you have a taxonomy. And in some cases we have very important product pages or very important facet pages or subcategories that should be very well linked because these are targeting some of the most important queries that we really want to rank. And they are not because of how the CMS is preconfigured, which Would you say have been those types of scenarios that you have seen where internal link optimization have made all the difference, a before and after in the SEO process? If you could please share a little bit more insights and context regarding these scenarios that you have found, that you have faced, and how you have tackled them.

I've had lots of experience with clients, agency side in particular, where clients' sites had legacy issues. So there's been pages that have got some importance or that should be high converting pages or are really struggling to rank, or the user journey is really disjointed. And I think the thing with internal linking is that we need to think about it as not just an SEO thing. We need to think about it as something that's going to help with the user journey, with conversion rates. And one of the standout clients that I had When working on internal linking, basically they wanted to improve the quality of their leads. There were pages where there were, there was really great user activity. The users really interacted well with the content. However, they weren't converting. So we then obviously reviewed the internal linking, found some pages that we could link them to. It was really great. Basically, I think there was a number of folders that we actually worked on. But the average traffic increase was around 15% year on year, which for a client that, that was already successful, obviously a traffic increase is lovely. But also the qualifying leads is where it matters. So on average, our qualifying leads, once we'd improved the internal linking, was around 35%. So a 35% year on year increase in qualifying leads. It's just great for just adding some internal links. And improving the user journey. And obviously we had the traffic and keyword ranking lifts as well, which was fantastic. So it was multifaceted.

Amazing. From where did you add these links? Because I think that is where sometimes there is the struggle, right? Sometimes we wish to add these links from the overall navigation of the website, but there are a lot of constraints on doing that. How did you manage to add more internal links to these pages?

There are lots of different ways that we did it. In one folder, we moved the pages just within the global navigation. So there was no removal. We changed anchor text to improve that. And then with the additional folders, what we were doing was we were changing the calls to action and the internal link anchor text, and then adding in internal links from those interesting pages to those more qualifying, or the pages that we, we would see as the qualifying pages. Obviously we were proved right by the data, but again, it was Looking at the global navigation, looking at anchor text, looking at the pages that were already linking to those pages, improving their anchor text, but also adding additional links from those really additional useful pages.

Amazing. So those that were already connected from a topical perspective and related to those destinations. Yeah.

I find that with internal linking, it's not always about adding more links. Um, I find that it's also to do with obviously the anchor text and getting the user to actually click the link and then thinking about the anchor text relevancy to the page that you're linking to. So not just for the user, but also for bots.

What Natalie said earlier on there about legacy sites, and that's one of the things that comes to mind with me as well, working with a site a while ago. I think it was a general audit I was doing. Their rankings had gradually trailed off. And one of the things that really stood out was their main navigation. There was a lot of the links, main navigation and body links, but a lot of it was pointing to old versions of pages. So they were passing through redirects. Some of them, I think, were even passing through 302s rather than 301s. There were some pointing to canonicalized pages. So they were pointing to the wrong place, and Google was just confused. I mean, if we think of these being a sort of signpost to Google of the most important pages, it didn't know what was going on. I mean, every other week they would have one of the old pages pop into the SERPs again and then disappear and come back. So I mean, they were relatively simple technical fixes. They were just a case of updating the URLs to the true ones. And in terms of results, I couldn't really pin it down exactly to that because there was a load of other fixes went on. But for making relatively small changes, they had a hell of a boost. I mean, that was a really big thing. The other end of the scale, I was just going to say as well, that one of the things that has been a bit of an eye-opener for me was affiliate marketing again, setting up a few sites and working with brand new sites. One particular, I had a few pages, I think I had 2 inbound links to the whole website pointing to one page, and that page started getting a few rankings. And playing around with the internal linking from that page to others, it just shows how powerful an internal link can be. And you tweak the anchor text and the positions change. Once you get rid of all the other noise, you can start seeing the real power of what they can do.

Amazing. Both of you reminded me of a scenario that I have been in myself. And sometimes this is very low-hanging fruit. I had a client some time ago with very powerful, also very well-performing pillar pages for generic terms, but of course these are not money-making pages. And then many of these pillar pages were internally linking to the final product page, but the pages that we really wanted to rank in the SEO process was the category pages or the subcategory pages for all the group of softwares of that type and not a single product. So we literally included a link to the category page saying, and if you want more offering, not only this final product, but we have different tiers of products. that can solve the issue in different ways. Take a look at more options here. All of a sudden that category page with this more powerful, more meaningful internal links from a very powerful and very popular pillar page went in the top 10. As Natalie says, it's not necessarily just the volume of the internal links or how many internal links are placed, but from where they are coming.

