Internal linking probably remains the most underrated way to improve your e-commerce site’s SEO. Even though other methods may have bigger impacts, internal links are incredibly easy to implement and can still produce real results quickly.
So, if internal links aren’t a major part of your SEO strategy yet, you could be one small change away from skyrocketing the amount of traffic your site gets.
What Are Internal Links?
If you already know what internal links are but just want to know how to implement them for better SEO, jump to my list of best practices.
Otherwise, here’s a quick primer…
Internal links refer to the hyperlinks that connect one page to another on the same site. Aside from their SEO benefits, their main purpose is to help users navigate the site by directing them to related content.
They also play a major role in helping search engines understand the structure of a website. This is why the “related content” aspect I just mentioned is vital. Internal links tell search engines, “This page and this page are connected” – literally, of course, but also in terms of the information they cover.
Furthermore, they make it easier for search engines to crawl and index the website’s pages, contributing to overall site visibility. While your sitemap should include every page on your site that you want indexed, Google prefers to find every page on your site through internal links – just like your users would.
From an SEO perspective, internal links are valuable because they help distribute “link equity” throughout your site, which can improve the rankings of linked pages.
Put simply, link equity refers to the value or “authority” that is passed from one webpage to another through hyperlinks. When one page links to another, some of this authority is transferred, which can help improve the linked page’s visibility and ranking in Google and other search engines.
This is crucial to understand because the idea of link equity ties directly into Google’s PageRank algorithm. PageRank is a system developed by Google to evaluate the authority and importance of web pages based on the quality and quantity of links pointing to them. Web pages with more links from “authoritative” sites or high-value internal links generally have higher PageRank.
The amount of link equity passed depends on factors like the linking page’s authority, relevance, and the number of links on that page. Pages that have more external backlinks from authoritative sources have more link equity to share. Internal links help spread this equity within a website, boosting the SEO performance of other pages.
Internal vs. External Links
With that in mind, let’s take a moment to talk about the differences between internal and external links.
Internal links direct users to another page within the same domain. For example, linking from homepage.com/blog to homepage.com/services.
As you probably guessed, external links direct users to a different domain. For example, linking from homepage.com to another website.com.
So, whereas internal links help users navigate your site and make it easier for search engines to crawl and index more pages, external links take users to additional relevant content outside your site.
One big reason to use external links (on your blogs, anyway) is to help build authority and trust with your audience. Generally speaking, your blog will have a better chance of attracting returning traffic if readers see that you’re happy to link to credible sources if it helps them get the answers they need.
However, to be clear, including outbound links probably doesn’t improve your own site’s SEO in any meaningful way.
Contextual vs. Navigational Links
When it comes to internal links, there is one more distinction we need to draw – especially where SEO is concerned.
And that’s the difference between contextual and navigational links.
Navigational links are typically found in places like
- Menus
- Sidebars
- Headers
- Footers
And other “navigation” areas of a website (hence the name).
They help users easily access different sections of the site, such as the homepage, services page, or contact page.
Aside from that, another distinguishing factor of these links is that they’re static, meaning you’re not going to be updating the links in your site’s header on a regular basis for example. Once you set them, they’re probably staying that way.
On the other hand, contextual links are embedded within the main content of a page – usually, a blog. They appear naturally within the text and are often used to link related topics or deeper insights.
For example, if you wrote a blog about baseball gloves, good contextual internal links would take the visitor to similar topics (i.e., blogs about baseballs, baseball bats, baseball cleats, etc.).
This is why contextual links are essential for SEO. As opposed to the static nature of internal navigation links, you can change and update contextual links whenever you want to support your ongoing SEO efforts.
Why Does Internal Linking Matter for SEO?
Alright, we’ve already covered this in some detail, but let’s really get into the specifics of why it’s essential that internal linking plays a major role in your SEO efforts.
The five main reasons you need to understand are that internal links…
Tell Google How Pages Relate to One Another
Okay, to reiterate one more time, internal links play a vital role in SEO by helping Google understand how different pages on a website are connected.
When the Googlebot crawls a website, it starts by visiting the homepage and follows internal links from there.
