Internal linking: the path to the page that sells

Take a carpentry workshop in Banyoles that has been publishing one article a month on its blog for a year: how to look after an oak table, which wood copes best with the steam in a kitchen, how long a built-in wardrobe takes to make. The articles get visits, especially the maintenance ones. The made-to-measure kitchens page, the one that brings in orders, barely shows up on Google and hardly anyone reaches it. Go through the articles one by one and none of them links to it: to get there you have to open the menu and look for it. That's fixed with internal linking, and when a website already has content it's one of the cheapest SEO jobs there is.

What internal linking is

Internal linking is the set of links that take you from one page of your website to another page on the same site: the ones in the menu, in the footer, the breadcrumbs above the title and the ones inside the text. External links point to other websites, and the ones other websites point at yours are usually called backlinks; we cover those in how to get backlinks for your website without buying any. Internal links have one advantage over the rest: they depend only on you.

Google explains it in its link best practices guide: it uses links to find new pages to crawl and as a signal when deciding which pages are relevant. With internal links you show Google what you have, what each page is about and which ones matter most to you.

What internal links are for

A well-placed internal link does three jobs at once.

Helping Google find all your pages

Google moves from page to page by following links. A page that nothing links to is harder to discover and tells Google little about how important it is, even if it's in the sitemap. Google's rule fits in one line: every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.

Helping it understand what each one is about

The visible text of the link, the anchor text, is a clue about the page it points to. A link that says “made-to-measure wooden kitchens” tells Google, and whoever reads it, what they'll find on the other side. One that says “here” tells them nothing.

Getting the customer to the page that sells

Someone reading about how to look after an oak table has already shown an interest in wood. If that same paragraph has a link to the made-to-measure kitchens, they can carry on without going back to Google. If it doesn't, they'll most likely close the tab. That's why a blog with no links to your services only does half its job, as we explain in is a business blog worth it?

The internal links every website has

• The menu. It leads to the main pages from anywhere. It's the most repeated link on the site, but it's the same on every page and gives no context.
• The footer. For what people look for at the end: contact, prices, legal pages. Cram fifty links in there and nobody finds anything.
• Breadcrumbs. The “Home / Blog / SEO” line above the title of this article. They tell you where you are and let you go up a level in one click.
• Links inside the text. The sentence around them explains why that other page is worth a visit. They carry the most information and they're the ones people forget.
• Buttons. “See prices” or “Ask for a quote” are internal links too, and they're the ones that bring the sale closer.

For Google to follow them, they have to be real links. Its guide says that, generally, it can only crawl a link if it's built with HTML's normal link tag, the “a” element with its address in the “href” attribute. A button that changes page with a JavaScript trick may work when you tap it and not exist for the search engine. It's a fault you see in drop-down menus and on websites built with a lot of JavaScript.

Link text: what to write and what to avoid

Google asks for link text that is descriptive, concise and relevant both to the page it's on and to the page it links to. On a small website that comes down to six habits:

• Say where it goes. “Made-to-measure wooden kitchens” works. “Click here” and “Read more” don't, and they're exactly the examples Google gives of what to avoid.
• Make it work on its own. Google's test: read only the link text, without the sentence around it. If you can't tell what the destination page is about, change it.
• Keep it short. Three or four well-chosen words read better than a whole underlined sentence.
• Keep it natural. Google warns that keyword stuffing in links goes against its spam policies. If twenty links say “cheap carpenter in Banyoles”, it shows. Better to vary: “our made-to-measure kitchens”, “how we build an oak kitchen”, “what a wooden kitchen costs”.
• Don't bunch them together. Five links in a row, one per word, are impossible to tell apart. Google recommends spacing them out and giving each one its own sentence.
• If the link is an image, give it alt text. Google uses it as the link text.

All of this also helps people who use a screen reader, who often jump from link to link to get an idea of the page. A list of “read more, read more, read more” tells them nothing.

Do all your internal links need the exact keyword?

No, and repeating it in every link tends to sound forced. It's enough for the text to make clear what's on the page: if it's the made-to-measure kitchens page, any natural way of saying so will do. What does help is not describing the same page in contradictory ways. If some links say “kitchens” and others “wardrobes” for the same address, whoever follows them won't be sure what they'll find.

Orphan pages: the ones nothing links to

An orphan page is a page on your website that no internal link leads to. There are more of them than you'd think:

• the landing page from an old campaign that was left online;
• a new service that was added to the website, but not to the menu or to any article;
• a page that changed address without anyone updating the links that pointed to the old one.

Some are orphans on purpose, like the thank-you page after a form or a landing page meant only for people coming from an ad. Those can stay as they are. The problem is the ones you want to show up on Google and that nobody finds by browsing your site, neither the search engine nor the customer.

How to find them

On a small website you can do it by hand. Take the list of pages from your sitemap, which is usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or a similar address, and next to each one note which other pages link to it. In Search Console, the Links report has a table of your top internally linked pages, and if you pick one you'll see which of your pages point to it. Google warns that it's a sample rather than a complete list, so it's good for spotting big problems, not for counting links one by one. We go through the other reports worth checking in Google Search Console: what to check every month. Larger websites use a crawler, a program that goes through the site the way Google would and counts the links each page receives.