Mm-hmm.

How authoritative is the page also linking, how relevant it is indeed, and also beyond the improvement in rankings is at the end of the day, the improvement in conversions, right? Another issue that I have seen a lot is also very old pages, pretty much legacy pages that at some point attracted tons of backlinks. Like an infographic that was shared like 5 years ago. Sometimes these pages, it's not only the issue that they are returning 404s or 302 redirecting, not even 301 redirecting, but even if they are returning 200 OK HTTP status and they are indexable, sometimes these are orphan pages. That are not like even redirecting to a currently working page that is meaningful to rank. But even if that is not meaningful to do and they should be indexable, these are sometimes like an HTML with text and without any navigation, without passing that value internally to even the homepage of the current working website or the main categories with no navigation at all. What are those scenarios that you see happening that should be low-hanging fruit? To identify and fix?

I think as Geoff mentioned earlier, as you mentioned as well, the legacy issues can be so easy to fix. Links to 404 pages, any kind of broken link, any kind of redirect or canonical chain, they can be fixed so easily. And breaking those down, again, obviously from Google's side, they do say, oh, we don't, you know, we always pass on, we always pass on equity through redirects, but we know as SEOs that that's not always the case. And we also know that we've got to speed things up for users. So fixing things like that is so, so easy. And I think again, when we're looking at sites like e-com sites where they are linking to say product pages within a global navigation, because there's a specific deal on, a specific sale on, might be linking to a hub page, like a Black Friday hub. There's so many issues that can arise there, especially dependent on the CMS and the technology once you've got a client that's got the best practice and they're knowing and understanding how to do that, it makes everything a lot easier. But I think going through, especially if you're taking on an older site, getting rid of those legacy issues and also training up teams I find is quite important. And I don't just mean like a technical SEO team or a standard SEO team, but also training up link building and content teams. What I found as well is when working with teams, I do not just technical SEO, but link acquisition. And I find a lot of the time when we're going through a creative process and discussing about a page that's going to be used as a link target, often these pages will be orphaned. And it's really, really important to tell the team as part of the process, actually planning the campaign, creating the assets, deciding where to get the links from, you need to make sure that that page actually links to other pages because What's the point in building some amazing links and getting some great coverage to these pages?

Even for cross-site.

Yeah, yeah.

In other domains or in subdomains that are completely disconnected.

Definitely, yeah.

From the rest of the site, right? Like they need cross-links, they need to interlink.

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's, you know, you're harnessing the power of external links because we all know that backlinks have so much power, but it's making sure that we use them correctly.

Just to sort of expand on what Natalie was saying there, I mean, I've seen that so much with PR as well. I mean, that's heartbreaking when you come across an old URL with 300 links pointing to it, like, what was this? And you find out it was a big campaign they did, and then a month later they killed it. Or even like you were saying, a whole subdomain. And I think sometimes, like, we're talking quite practical stuff here, but Also, there needs to be a bit more strategic thinking with a lot of stuff. Like in the long term, if you're going to be putting a lot of work and resource into particular pages, how's that— how are you going to maintain that authority? How are you going to keep a hold of it as opposed to just something you throw away in a month or two time? At the other end of the scale, in terms of the main things I see wrong, the very basics, like really generic anchor text. And I mean, there's that from an SEO point of view, but trying to get people to think about even from the user. I mean, a lot of the time you look at a link and I have no idea where it's going to take me. Like, there's no context around it. So trying to— going back again to what you're saying, Natalie, about training teams up and things and just getting them to think of if you're writing a link, make sure the person knows where they're going to end up when they click on it.

We should talk more about that too, this reactive sort of efforts that we do when we are starting with the analysis and the auditing and recommendations, but there should be a proactive way to avoid these issues from happening in the first place. That is through education, evangelization, checklist validation, a good workflow before and after. But yes, education plays a key role indeed to make it descriptive to the target page, 100%. So you mentioned, Natalie, something that you reminded me And I think that we are not so aware that this is somehow still an issue across many websites. Big important online shops linking from their main navigation using UTM parameters to tag to internal main categories and subcategories, which makes that they never link directly to the final URL to rank and they don't get that direct value, but they are always linking to a canonicalized URL. I have seen this happening more than I ever expected. And another misconfiguration or challenge scenario that I was reminded when you were talking too was when cross-linking sometimes even from informational resources between them, right? How many blog posts don't have like a read next or related articles, related resources, the same with products. Here's this product and here are these other related products or relevant products. The same with category pages. So cross-linking between, let's say, sister pages at the same level is fundamental. Also, what a difference a breadcrumb can make sometimes, especially with websites that have like this sort of minimalistic design. Unfortunately, because of the minimalistic design, there are no links to the sister categories, sister subcategories. So it's pretty much like only a way to go down to the more granular product pages from there, but not a way to even go up to like parent categories or subcategories or related categories to pass the internal link popularity value and also to facilitate the browsing of these pages. I wanted to ask you, what are the main steps that you tend to follow? Which are these minimum actions of steps that you have found you tend to always do to identify opportunities in terms of internal linking?

