SEO Quick Wins: Unlock Higher Rankings with Smart Internal Linking

Internal linking is a powerful yet often overlooked SEO strategy that can quickly enhance your website’s rankings. By strategically linking relevant pages, you help search engines understand your site’s structure and hierarchy while keeping visitors engaged longer.

While most marketers insert links intuitively, it pays to be more strategic in your linking optimizations. Smart internal linking can be one of your quickest and most effective SEO wins when you need to boost your rankings fast.

This guide will walk you through our proven internal linking techniques designed to boost authority, improve crawlability, and drive faster SEO results—without having to wait months for your long-term SEO strategies to take effect.

Are you not convinced yet that internal linking is one of the surest assets in your SEO strategy? John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google who frequently answers SEO questions regarding Google’s algorithm, stated that “internal linking is super critical to SEO.” He calls it one of the biggest things you can do on your website to guide Google to your most important content.

TLDR: Boost rankings with our favorite Internal Linking strategy

This internal linking strategy is designed to leverage your website’s authority to boost rankings for transactional keywords that are underperforming (i.e., keyword sleepers).

• Step (1)  Find Your Most Authoritative Pages  – Use SEMRush to identify the top pages or blog posts with the most backlinks. These pages carry the most authority and are the best sources to link from.
• Step (2) Identify Underperforming Keyword Sleepers – Use Google Search Console to find transactional keywords that rank on page 2 or 3 of Google. These “keyword sleepers” have potential but need a ranking boost.
• Step (3) Add Strategic Internal Links with Anchor Text  – Insert links within your high-authority pages, using relevant anchor text, to point to your keyword sleeper pages. This helps transfer authority and improve their rankings.

By following this approach, you’ll strengthen your site’s internal link structure and improve rankings for important keywords

Next, we’ll walk you through how to build internal links for SEO, conduct internal link analysis, and utilize the most effective internal strategies to optimally pass authority on your website to benefit your SEO success.

Understanding Link Authority and how to use it as your SEO Quick Wins

Internal linking is crucial in distributing link authority across your web pages. When done correctly, internal links can direct positive search ranking signals from one page to another, helping your most essential pages rank higher with increased link authority.

What is Link Authority?

Link authority refers to the ranking power that a page holds through links, both external and internal. While external backlinks from other websites are valuable, how you structure your internal links also significantly impacts SEO. By strategically linking to a select page within your site, you can direct authority to that page and boost its ranking potential.

This diagram simplifies link authority to be demonstrated numerically (not an actual algorithm).

As shown in the image above, simplifying the concept of link authority, the homepage link has the highest authority because the homepage is the most linked and visited page on your website. As you move down in the hierarchy, the lower category pages – the /folders, /sub-folders/ and deeper blogs or pages – will have less and less authority as they move farther and farther away from the homepage.

If a blog post or infographic on your site has gained high authority due to numerous external backlinks point to it, you can use that authority to strengthen your less visible but strategically important transactional pages through smart internal linking (highly relevant content), as shown above.

Google will follow your internal linking structure to get an idea of your site’s most important pages and assign authority accordingly. According to Yoast.com, by adding the right internal links to your page, you make sure that “Google understands the following: the relevance of the pages; the relationship between the pages; and the value of the pages.”

A Deep Dive into Internal Linking for SEO Quick Wins

Once you’ve audited your current links, it’s time to apply these principles to enhance your SEO strategy further.

Creating a Hierarchical Linking Structure

A well-structured internal linking strategy begins with a clear hierarchy. Your homepage should link to key category pages, which in turn, link to individual posts or landing pages. This structure improves crawlability and website optimization, ensuring that search engines understand the importance of each page.

Link Placement: Where and How to Link Effectively

The strategic placement of internal links can influence user engagement and SEO performance. Links placed higher in the content tend to carry more weight with search engines and are more likely to be clicked by users. Ensure that internal links are integrated naturally within the content to enhance readability and provide value, guiding users to related topics and deeper site engagement​.

Linking to High-Priority Pages and High Converting pages

Identify high-priority pages—such as landing pages or conversion-focused content—and direct more internal links to them. This internal link building strategy ensures that these pages receive more authority and rank higher in search engine results.

One way to identify these pages are to use GA4 to identify what your top high converting pages are and include

Internal Linking for Blogs

Blogs offer a perfect opportunity for internal linking. Each blog post should link to older posts with similar topics, which helps distribute page authority across your site and keeps older content alive. This practice not only improves the SEO performance of individual posts but also enhances the overall user experience by providing readers with additional valuable information​.