How many internal links to put on each page

There's no magic number, and Google says so plainly: there's no ideal number of links a page should contain, although if you think it's too many, it probably is. We ask ourselves one question before adding each one: who does this link help, here? If it helps explain what's being said or leads to the next logical step, it stays. If it's only there so that there are links, it goes.

In an article, a few well-placed links are usually enough: one or two to the related service and the rest to articles that expand on something only mentioned in passing. On a service page, links to prices, to the contact page and to the articles that answer the doubts of someone who's about to decide.

The three-click rule and the distance to what matters

You've probably heard that no page should be more than three clicks from the home page. Nielsen Norman Group, one of the most widely cited usability consultancies, explains why the 3-click rule for navigation is false: no published study supports it, and the study they cite found that needing more than three clicks didn't make people drop off more or feel less satisfied. What counts more is that every step makes it clear where it leads, that breadcrumbs tell you where you are and that pages load quickly: three slow clicks are worse than five fast ones.

The underlying idea does hold: what sells has to be close and well signposted. Search Console's help suggests using its Links report to check that core pages, such as the home and contact pages, are properly linked, and that people can get from one page to another in as few clicks as possible. A service you can only reach from the footer, or an article buried ten pages back in the blog, will struggle to get visits.

How to do internal linking on your website, step by step

1. List the pages that sell. Services, products, prices and contact. They're the ones that should get the most links. If you still have all your services crammed onto one page, start there: we explain why in the services page: one for each thing you sell.

2. Find where you already talk about each one. Type site:yourdomain.com kitchens into Google, with your domain and the right word, and you'll see which of your pages mention it. Those are the candidates for a link.

3. Put the link where the text already talks about it. In the sentence where the topic comes up, with text that describes the destination page. A “related articles” block at the end is fine, but it doesn't replace the link inside the text.

4. Link to the new article from the old ones. When publishing, almost everyone links from the new article to the old ones and forgets the way back. Find two or three earlier articles on the same topic and add a link to the new one: it gets readers from day one and Google has more ways to find it.

5. Group articles on the same subject. If you have five articles about kitchens, they should link to each other and all point to the made-to-measure kitchens page. That way readers always have somewhere to go next and it's clear which page is the main one for that topic.

6. Fix what's broken. An internal link to a page that no longer exists ends in a 404 error and cuts the path. And if you change a page's address, as well as the redirect, update the links that pointed to the old one. It's one of the mistakes we go through in migrating your website without losing rankings.

Internal linking on a blog: every article leads to a service

Every article should leave a clear next step, and it's almost always the service it relates to. There's no need to force it into every paragraph: it's enough for the link to be at hand when the reader thinks “someone could do this for me”. At the carpentry workshop, the article on wood that copes with damp would link to the made-to-measure kitchens, the one on looking after a table to the made-to-measure furniture, and both to the contact page.

Internal linking mistakes we see often

• Everything points to the home page. The logo, the menu's “Home”, the “back” link on every article… and not a single link in the text reaches the services.
• Every link says “read more”. On the blog, on the services and on the buttons. Neither Google nor the reader knows what's behind each one.
• Menus that aren't links. They work when you tap them, but they're built with JavaScript without a normal link tag and the search engine doesn't follow them.
• Links to old addresses. They go through one or more redirects before arriving. They work, but every hop adds waiting time.
• Linking for the sake of it. A link on every line, to pages that have nothing to do with the sentence. It distracts the reader and helps nobody.

Internal linking matters for AI too

More and more people ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Mode instead of searching. On its page about AI features and your website, Google says that no special optimisation is needed to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and among the SEO fundamentals that are still worthwhile it lists making your content easily findable through internal links.

Other assistants don't publish as much detail, but their bots also have to reach a page before they can cite it. A well-linked website, with link text that says what each page is about, makes that easier. It's part of our GEO (generative engine optimisation) work, which rests on the same foundations as SEO.

What it costs to have your articles properly linked

Internal linking is included in the work. Every article in our web articles service comes with internal links to your service pages, and in our SEO work we review the site's structure, including how its pages link to each other.

The plans with articles are these: Your Website, €200 a month, with a ten-subpage website, hosting and one article a month; Basic Presence, €400 a month, with three articles a month on your website and three on your Google listing; Mid Presence, €750, with five and five plus Google Ads and Meta Ads management; and Advanced Presence, €1,500, with seven and seven plus two posts a month on your social media. Prices exclude VAT, with no setup fee and no minimum contract: thirty days' notice is enough to stop. You'll find the breakdown on our pricing page.

Internal linking with a small team

We're three partners working at the same table in the Palau Firal in Sant Antoni de Calonge, with businesses in the provinces of Girona and Barcelona. Ivan builds the websites and makes sure the menu, breadcrumbs and buttons are links Google can follow. Jordi decides with you which pages should receive the links, which are the ones that sell. Izan measures which articles end up taking people to a service or to the contact page.

If you already have a blog full of articles that lead nowhere, message us on WhatsApp with your website address and in the first conversation we'll tell you which pages we'd link first. You can also write to us through the contact form.