So from my point of view, I think being able to use tools and I usually create my own templates. I use Sitebulb and Screaming Frog in tandem with each other most of the time. And what I do is identify where the issues lie. And then what I would then do is I have 3 different kinds of processes. I covered them in my Sitebulb article and also my Brighton SEO talk, but there's like 3 main processes that I use to then identify any opportunities for linking. That's if you're, if you're looking for new links. Obviously before that, you need to figure out, well, is it a situation where I'm going to have to alleviate issues? So is it, is there a redirect chain? Are we linking to dead pages? What do we need to do? So I think it's analyze, find the solution, and then get cracking with whichever way you're, you're looking to improve it, whether it is implementing those changes. Whether it's looking for more ways to add links or more sources and places on the site to add those links to, or it could be finding places where you need to remove links from. So it might be a non-indexable page and then you can just go and clean up that page. If users aren't clicking on that link, then it's not worth having that link in the first place. So yeah, I always think about the user.

You mentioned we're going to talk about this. I thought I had in my head that I've got a straightforward process for how I do this. And when I looked at it, it's really not. I've got about half a dozen or more different processes. So I mean, I tried to sort of think about the different ones, and probably the main one that I've got is starting with target pages. So if I know I've got a set of pages, want to rank these better, I know what we're wanting to rank them for, start off with them keywords, chuck them into a crawler, um, into content search. So try to find all the different pages that have variations of that on. Prioritize them by URL rank or whatever sort of page-level metric you've got and go through them pages and see where are the opportunities to link to them target pages for. And obviously there you're prioritizing the most important pages to give links back from. Sometimes flip that round as well and use the source pages. So take the highest priority pages on the site. So you can have the homepage and then some hub pages and things and Go through them and kind of look. Well, have you got anchor text that you can optimize a bit more? Because these are really powerful links. It's worth spending that time on. Have you got redundant ones? Get rid of them. Increase the share to the ones you've got left. And are there additional important pages you can be linking to? I suppose one of the other big ways is just manually looking through automated opportunities. So thinking of the the main nav as being automated in a sense of. You add one link and you're adding across the whole site, but also the template level. So like you mentioned before, Aleyda, sort of related products, related categories, other articles you might find interesting, them sort of things, and breadcrumbs. So them sort of things where it can be one implementation for a big impact. And it usually varies depending on the type of site, like e-commerce is very different to publishing or—

I think that we can all agree that the first step is crawling the website, simulating the behavior of the bot to see what is actually findable and how many links your top main category, those pages that matter the most for you to rank, are getting internally. What I'd like to do also to give a little bit of more context and identify opportunities and where is the issue, is to blend the data of the crawl with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. I call this like my SEO worksheet that I have the crawl data, how many internal links they have, and the popularity metric as a reference. What is the gap in terms of backlinks? You also can blend there and add there your backlinks data from your favorite backlink tool and see how these pages that are very important for you to rank are ranking for their targeted queries. So you can see, okay, all those that are ranking not yet in the first position, but are ranking between position 3 or 10. And they have all the backlinks in the world, but take a look. They are not linked from the main navigation yet. They are not linked from the homepage. They only have 5 links somehow. And this is a million URLs website. So of course there are opportunities like that, that should be much more obvious and say, okay, I definitely need to start cross-linking this page better. I think that there is a good way, putting in context based on actual metrics and rankings for those queries that actually matter for you and the goals that you're trying to achieve at the end of the day. We have talked a little bit about the steps, the dos and don'ts. What are the tools that you use? We have mentioned a little bit of how handy crawlers and fundamental crawlers can be here. What are the tools that you use to identify these opportunities? faster and in a cost-effective way.

My, the 3 tools that I mainly use are Ahrefs. I use that to look for backlinks and to find the best ranking pages. They've got some great ways to use that to find those pages on there and identify opportunities. And then, as I mentioned previously, I use Sitebulb and Screaming Frog kind of in tandem. I find that it's really helpful. I think it's more that how my brain works that I have Sitebulb that kind of tells me certain things for internal linking. So for example, they've got a really great way of telling you where you've got pages that have got suboptimal internal link anchor text. So when you're just using things like here as your anchor text, I find that it's so, so helpful and making sure that obviously you're using more useful anchor text for the user rather than just constantly using here. And then traditionally I've, I've always used Screaming Frog since I started. I use that to identify chains and things like that because I find it quite easy. And I also use their, in part of my link sourcing, internal link sourcing. What I do is I use their content search tool so that I can crawl the site and search for specific opportunities.

