Are you neglecting the power of internal link building to improve your website SEO?

If yes, you are deliberately walking into lower page rankings.

Most businesses focus on external linking strategies while underestimating the power of an optimized internal link-building process.

But what is internal linking? How can you make the most of your efforts in ranking your low-performing pages?

Let’s dive deep into the strategies that boost user engagement and retention.

What Is Internal Link-Building?

Internal link-building focuses on inserting links to a page that points to another page on the same website.

It helps improve SEO for poorly ranking but highly relevant web pages.

Besides helping your target audience, it helps search engines better understand your website.

Let’s look at some significant reasons why you should focus on internal linking:

• Navigating through your website becomes much more manageable. Your users can easily find relevant content they were searching for initially
• Qualitative anchor text awakens a user’s interest, thereby boosting your page views
• Internal linking improves PageRank, a metric introduced by Google to measure the importance of web pages
• It enhances the time spent on a website which reduces your bounce rate
• Assists in crawling and indexing by helping Google understand your website better

Below are the top five link-building strategies to improve user retention.

Develop A Killer Content Marketing Strategy

Creating a lot of content is crucial for internal linking, but the links must provide value to your target audience.

What are the topics they are actively researching? Which challenges do they deal with regularly?

How does your product/service help them overcome those challenges?

Your entire content strategy should revolve around solving their problems.

You must give your audience strong reasons to stay to increase your retention rate.

Focus on the following points to enhance your current content marketing strategy:

• Create strong audience personas for creating highly relevant and helpful content
• Understand your current brand positioning in the market to create better content
• Identify the right ways of providing unique value to your audience. Study your competitors to target the areas they are missing
• Make sure your content screams your business story or the value you aim to convey
• Analyze your past content performance to focus on the right content ideas that drive maximum engagement

Link Deeper For Improving Overall Website SEO

Have you ever come across links that always lead to the homepage or contact us section?

Most websites keep their internal linking structure restricted to the sections already available on the navigational panel.

The aim of your internal linking should remain on strengthening the overall website SEO.

Another major mistake includes all the call-to-action buttons pointing to the contact us page.

Add natural links that instantly enhance your content marketing strategy.

Highly successful internal linking strategies rely on a user-focused approach.

So, answer one simple question before adding internal links to your content pieces: “Will this link provide value to your target audience?”

It’s the best way to improve user engagement and retention on your website.

Remember that people are likely to return to websites that prioritize user experience.

They will be more engaged with informational content as they can instantly relate and connect with the context. You will end up providing an excellent website experience.

Use Anchor Text With Relevant Context

Anchor text is the blue underlined text that hyperlinks display when linking to another page.

It provides users contextual information while browsing through a specific page.

There are several different types of anchor text. Here are the most common ones for your reference:

• Exact-match anchor text uses the same keywords displayed on the linked page
• Partial-match anchor text is briefly related to the main keywords as it is slightly molded to depict the value
• Branded anchor text focuses on using a brand name and generally linking back to the homepage of the mentioned brand
• Generic anchor text use words like “Click here” or “learn more”

Let’s focus on one crucial question to help you understand the best type of anchor text to use in your content: 

Is your anchor text compelling enough to make people leave what they are reading to jump to the next page?

Never try to stuff in keywords to link back to a particular page.

Use highly descriptive keywords that speak for the value the page contains.

For instance, small businesses often look for budget-friendly alternatives.

Make sure you insert this keyword when you provide a link back to a particular product you offer to that segment.

Therefore, use partial-match anchor texts to show relevant content and provoke users to click.

Let’s look at another example defining the importance of relevant context.

You wrote an article on X hacks to enhance your content marketing strategy.

Your content discusses using a content calendar and you know some people will be interested in how to create one.

So, under the subheading that mentions the content calendar, include a link back to your article with a guide on creating one.

People who are struggling will instantly relate and jump to the article before moving further.

Use The Right Number of Internal Links

Imagine a signboard in front of you with block letters saying “DO NOT OVERDO IT.”

Pay heed to that message when building your internal link. Now, is there any specific number your should follow?

Not really.

The length of the post significantly affects your internal linking structure.

For example, you should not add twenty links to a post containing 1000 words.

On the other hand, you can include more internal links for detailed or long-form posts.

Do not hesitate to add links as long as they are beneficial for the user.

Including the number of links based on the value they provide to the user will work great.

At the same time, make sure blue underlined words aren’t all they see on a page.

Identify And Work On Your Website’s Hub Pages

Hub pages are broad topics that further narrow down to specific detailed topics on other linked pages.

These pages consist of keywords with general terms and high search volume.

They are specifically important for businesses as they drive considerable traffic. All your best content is targeted on these pages.

The pages appearing on your website must mean something to the users.

These pages help you create a systematic website structure.

Sites that lack a structure often deal with poor ranking. But understand what a hub page is before enhancing it with internal linking.

People often confuse hub pages with product pages. You can create many of the former with a myth that you are focused on the latter.

Remember that people are searching for their problems or queries. No one is instantly searching for your product.

Let’s say some pages on your website are performing exceptionally well.

While others with highly detailed content hardly cut through the Google algorithms.

Internal linking to these pages that provide value to your users will help you move up on the SERPs.

 

Key Takeaways

• Internal linking helps websites in providing easy navigation, boosting page views, improving PageRank, and reducing bounce rate
• Ensure your content marketing strategy focuses on providing heavy value to your users. If not, your internal links will not get the clicks they deserve
• Stop linking back to your homepage and contact pages. Work on linking deeper for an improved overall website SEO
• Use partial-match anchor text that focuses on highlighting the value the linked page will provide to the user
• Do not go overboard in internal linking and only use links that are beneficial to the users
• Stop using your product pages in the name of hub pages. Instead, target pages and keywords with value-driven content.