Internal linking for a local site, in plain terms
Links between your own pages are the cheapest ranking work available and the most commonly skipped. What they do, the three rules, and what we found on our own site.
An internal link is a link from one page of your site to another. That is the whole concept, and it is worth understanding because it is the only meaningful ranking work that requires no permission from anybody else.
What they actually do
Two things, and the second is the one that gets forgotten.
First, discovery. Google finds pages by following links. A page nothing links to is a page that is hard to find, and on small business sites these exist in numbers: the service page built last year that only ever appeared in the navigation on desktop, the location page linked from a footer that was later redesigned.
Second, and more usefully, they say what a page is about. A link reading "blocked drain clearing in Chermside" tells Google something specific about the destination. A link reading "click here" tells it nothing, and you have spent the link to say it.
The three rules
1. Links in the body count differently from links in the menu
Your navigation and footer link to the same set of pages from every page on the site. They are structure, and they are treated as structure.
A link inside a sentence, in the middle of a page, pointing at a related page because it genuinely helps the reader, carries more weight and more meaning. When people say a page has no internal links, they usually mean it has forty navigation links and none from any body text, which is a real problem hiding behind a large number.
2. Anchor text is a description, not a slogan
We also do drain work. <a>Click here</a> to find out more.
We also clear <a>blocked drains across Brisbane's
northside</a>, including tree root removal.The second version tells the reader what they will get and tells Google what the page is about, in the same breath. Vary the wording between links rather than using one identical phrase everywhere, which stops looking natural fast.
3. Link from the strong to the weak, not the reverse
Your homepage and your best-performing pages have the most to give. The pages that need help are the new ones and the ones nothing points at.
Most sites do this backwards: every new page dutifully links back to the homepage, which needed nothing, and nothing links forward to the new page, which needed everything.
What this looked like on our own site
This site had a problem worth describing, because it is the exact problem most local business sites have and it was invisible from inside.
We had 34 industry pages. Each had precisely one internal link pointing at it, from the industry index, and each linked out to three site-wide destinations. Thirty-four pages sitting on a single thread each, with no way to move sideways between them.
The fix was not clever. It was a rule that resolves genuinely related pages for any industry, so a plumbing page links to water damage restoration and a moving company links to self storage, plus fourteen contextual links written into existing blog posts where they actually helped the reader.
Where the links should go on a local site
- 01From your homepage to each main service page, in body text, with descriptive wording.
- 02Between service pages that genuinely relate. Hot water to plumbing repairs, cosmetic to general dentistry.
- 03From every blog post to the service page it relates to. This is the single biggest gap on most sites, and it is free. It is also what makes writing about the questions customers ask pay for itself rather than sitting in a corner of the site.
- 04From location pages to the services you actually do there, rather than to a generic services list.
- 05From your about page to your case studies and your contact page, because that is the path a person on that page is already on.
What to avoid
- The same anchor text on every link to a page. It reads as constructed rather than written.
- Links stuffed into a paragraph that does not need them. If it does not help the reader, it is not helping.
- A block of forty links at the bottom of every page. That is navigation wearing a costume.
- Linking to pages that no longer exist. Every broken internal link is a dead end you built yourself.
Internal links sit inside the wider on-page picture, covered on our on-page page. If you are adding links between location pages specifically, read this first, because linking thin pages to each other does not thicken them.
How many internal links should a page have?
Do links in the menu count?
Should I use the same anchor text every time?
Do internal links help as much as backlinks?
Want to know which of your pages nothing links to?
The free audit crawls your site and reports every page's inbound in-content links, so the orphans show up as a list rather than a suspicion.
〉 Keep reading
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