Also make sure to have a good balance of internal links that are blog posts and also service/ product pages. As an example, if Alphametic is creating a blog post around the topic of “Interna Linking”, like this one, we can also internally link our SEO services page to this post to create that connection between the important navigational page and this blog post.

Utilize Your Top Backlinked Content to Create Authority by Proxy

You can take your top backlinked content on the site and add internal links to those pages to pass on authority. As an example, you can use a tool like SEMRush and go to “Backlink Analytics” to identify your top backlinked content.

 

At Alphametic, one of our top backlinked pages in our Global Search Engine Market Share page. If we wanted to pass some authority onto our Service pages, we can add a link to that search engine market share page to signal to Google that the service page is also important and authoritative.

Internal Linking Best Practices

To maximize the impact of internal links, follow these practices:

• Use descriptive and highly relevant anchor text containing keywords related to the linked page’s content.
• Ensure that internal links are relevant and add value to the user experience.
• Avoid over-linking a page, as this can dilute the SEO value of the links.
• Avoid the overuse of “nofollow” links

How many Internal Links Should I have on my Page?

When implementing internal links on your webpage, it’s always important to consider the user experience. As mentioned above, avoid over-linking a page, as this can make your page unappealing to read and dilute the links’ SEO value. 

According to internallinkjuicer.com, “A good rule of thumb is to limit the number of internal links to around five or six per page. This should be enough to give your readers a few options without overwhelming them. When it comes to image links, you can include more than five or six since they don’t take up as much space as text-based links.”

Using Keyword Rich Anchor Text 

Using keyword-rich anchor text is a must for both SEO and user experience. Anchor text should naturally include your target keywords without being overly optimized. This will help Google understand the context of the linked page.

Smart Anchoring is the essence of SEO targeting

In fact, according to a study done by Zyppy.com where they analyzed 23 million internal links across 1800 websites, they found that sites that had pages with at least one exact match anchor had at least five times more traffic than pages without. (source)

Internal Link Analysis for Landing Pages: Ensuring Effectiveness

Before implementing your internal linking strategy, you must conduct an internal link audit. This audit helps you understand the current link structure and identify opportunities for improvement.

Auditing Internal Links: What is an Internal Link Audit?

An internal link audit involves reviewing all the links within your site to ensure they function correctly and effectively to pass authority. It’s a critical step in website optimization as it helps to reveal issues such as pages with no links or broken internal links.

Tools for Conducting an Internal Link Audit

There are several tools available to help you audit your internal links, such as Google Search Console and Screaming Frog. These tools can help you find internal links to a page, identify any broken links, and evaluate the internal link analysis for landing pages.

Key Steps in an Internal Link Audit

1. Map existing links: Use tools to crawl your website and identify all internal links.
2. Identify weak or broken links: Ensure all links function correctly and direct to relevant pages.
3. Prioritize linking opportunities: Focus on linking to pages that are underperforming or essential to your SEO goals.

 

 

 

Tools like Google Search Console can be used to export a report of your top-linked pages internally.

Questions to Consider:
– Are there important pages that aren’t linked enough?
– Are there un-important pages with too many internal links?

 

Tools like Screaming Frog can be used to evaluate your internal linking structure.

Key Issues to be Aware of: Broken Links, Redirected Links, Not Enough/ Too Many Links, Poor/ No Anchors, NoFollow Links, Orphan Pages

Internal Linking During Content Updates

When you update existing content, take the time to review the internal links. Adding links to newer and more relevant articles can improve the visibility and authority of both new and old content. For example, if you’re updating a page about your business’s primary services, updating links to direct to new related articles with updated information can boost relevance, as it is more valuable for the user visiting your site, improving your overall seo content strategy.

Should I Hire an SEO agency to audit my internal links?

To summarize, internal linking is essential to any successful SEO strategy. Conducting an internal link audit, following best practices for building internal links, and continuously optimizing your link structure can significantly improve your website optimization and overall rankings. Additionally, seeking professional help from a search engine marketing expert (such as the team at Alphametic) can ensure that your internal linking strategy aligns with your broader SEM and SEO goals. As SEO processes and strategy implementations become complex, it is best to know that you have experienced SEO pro in your corner.