No piece of content on your website should exist on its own, in isolation. Successful SEO content strategies are built on the foundation of a content ecosystem: an interconnected network of assets that function holistically to engage audiences, earn search rankings and achieve business goals.
Internal linking is the connective tissue that contextualizes relationships between all of your website’s content. These connections help search engines and visitors understand how the various pages and topics come together to represent your brand’s focus and expertise.
Strategic use of internal links can create progressive user flows through your site, enabling customers to guide themselves deeper into the funnel. Internal linking is also critically important for SEO success. Yet this consideration often tends to be overlooked or set aside as a secondary priority.
Here’s why you shouldn’t wait on implementing a proactive system for internal linking as part of your organization’s link building strategy.
Why internal links matter for SEO
They help search engines understand your content ecosystem and its structure.
Think of web crawlers as actual spiders, exploring the intricate spiderweb that is your site and trying to map out its entirety. Proper internal links serve as threads that help the spider easily travel from one place to the next sequentially. When there are no threads to follow, or the threads are broken or go in random directions, the spider gets confused.
Importantly, effective internal linking helps your website distribute link equity and PageRank authority, helping new pages benefit from the established credibility of others.
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They create natural next steps for visitors.
When a visitor arrives at your website, one of the main goals is to keep them around with engaging content. Internal linking does this naturally by making it easy for users to find related pages and additional information. This also means they can answer all of their questions about a topic without ever needing to leave your site and, say, visit a competitor’s.
There are many logical pathways you can create through internal linking; for example, linking from a “what is X” post to a “benefits of X” or “how to do X” post, and then linking from there to a service page showing how your brand does X.
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They demonstrate your breadth of topical coverage.
Search engines and generative engines alike reward domains that demonstrate well-rounded topical authority. This is meant to mimic the way humans assign credibility — we trust people who know what they’re talking about, and have a track record to back it up.
Organizing your content into topical maps, and using smart internal linking to connect the dots, makes it clear to Google where your site’s content is focused, along with its expansiveness and depth of coverage.
They increase visibility of your most important content.
Which pages on your website are most valuable to your brand? These might include cornerstone content, topical pillars, product pages and more. When you know which pages you most want to drive people to, you can prioritize them as part of your internal linking strategy to maximize the flow of traffic to these key destinations.
Internal linking for SEO: Best practices
How should you approach internal linking to make sure you are maximizing the impact of this valuable practice? Here are a few guiding principles for effective SEO.
- Use descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text. Include contextual links in the content (not just on sidebars and footers) with descriptive text used for the link itself. For example, instead of “Check out our SEO strategy guide here,” use “Check out or SEO strategy guide.”
- Prioritize linking to high-value pages. Use internal linking to funnel website traffic to brand-critical or high-converting pages.
- Maintain a consistent and logical site structure. Clear and organized linking hierarchies make it easy for users and search engines to navigate your site. Topical maps are very helpful for this purpose.
- Update older content with links to newly published content. Create a process to identify and update existing related pages that can link to new ones when you publish, helping generate instant momentum for the new content.
- Avoid orphan pages. Virtually every page on your site should be linked to from somewhere else to ensure it gets crawled and indexed.
- Regularly monitor broken links. While clean internal linking works greatly in your SEO favor, broken links can negatively impact your site’s authority. Run regular SEO audits to identify and fix them.
- Don’t use too many (or too few) internal links on a page. Too few can lead to missed opportunities; too many can overwhelm readers. Focus on the most helpful and relevant links. A study by Zyppy found that 25-50 internal links is generally the sweet spot for pages that get the most Google Search clicks.
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Internal linking is eternally important for SEO
Internal linking is not just an afterthought — it’s a fundamental component of a strong SEO strategy. By creating a well-structured network of links within your website, you can increase search visibility, guide users through meaningful content journeys, and reinforce your brand’s topical authority.