These internal links guide Google through the site, allowing it to recognize the relationships between various pages and content. So, by linking related pages, you’re signaling to Google which pages cover similar topics, creating a logical structure for Googlebot to follow.
To go back to our earlier example, internally linking blog posts about baseballs, baseball bats, and baseball gloves would be a smart way to tell Google that these are similar pages, which can help them all rank better.
Make It Easier for Search Engines to Find Your Content
As websites expand, it becomes more and more likely that it will wind up with pages that have no internal links pointing to it at all. We call these “orphan pages.”
While sitemaps should be listing these pages, it can still take time for search engines to reach them, especially on large e-commerce websites that require more resources to crawl or newer sites that aren’t usually visited very often by Google right away.
By making sure that all of your valuable pages have internal links pointing to them, you provide search engines with faster, more direct access to that content, ensuring it gets indexed more efficiently.
…and Understand Which Pages Are Most Important
Internal links don’t just help Google find pages. They also help Google understand which pages have the most importance to your site.
I’ll go into more detail about this in just a moment, but by repeatedly linking to specific pages, you signal to Google that these pages are key pieces of content. Google evaluates the number and placement of internal links as a strong indicator of a page’s significance within your website’s structure.
In a Google webinar, John Mueller (Senior Search Analyst at Google) emphasized this point, noting that internal links assist Google in identifying your most important pages.
“It’s one of the biggest things you can do on a website to guide Google and visitors to the pages that you think are important.”
The more internal links a page has, the more it stands out to Google as being central to your site. This can influence how Google ranks those pages, helping ensure that your priority content is more visible in search results.
Tell Search Engines (and Users) What a Page Is About
The anchor text you use for your internal links can also help Google understand the pages being linked to. Obviously, if your link says “Top Workout Supplements”, Google is going to assume that’s a pretty good summary of what the page being linked to is all about.
The more consistent this anchor text is across multiple pages, the more it solidifies to Google what the target page offers users.
You can probably already think of some obvious ways internal linking can improve your site’s SEO, but we’ll go into more detail about these strategies in the next section.
Help Spread Link Equity Throughout Your Site
As I mentioned earlier, Internal links are essential for spreading link equity throughout a website.
By strategically using internal links, you can distribute the link equity gained from external backlinks to other pages on your site.
For instance, if a well-linked page – such as your homepage or a popular blog post – has high PageRank, linking from that page to others allows the equity to flow, boosting the importance of those linked pages in the eyes of Google.
This process helps elevate the ranking potential of newer or lower-traffic pages, ensuring that the benefits of external links are spread across your site, improving overall SEO performance.
Influence Sitelinks
Sitelinks are the links you see listed under a result in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs):
Having sitelinks is a huge advantage. For one thing, they push your competition farther down the page. At the same time, they increase your website’s chances of getting clicks, and potentially put your customer a lot closer to the final page they wanted to get to anyway, which improves user experience and even conversions.
While you can’t just tell Google, “Here are the pages I want you to use for sitelinks”, Google confirms that you can influence their decision. One key way is with internal links:
“Create a logical site structure that is easy for users to navigate, and make sure you link to your important pages from other relevant pages.”
So, as I covered earlier, your links should help Google understand which pages are most valuable to your site. Amongst other things, this increases the likelihood that they’ll give you more real estate on Google’s first page.
Internal Linking: 9 Best Practices to Improve Your SEO (Plus a Bonus Tip)
Okay, we’ve talked a lot about why internal inks are good for SEO, but now I want to cover some specific steps I always recommend to our clients to really leverage the power of internal links for better rankings. Please read over all of them but also check out this blog post I did on how to handle technical SEO to help your entire e-commerce website rank better, too.
1. Your Most Important Pages Should Have the Most Links
We just talked about this when it comes to sitelinks, but it’s worth repeating: if a page is important, you need to prove it to Google with lots and lots of internal links from relevant pages.
For e-commerce websites, this usually means the category pages that list the most important products, but don’t forget about your product pages, too.
