Internal linking requires no new content, no developer sprint and no budget approval. It uses pages you already have to make other pages you already have perform better. It is also the item most likely to sit at the bottom of an audit’s recommendations, unactioned, for a year.
Part of the reason is that it sounds trivial. It is not trivial, it is just cheap.
What internal links actually do
Two things. They tell search engines which of your pages you consider important, by how often and how prominently you link to them. And they tell search engines what a page is about, through the words used in the link.
A site where every page is linked from the footer and nowhere else has flattened both signals. Everything is equally important, which means nothing is.
Count the links to your commercial pages
Start with the pages that make you money. For each, count how many internal links point at it, and where those links come from. Most businesses find their key service pages are linked from the main navigation and almost nothing else, while a three-year-old blog post has forty inbound internal links because it happens to sit in a popular category.
The mismatch between what you care about and what you link to is the single most common finding, and correcting it is the fastest available gain.
Link from your content to your services, deliberately
Every article you have published that touches on a service you sell should link to that service page, in the body copy, with descriptive link text. Not in a “related posts” widget – in the sentence where the reader is thinking about it.
This is a one-off sweep of your existing archive. On a site with fifty posts it is an afternoon’s work, and it routinely moves rankings on the pages that matter because those pages finally look important.
Use link text that describes the destination
“Click here” and “read more” tell search engines nothing and tell screen-reader users nothing either. Describe what is on the other end: the service, the topic, the specific page.
Vary the phrasing naturally rather than repeating identical text every time. If every link to a page uses exactly the same words, it reads as manipulated, and it also makes for stilted copy.
Accessibility and SEO agree completely here, which is a useful reminder that the two disciplines overlap far more than most teams assume – the same principle runs through this guide to accessible infographics, where descriptive alternatives do double duty.
Find your orphans
Orphan pages have no internal links pointing at them. They exist, they may be in your sitemap, and they are effectively invisible. Any crawler will list them for you.
Some orphans should stay orphaned – thank-you pages, campaign landing pages you do not want in search. The rest either need links or need removing. Leaving them in limbo is the worst of the three options.
Build hub structures around your services
Group related content around the service page it supports. The service page links out to the supporting articles, and each article links back to the service page. That structure makes the relationship between the pages explicit rather than leaving it to be inferred.
It also makes the site easier for people to navigate, which is the more important benefit and the one that gets mentioned least.
Keep it maintained
Internal linking degrades. Pages get renamed, URLs change, redirects accumulate, new content gets published without being linked from anywhere. A quarterly pass – new content linked in both directions, broken internal links fixed, priority pages checked – keeps the structure from drifting back.
Establishing that routine, and getting the initial sweep done properly rather than partially, is a fairly typical first-quarter project for a Brisbane SEO agency taking over an established site. There is usually a year of easy gain sitting in the archive before anyone needs to write anything new.
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