Blog / seo wednesday
Internal Linking for Small Business Sites
How to link your own pages together properly: where to add links, what anchor text to use, and the linking mistakes that quietly hold small sites back.
Most small sites we look at have perfectly good pages that nothing links to. The writing is fine, the page loads fast, and it still gets no traffic, because it sits four clicks from the home page with no path in. Internal linking is the cheapest SEO work available. No new content to write, nobody to email. You are just connecting pages you already own. This week's instalment of our SEO series covers how to do it without turning your site into a link farm.
What an internal link is actually doing
Three things. It helps search engines find the page in the first place, since crawlers discover most new URLs by following links from pages they already know about. It tells them what the destination is about, through the words you use in the link. And it passes along some of the standing that the linking page has earned.
There is a fourth benefit that has nothing to do with search engines: a reader who finishes your post about roof flashing and sees a link to your gutter repair page is a reader who might book something. That is usually the bigger win.
Link from the pages that already get traffic
Open Search Console, go to Performance, and sort your pages by clicks. Look at your top ten. Those are the pages with the most standing to share and the most eyeballs to redirect.
Now go through each one and add one to three links, in the body text, to pages that need the help. A bakery whose "how far ahead to order a wedding cake" post gets steady traffic should be linking from inside that post to the wedding cake ordering page. Obvious in hindsight, and we see it missing constantly.
Links inside the body of a page do more for you than links in a footer block, and they get clicked far more often. Resist the urge to solve this with a mega menu that links to all 200 pages. That is not structure, that is noise.
Write anchor text a person could read out loud
"Click here" and "read more" tell nobody anything. Google's own documentation puts it plainly: anchor text tells people and Google something about the page you are linking to, and it should be specific enough to make sense on its own. If you read the link text with the rest of the sentence covered up, you should still know where it goes.
Go the other way and you cause a different problem. Forty links across your site all reading "cheap plumber Toronto" looks manipulative because it is. Vary it. Write the link the way you would say it.
If you link with an image instead of text, the alt text does the same job, so fill it in.
The mistakes we see from the server side
Running a hosting platform gives us a particular view of this, because we see the request logs.
The most common one: internal links pointing at old URLs that now redirect. The link still works, so nobody notices. But every one of those is an extra round trip on every visit, and on a page with fifteen stale links you have added real latency for no reason. When you change a slug, update the links pointing at it rather than leaving the redirect to do the work forever. We wrote about the right way to handle redirects if you want the details.
Close behind: links hardcoded to http:// or to a www variant you no longer use, which forces another redirect hop on a site that is otherwise served cleanly over TLS. Search and replace those in your database. On our own hosting plans the redirect itself is cheap, but the extra request is not free for the visitor on a phone with two bars of signal.
Then there are orphan pages, which have no internal links at all and rely entirely on your sitemap to be found. A sitemap gets a page discovered. It does not tell a search engine the page matters.
Check your own site in about an hour
Search Console has a Links report, and its Internal links section lists your pages by how many internal links point to each one. Sort it ascending. Everything at the bottom of that list is either unimportant or neglected, and only you know which. Pages sitting in "Discovered, currently not indexed" are very often just poorly linked, something we covered in our walkthrough of the Search Console indexing report.
For anything bigger than about fifty pages, run a desktop crawler over the site. It will show you the redirect chains, the broken links, and the pages nothing points to, in one pass.
None of this is glamorous and none of it needs a specialist. Set aside an hour a month, fix ten links, and the compounding effect over a year beats most of what people pay agencies for. If you have tidied your links and pages are still slow, the bottleneck is somewhere else, and it might be ours. Open a support ticket and we will look at the request logs for your account with you.
Sources
- Make your links crawlable, Google Search Central
- SEO Starter Guide, Google Search Central