And don’t lose sight of your blogs, either. While blogs don’t usually produce a ton of conversions for e-commerce sites, they can still be vital for improving your site’s overall authority.
If the page matters, prove it – with links.
2. Link Only from Relevant Pages to Relevant Pages
This is essential to remember.
I know we’ve already talked about it a lot, but when you’re adding internal links to your site, it’s crucial that you not link from one page to a completely irrelevant one. It doesn’t help either page and, in fact, it can needlessly dilute the influence of the other links coming from the same page.
If a page links out 5 times, those links are each going to be worth a lot more than if it links out 500 times. Keep that in mind when deciding how many – and which – links you want to add to each page.
3. Optimize Your Anchor Text for Keywords
For reasons we identified earlier, descriptive anchor text is important.
This is why you want to avoid generic anchor text like “Click here” and “Learn more”, etc. whenever possible. They don’t help Google understand what the page is about and, thus, do nothing for SEO.
Instead, my advice is to work the keywords you want to rank for into the anchor text. If you’re linking to a brand-new page, tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are great for finding these keywords.
Otherwise, puling the “Queries” for the page from your Google Search Console should give you plenty of inspiration, too.
Don’t Use the Same Anchor Text for Two Different Pages
When choosing anchor text for different pages on your site, make sure you don’t use the same anchor text for links to two different pages.
For example, we have one page for e-commerce SEO services, but we also have a blog post that discusses what e-commerce SEO is. While I just used similar anchor text for these two pages, they’re still different…because those two pages are different.
Using the same anchor text for internal links to two completely different pages will confuse Google, which is never good for SEO.
4. Diversify Your Anchor Text
Similarly, don’t spam the same keywords over and over again across all of your anchor text.
While it might make sense to use “tennis rackets” a few times when linking to category page that lists out the rackets you sell, this approach eventually starts looking like spam to Google.
Fortunately, you don’t have to overdo it to diversify your anchor text. I’m not suggesting you use something unnatural like “rackets for playing tennis”, but you could add variations like:
- “Our tennis rackets”
- “Our large selection of tennis rackets”
- “Our inventory of rackets”
- “Tennis rackets we ship within 2-3 days”
The importance of diversifying the anchor texts for your internal links is another reason why you can’t rely on navigational links to leverage the full power of internal linking. They all have the same anchor text and they’re all on every single page regardless of relevance, so you can only do so much with them.
These are all different anchor texts that still include some variation of the main keyword you’re targeting, “tennis rackets.”
And that’s why it is usually a good idea for e-commerce sites to invest in blogs. They may not be great for driving conversions, but they can drive up your authority and – through strategic internal linking – send it to the category and product pages that do convert customers.
5. Place Your Most Important Links at the Top of the Page
There are a number of reasons it makes sense to put your most valuable links high up on the page – especially when it’s a blog (this is less realistic for category and product pages).
First and foremost, there’s anecdotal evidence that Google seems to prioritize these links more.
So, if you were going to go back to link to 10 different pages on a blog, you’d want to put the most important one (maybe to a category or service page that drives the most profits) toward the top of the page. Expect that every link after that gets treated with less importance.
That said, don’t get carried away. Don’t flood the top of your page with links and be careful about placing one that’s less relevant over one that is. Ideally, you’re adding enough internal links to each valuable page that if a few are lower on the pages they’re being linked from, it won’t hurt your overall strategy in any significant way.
Secondly, if these links are truly relevant and helpful to your users, placing them higher up means more people will actually click on them, too. This will drop your bounce rate and can increase time-on-site, two factors that can help your site’s SEO.
6. Don’t Update an Internal Link without Updating Content
As time goes on and you decide to go back to update anchor text, don’t just change the anchor text itself.
The context around the link matters, too, but especially when making updates.
If all you do is go back and update anchor text for links by switching it out for options with better keywords, Google will take notice of your superficial change – that you’re basically just doing it to game the algorithm.
Instead, you want to change text around the link, too. I usually recommend the sentences on either side of the one that includes the link with the anchor text we’re updating. This way, to Google, it looks like changing the anchor text is just part of a larger plan to update the entire page’s text.
