If you’re new to implementing SEO principles and best practices, you’re probably overlooking some easy-to-implement internal linking opportunities that could bring your content to the next level.
Finding strategic internal link-building opportunities is one of those time-consuming optimization tasks best left to an SEO professional. It’s long, boring, infuriating and extremely confusing!
Even with hundreds of free tools, tutorials and resources at your fingertips, you may end up facing obstacles you couldn’t have anticipated.
This can lead to stress, frustration and hours of circular SEO strategy guide reading that leads nowhere. But sometimes you have to do it yourself.
Maybe you’re on a tight budget, and you’re not sure what SEO options and services are available to you. Perhaps you just want to lightly dip your toes in the water and see if you can manually improve the internal link-building already happening on your website.
Maybe you’re a copywriter or an aspiring SEO specialist just trying to figure out the ropes so you can test some theories on establishing a site architecture that delivers.
Well, this article is for you!
Today, I will be breaking down different places in your content where you could use smart internal link-building to improve user navigation, help establish an information hierarchy and help disseminate link equity without tearing your hair out.
What Is Internal Link-Building And How Do I Find Quality Link-Building Opportunities?
Traditionally, internal link building falls into one of two categories: navigational or contextual. Unlike external links (or outlinks), which are hyperlinks that point to pages on other websites, internal links keep users on your website.
As a result, there are a few unique benefits to having a healthy internal link-building strategy;
*Internal Linking Helps Search Engines Understand the Structure of Your Website.
*Internal Links Help Clarify the ‘Authority’ Other Pages On Your Website Have in Comparison to Each Other.
*Internal Links Help Users Navigate Between Relevant Pages.
If you want to get more traffic to your website while pushing the content you’ve worked so hard to produce AND you want to improve your user experience, a strong internal linking strategy is a must-have.
For this article, I will be writing about internal link-building from the perspective of a small business owner, copywriter or independent blogger.
So, we will not be talking about best practices like shallow click-depth, optimizing anchor text or keyword strategy.
But we WILL be talking about the different pages and pieces of content that fall under those two umbrella terms and how you can use them to build links within the content you’re already producing.
Use Navigational Links to Identify Better Link-Building Opportunities
Navigational links are an essential component of an easy-to-navigate website. They are often implemented site-wide in the form of footers, headers, sidebars and breadcrumb menus.
While your website may have hundreds of pages worth of content thanks to blog posts that serve customer outreach or any other number of unique features and services, these links act like a sitemap underlining and highlighting the most important pages on your website.
These high-authority ‘pillar’ pages become the jumping-off point for entire content clusters supporting and referencing back to these main pages.
They are also the perfect links to include at the bottom of blog posts and articles when writing your call to action.
For example, when finishing up a blog post on “finding the right service provider,” you might want to link your About Us page with some anchor text at the end that says something like
‘With over x years of experience servicing Calgary small businesses, we are experts at solving your toughest SEO problems.’
Likewise, if you’re writing content that references a category you already have a dedicated page for, you could use that as an opportunity to promote it.
This could look like a quick note to “check out our other tips, tricks and strategy guides for simplifying everything SEO.”
Or you could create a link menu with related posts and articles that fall under that category in your post. You may have seen this strategy used before to create ‘recommended reading lists.’
i.e.
Other Resources to Help Build Your SEO Know-How;
- SEO Concepts and Strategies for Absolute Beginners
- How to Choose the Right Images for Your Website
- Web Development vs. Web Design and Do I Need Both?
- How to Use a Website Design Template
Suppose you’re familiar with your main pillars and how the rest of your site relates and refers back to them.
In that case, this will help create naturally recurring internal linking opportunities that support their authority in the eyes of search engines and web crawlers.
And a site that sends users to places they want to go will improve your user experience by leaps and bounds, which is exactly what we want.
Getting Creative With Contextual Links to Identify Link-Building Opportunities That Convert
Unlike navigational links, which direct users to larger ‘pillar’ pages, contextual links direct users to related content. You may have even noticed them sprinkled throughout this article.
When writing blog posts, you will likely use contextual links to send users to other places within your website with niched-down, specific content on topics they’d be most interested in.
While navigational links are a helpful way to brainstorm call-to-actions or reference overarching categories and bread-crumb-trail people back to where they want to be, contextual links are an excellent way to help people find things they didn’t know they wanted.
Use People Also Ask and Other Search Tools to Identify Related Topics
When creating a new post or page, it can be helpful to understand how it will relate to other similar search queries.
Expanding on a topic already covered in another place on your website can be an excellent opportunity to link to a parent page and vice versa.
But if you’ve already done that or it doesn’t apply, another alternative is to link to other pieces of content that would interest your reader.
While SEO tools can do this for you, even a quick Google search for your topic and a perusal of the ‘People Also Ask’ feature can yield helpful results if you’re on a budget.
From there, you create link menus or inline anchor text with your audience’s next couple of steps in mind. And you can do it all without breaking the bank or spending hours ‘guessing’ what your end user might be looking for.
Update Links for Older Blog Posts and Pages as New Content Gets Added
You’ll often find yourself expanding on or supplementing topics, products and services you’ve already written about.
This is a perfect opportunity to review older posts and pages for places in your writing where you can tweak the text to reference newer content and vice versa.
For example, a sentence about how ‘challenging it can be to run a small business” can be updated with anchor text like “while there are several reasons your small business mindset might be holding you back.”
These little review periods can be a bit time-consuming, but they’re a great way to ensure you build strong connections between all the different pages and posts on your website.
Use Bookmark Links to Make Long-Form Content Easier to Navigate
While I’ve already mentioned building link menus that bookmark key topics within long-form blog content in a previous post, it bears repeating.
A simple bookmark menu that bypasses content your reader isn’t interested in to get them to the information they want quicker is incredibly valuable.
For example, in this article, the most important tips to highlight are;
- Use Navigational Links to Identify Better Link-Building Opportunities
- Use Search Tools Like People Also Ask to Identify Related Topics
- Update Links for Older Blog Posts and Pages as You Go
- Use Bookmark Links to Make Long-Form Content Easier to Navigate
If someone is just scrolling through, hoping for a specific answer, this is an easy way to give them a quick overview of the article and where to find the answer they are looking for.
Finding Internal Link-Building Opportunities Doesn’t Need to Be Hard
A lot of it comes down to knowing the basic structure of your website and putting yourself in the shoes of your end user.
Navigational menus are an excellent place to start when identifying how the different topics you cover ‘cluster’ together and can be recommended to an end user.
They can also reveal essential pages to push when writing a call to action at the bottom of a page.
Search tools and category pages can help you identify related topics to push and recommended reading menus to build. Simply updating and tweaking text on older posts and pages can help ensure you’re not drowning in orphaned pages.
But in the end, considering how people will be using your site and providing faster, easier ways to find the things they want is your best bet at creating a simple internal link-building strategy that works.
If you’re doing your SEO on your own, these overlooked areas are an excellent place to start.
But if you’re looking to save some time and a lot of headaches, Scour Web has a team of website architecture specialists ready to take your website to the next level.
The time you spend scouring niche SEO blogs could be holding you back from achieving real, measurable growth.