I suppose my first tool is quite an obvious one, Sitebulb. I do use that even for my own stuff. A lot now. We have been trying to pull more tools in there to facilitate the journey. I mean, like Natalie mentioned, it's usually a semi-automated process. So we have hints which we're trying to pull more and more in that just flag up where we, where we think we can identify specific problems. Like if you've got a load of non-generic anchor text or things like that on particular pages. And so we've got the likes of them things that flag up, these are a problem that we're going to investigate. But then the The areas that I use probably more are the URL Explorer. So you can just— all of the data in there, so all of your link data, you can filter by which are the ones with the most loads of links pointing out or no links pointing out, they've got no internal links, that sort of thing. And then prioritize by the URL rank. But then fairly recently we added the Link Explorer as well, which rather than having row per page, it is every row is an individual link. So if you've got 10 internal links on a page, they will be 10 rows. So that gives a different level of granularity when you're looking at different things, because we also categorize them links by whether they're part of the navigation or the template or the body. So you start being able to get really granular on how you can Cut and slice your data up and work out where the opportunities are. Beyond that as well, I use external stuff. So Ahrefs, bit of SEMrush or Semrush now because I something you mentioned earlier on later about pages that have got loads of backlinks that are erroring or four of four or they're orphans.

100%. You identify that there's something off with the numbers of the reports of whatever tools you use, but you actually need to go to the page to visualize and see, okay, I see that there are no secondary navigation. I see that there isn't a footer. I see that there's no sidebars. You definitely need to go and check yourself, not necessarily every page by page, but type of page or type of template. I want to finish with a last tip. something that you think that we haven't covered yet, that you totally think that will be super useful, meaningful, relevant for our audience to take into consideration when doing internal linking analysis to improve their process, to make it easier, please feel free.

From my perspective, I think we can use loads of different tools. And as we mentioned before, being able to manually check things is so important. But I think at the end of the day, we're doing this not just for bots, but We're also doing it for users. So my tip is whenever you're looking to add internal links, remove them, improve them, whatever you're trying to do, put the user first, put yourself in the user's seat and look and see what you would click on, what you would improve, how you would see things. Because at the end of the day, that's who we're creating this content for. That's who's going to convert. That's who we're going to get the leads from. So yeah, put the user first.

Natalie touched upon earlier on, get writers and editors involved, train them up on what they should and shouldn't be doing and why it's important, because that can solve so many problems in the long run. And the other one is just as a quick win sort of thing is look at your main navigation, go through it, remove any redundant links, anything that isn't really important shouldn't be in there, optimize the anchor text in there. I mean, anchor text is important in general, but in them links, I mean, you're essentially pointing to every page on— user on every page on the site through them. So that's really important. And if you've got really important pages that aren't in there, you should probably consider having them in. I mean, again, what Natalie was saying there, think about from a user's point of view. If you've got one of the most important pages on your site, surely it should be in that main navigation.

This is great. Yes. And I have to say too, that you, you cover a very important point that potentially we had missed before, but actually happens, right? Like overlinking, right? The websites that it's not because of a lack of links, but because they have 3 levels of navigation. Sometimes like second, third level are not even rendered in the DOM, so the links don't exist at all. And so it's highly important to double-check that if the links are actually implemented with href tags, that if the links are relying on client-side JavaScript, that at least like that the speed is good, that they are correctly rendered. And the excess of them, if there are too many, what we need to think about is what Natalie mentioned, right? Like how many links are actually useful for your users? How many links are actually worth it to place to? refer the users to pages where it actually makes sense for them to browse from where you are. So that should always drive internal linking in the first place. So thank you, thank you very much for your wisdom today, Natalie and Jeff. I really appreciate it. I hope that you in the audience have also found this very useful for your internal linking optimization. If you have any questions, if you have any doubts, Please don't hesitate to leave your questions here. I will tag Nat and Jeff so they can follow up. And please follow them through social media. You can see their social presence here on the screen and you can follow them. They are very active and they are very nice, as you can see. And if you like today's edition of Crawling Mondays, please don't wait for longer and subscribe now in case you haven't subscribed yet. Thank you very much and looking forward to see you in the next edition of Crawling Mondays.

Thank you.