By the way, the same advice applies to updating your blogs. If all you do is go back and add more keywords, don’t expect Google to appreciate the “effort.” Updating keywords should seem like part of an overall larger plan to improve the content.
7. Don’t Add a Million Links Per Page
We talked about this in best practice #2, but limit your internal linking to only the most important (and relevant) pages.
In the past, John Mueller has shed some light on how too many links can dilute the PageRank each one of them passes, but he never gave a specific limit to fall under.
Conventional SEO wisdom has always been that 100 – maybe 150 – internal links per page (including headers and footers) are the limit.
That’s probably not bad advice, but I’d still recommend you start much lower than that. Many e-commerce sites have close to 100 alone just in their navigation links.
So, use your best judgment when you first begin your internal linking strategy. Link only to the pages that matter most and (last time I’ll say this, I promise) only to those that are most relevant to the page from which you’re linking.
8. Add Internal Links to Every New Page
By now, this will probably come as no surprise, but I highly recommend that you don’t publish any new pages without ensuring that there are multiple internal links pointing to it.
Fortunately, if you run an e-commerce site, any new category or product pages will come with relevant internal links the moment you hit “publish.”
However, the same can’t be said for blog posts, which is why you need to make sure this is part of your company’s best practices for publishing new content.
In fact, I’d take this a step further and say that planning the internal links should be foundational when coming up with your content calendar. If you don’t have relevant pages to link from for your new blog post, is that blog really relevant to your audience?
Maybe it is, but then you should come up with a plan for creating the requisite blogs to establish those all-important internal links.
For example, if all we did on this site was blog about SEO, but now I want to cover PPC, I’d want to create some blogs that cover both topics (i.e., “SEO vs. PPC: Which Is Better?”) to form a bridge between the SEO blogs we have and this new PPC piece.
9. Audit, Audit, Audit
Just like every other investment you make in your site’s SEO, you need to constantly audit your internal linking strategy.
Specifically, if you’re losing traffic, check to see if competitors’ pages have more internal links than yours. That probably isn’t the only issue to consider, but it’s definitely a major one.
Ahrefs is a great tool for this. Just enter any URL you want, click “Internal Links”, and take a look at where they are on the site:
BONUS TIP: Understand How Google (Might) Treat Multiple Links to the Same Page
There’s a theory that Google only “credits” the first instance of a link for a specific page when crawling another page. This concept is known as “first link priority.”
So, for example, if you link to “Basketball Shoes” in your menu bar – which appears on every single page – Google will crawl that one first before it crawls any other instances of that link on another page.
And the theory goes that Google will then “ignore” the anchor text from those other instances, meaning that they won’t help you from an SEO perspective. To get around this problem, we want to adjust the link itself so it looks different enough to Google that Google gives it credit.
To be fair, first link priority remains a controversial theory with many very experienced SEOs finding the idea laughable.
But I encourage you to check out this clip from SEO authority Cyrus Shepard who explains that there is definitely evidence that this internal linking strategy may still prove powerful:
And, if nothing else, it definitely can’t hurt to institute.
If you decide to implement this strategy, be sure to institute the “# trick” he mentions, too.
In short, if you’re going to link to a page that’s already linked to in the menu bar at the top of the page you’re linking from, beat Google’s “First Link Priority” by adding a # + word at the end of the URL.
For example, if you were linking to MyWebsite.com/baseball-bats, but this link is already in the menu bar above, link to MyWebsite.com/baseball-bats#bestbats instead. A user who clicks on it won’t be able to tell the difference and, as Cyrus points out in the video above, you may be able to get credit for the anchor text.
Make Internal Linking a Permanent Part of Your SEO Strategy
It has never been harder to optimize your site so it draws reliable traffic from Google and other search engines. Every year, there are more boxes to check and more challenges that make it harder to check them.
But internal links remain a relatively easy one. They also require you to improve your site through updating your content and adding new pages – tasks that can also be relatively simple, yet great for SEO.
So, add internal linking as a focal point of your site’s SEO strategy and you’ll leverage one of the easiest – but also most effective – strategies for attracting valuable traffic to your site.