How to best use internal links to improve your business’s organic SEO

Date: 04/12/2023

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Internal links can help improve your company’s search engine optimisation. For example, using internal links effectively can help keep potentially thousands of shoppers on your website longer. They can also reduce your business’s bounce rate and help your shoppers find different products they may wish to purchase.
Let’s say you write a comprehensive article explaining the best electric vehicle to buy that year, and your company offers various leasing deals, well you might wish to add internal links to the pages where the customer can express an interest in the product- for example requesting a call back from a sales person.
For example, they could click the internal link, and then they could view the cars details and fill in a simple form for a callback.

How does internal linking help improve a business’s organic SEO?

Internal links help both shoppers and also the search engines such as Google and Bing to crawl and index new pages.
Internal backlinks can be used by the search engines to crawl and index internal links, they can start to understand the website hierarchy structure and which pages are more important than others.

For example, if the page with the most links on your website, is to with “roof replacement”- then its likely the main service your business offers is roofing services.

Google can also gain an appreciation for all of the different services and products you offer, and by following these internal links, they may discover a brand-new page you have just published, such as a blog post, and Googlebot may crawl and index that page.

Great for shoppers

Internal links are also great for shoppers because if they are not interested in that particular product, they could click the internal link and view a different product.
Whereas if you did not offer that internal link, they might have bounced off the website and gone to a competitor’s website.

What exactly are internal links? And how do you add one to the page?

Adding an internal link is an absolute piece of cake if you have a CMS, like a WordPress content management system.
You can simply put the cursor over the text, highlight the text you wish to use as the anchor text, click the link button, and the hyperlink is created.
For example, you might have written a blog post promoting your businesses ten best selling products you sell; why not add internal links to the pages selling those products?

What is anchor text?

Those who don’t know much about SEO, may be under the false assumption that it’s best to keep highlighting the words, they want to improve the SEO for.
However, this is a common mistake that a lot of businesses make. Instead, you need to add internal links that will help the shopper; it’s all about being practical and helpful guiding the shopper to the right products. If you over optimise by adding too many internal links and using exact match anchor text, this can cause large SEO problems.
This means you should must only use the anchor text to accurately describe the page or blog post that it leads to in a way that helps the shopper fully understand what is being sold on that page.
For example, if you sell dog coats and keep overusing the anchor text dog coats excessively, this could even lead to a penalty from Google, which will massively and adversely affect your business’s seo.

404 and 410 status codes

As you add internal links, it’s essential that all of these are functional and working correctly; if too many of them lead to a page, which causes a 404 error, which is simply means page not found, then this could lead to a poor user experience.

Therefore, this could adversely affect your business’s seo.

Therefore, it’s worth using a quality seo tool, such as Screaming Frog, to see if there are any 404-page errors and whether these can be fixed.

Make sure that people can see the internal links

Many people purchase products and services on their smartphones; if they read a blog post, and they can’t see the internal link because it’s not highlighted- then could mean that they don’t see the internal link. So do make sure the text is not a different colour from the main text, as otherwise they are unlikely to click on it.

So do talk to your web designers. When an internal link is added, we recommend the word be underlined, perhaps make the text a different colour so it stands out.

Avoid keyword stuffing

This again continue on from our previous point that we made earlier, in that let’s say that you want to rank for “organic chocolate”, in Googles organic results; , then you shouldn’t mention this too many times in the article, to the point the text reads unnaturally, because it could be considered to be written in an unnatural way, which could lead to a penalty.

Equally, what you don’t want to do is to keep using the exact anchor text repeatedly as , again, this will lead to a penalty.

It helps to reduce the bounce rate

By using internal links effectively, you can help guide your shoppers to products or services they might want to buy. So it’s a bit like driving down the road; instead of seeing a block end and thinking we must turn back, you could offer a diversion, an alternative route.

For example, they might land on the page to view a well known brand washing machine, but you might want to say the simple block of text: why not also look at our other washing machines- we also stock these brands? Then, you can use anchor text to recommend different brands, and they may wish to click on these because they are instantly recognisable brands and might want to look at those products as well.

What you have, therefore, done is help the shopper find a different product-rather than just leaving the page, and increasing your companies bounce rate.

Consequently, you have helped to reduce the bounce rate, as they might have left the page and gone to a competitor’s website otherwise, and bought the goods from their.

Experienced seo experts

We have been helping businesses of all sizes all across Wales succeed with their search engine optimisation. We have helped companies to increase the number of sales they make dramatically; if you would like a quote for us to help your business, why not call us?