Internal linking is one of THE most important elements of on-page SEO. Good content with proper internal linking will take you quite far in terms of ranking, and Google is never going to devalue this so it will also help to future-proof your site.
When laying out your internal link structure, keep in mind that they serve two audiences: human visitors and bots. And they serve an integral role for both.
Internal Linking For Human Visitors
Google wants your website to provide the best possible user experience, and obviously, viewers would want the same for themselves. Internal links help to create an easy path for viewers to follow from their point of entry, to the final conversion. The internal links should take them on the most concise and clearest path to the final destination, i.e. conversion.
Logical points of entry are the home page (most common), service page, or location page, depending on the search term used and how well your pages rank. You can see which pages people are entering thru via Google Analytics.
The most common point of entry is the home page. From the home page, viewers are looking to see that you offer the product or service that they are seeking. If you have followed the home page content structure outlined here, then your home page contains a product or service section that has a short blurb about each, with an internal link to the corresponding product or service page. Once the viewer has clicked through to the service/product page that best suits their needs and has confirmed that you do offer the desired product or service, then the next step in their journey is to link them to whatever you consider to be a conversion, whether that is to call the business, submit a form, book an appointment, or add to cart. You can also offer more than 1 method, e.g. click to call or submit a form, click to call or book an appointment online, etc. In this scenario, the viewer is 2 clicks away from doing business with you: home page to service/product page, then service/product page to desired conversion page. This is ideal for ranking and conversions.
In some cases, you may have a top level service page and sub-service pages. For example, plumbers frequently have “BATHROOM PLUMBING” as a top level, parent page, then “toilet repairs”, “toilet replacement”, “tub repairs”, “tub replacement”, etc as sub/child pages. In this case, you should still follow the same principle, but you will link from home to parent page, then parent page to child page, then child page to CTA(s).
Internal Links for Bots
The internet is known as “the worldwide web” for a reason. Everything on the internet is connected in some way or form, much like a spider web. The bots crawl this connected data, i.e. the “web” to determine both context and content. Internal links help bots to crawl content much faster than having to digest every word on a page, thereby enabling greater indexation with its limited crawl budget.
Anchor text plays a HUGE role in helping Google to understand what a page is about. The bots only have seconds, milliseconds, to figure out what a page is about. The 2-3 words that you select as your anchor text tells Google as much, if not more, than the entire thousand plus words on a page. This is why it is imperative to use perfect anchor text, otherwise you will confuse the bots and negatively affect the search results. More on anchor text in a bit…
Internal links also help to pass “link juice”. The 2 most common applications of this would be the home page linking to service pages, location pages and blog posts linking to top level service pages. The home page is typically going to have the most traffic and the most backlinks pointing to it, hence it has the most “SEO juice”, which can then be passed to your service pages via internal links as outlined above. Location pages are going to represent long-tail keywords and thus, will be faster and easier to rank. The same holds true with blog posts. You want to harness the power of the long-tail keyword pages and posts by having internal links from each of them, back to your top level service pages. Your top level service pages are notoriously the most difficult to rank but by leveraging internal links from your powerful home page and your powerful longtail keyword pages/posts, you will to pass the “SEO juice” to those more difficult service pages and help give them a boost.
How Many Links Per Page?
Your home page should have an internal link to each product or service for which you have a featured blurb on the home page, regardless of how many links that entails.
If you have a business that offers multiple types of operations, you may have a top level service (parent) page that lists various services under each operation. For example, a business that offers plumbing and hvac would likely have a parent page for plumbing that lists a breakdown of all plumbing services, and another for HVAC services. These types of list/parent pages can also have as many links as are needed to link from parent to each of their various child pages.
Services pages should have 2-4 links, tops. One of those links should be exact match anchor text that links back to itself, and the other 1-3 internal links should lead to topically related pages. These could be other service pages, sub-service pages, or home. You would NOT link from a top level service page to a location page or a blog post, as this creates a backwards flow of the SEO juice.
A location page should link back to itself with an exact match anchor text, and any service blurb(s) contained on that page should link back to the top level service page that coincides.
Blog posts should have 2-4 links, tops. One of those links should be exact match anchor text that links back to itself, and 1 should link to the top level service page that it pertains to. You could also have an internal link to another topically related blog post. Do NOT link from a service page to a blog post though. You want the SEO juice to run from easily ranked blog posts to more difficult to rank service pages.
One of the primary reasons why we don’t want too many internal links on service pages relates to backlinks. Let’s say that we get a couple highly desirable backlinks that are pointing to a service page. Those backlinks are sending SEO juice to that service page and it’s coming in like a fire hose. That is going to give a tremendous boost to that service page. But if we then have 50 internal links from that service page, instead of a fire hose, we’ve diluted that fire hose so much that now it’s like 50 eye-droppers passing a drop or 2 of that juice to a bunch of other pages. Now those backlinks aren’t doing much of anything for any page. By limiting the number of internal links per page, you will get more bang for your buck with backlinks.
Anchor Text
Most SEOs will tell you that you need a percentage of exact match anchors, another % of branded, another % of naked, and finally, another % of generic. I personally do not follow this formula whatsoever. You will organically have some diversity simply by using “read more” buttons with blurbs, click to call links, contact us links, and other CTAs. I also do not look at competitors when creating my internal links, frankly because most SEOs suck at this task and I do not want to copy them.
I have two guiding principles when selecting anchor text: keep it short, and do not make it spammy. These rules have served me well for 11 years now.
First, every service page and every location page gets an exact match anchor text that links back to itself. I know…this sounds stupid but hear me out. As I said above, the bots crawl the anchor text to determine what a page is about, so if your anchor text matches your permalink, which matches your page title and your H1, you’ve just further qualified for Google what that page is about. If a page has no other internal link, this one is crucial.
For the remainder of my internal links on that page, I just use common sense with the content that I have written. I do want my other links to be topically and logically relevant though. If I have a page about roof repair, well sometimes repair is not possible and replacement is needed, so I will include “roof replacement” as anchor text and link to the roof replacement page from my roof repair page, and vice versa. If it’s a page about dishwasher repairs, I would include a sentence or 2 about other kitchen plumbing that we offer and I’d link to 1 of those pages, e.g. “garbage disposal repairs”.
I also use keyword variations when linking to the same page from multiple other pages. So let’s say that I have a half dozen location pages and each of them has a blurb about “roof replacement in (city)” and all of them are going to link back to the top level roof replacement page. So as to not be spammy, my rule #2, I will mix up my anchor text to include “roof replacement”, “new roof”, “roof installation” rather than repeating “roof replacement” over and over.
Other Pages
For pages such as privacy, terms of service, etc, nobody cares. Don’t worry about internal links to or from these pages. Just put a link to them in your nav or in the footer and call it a day.
