Most people who have a website and want to promote it have heard of link building. For most people this means having another website link to yours. While that’s true and the main focus of link building efforts, there is another aspect that’s often forgotten about – Internal Linking.
What is Internal Linking
Internal link building is pretty much what it sounds like – linking from one page on your site to another. Simple enough, right. Not so much… When working through an internal link building strategy it’s critical to have a solid plan based on verifiable data.
An internal link tells Google what other pages on your site are about and give those pages some “juice”. Internal links also tell Google what pages you think are important.
Where to Start?
Google Analytics – Start by finding what pages on your site get the most traffic and what their rankings are. Based on that information you know what pages likely have extra “juice” to pass to other pages. Next you want ot figure out what pages on your site have external links. These pages are getting a lot of link juice from those other sites so they have even more juice to share.
Now you want to figure out what pages could use a boost in rank. Google Search Console can help – find pages that get a lot of impressions but are in spots 2-10 consistently. If any of those are priority pages for your business you now know where to link to.
Put this information together and make a link map. Find pages that are doing well that are somewhat related to the pages you want to do better. You may need to rewrite content or supplement the content that’s already there, but find a way to work in the title of the “to” page and use that title or a variation as the anchor text.
Now we have a good internal link. Check your ranking for that page / keyword, resubmit that page to GSC, wait 30 minutes and check the rank again. did it go up? Hopefully. If not that just means that page needs a little more TLC. Maybe a new SEO title or H1 that’s more in line with your keyword research. Maybe more internal links (don’t overdo it). Maybe more content. There are several factors that help or hurt any given page on your site.
If you want more info on internal linking or could use a professional SEO audit, call one of our SEO Consultants in Dallas for free advice and a full technical site audit.