Some of you might have already been familiar with the term internal links and external links (sometimes known as inbound links or backlinks). For the ones who are not so familiar, Internal Links are the links one builds to link one piece of content to another on the same website, often on different pages, for the purpose of providing additional information or directing traffic.
What are the benefits of Internal Links
Typically Internal Links are used for two purposes to benefit the SEO of the website
To share SEO juice
To direct traffic to reduce bounce rate
How to best utilize Internal Linking
To best explain this, let's dive into the two points mentioned above individually
To share SEO juice
It's no secret that Google crawls websites before indexing them. It's also no surprise that Google will find thousands, or significantly more websites talking about the same thing, offering the same service, etc.. How Google understands a website is then partially by crawling through the links that one has laid out (hopefully) purposefully on said website.
When the website has a well-established and logical internal linking infrastructure, it makes it easier for Google to understand what your site does and what problems it solves.
Moreover.
It's a pretty common occurrence that a website has certain page with a high page authority, and other page has very low page authority. Having Internal Links built strategically (without spamming it) will also help web pages to pass page authority to another page. It's not something that happens over night, and there's no math to it. But if done right, overtime, user behaviors will signal Google that a set of pages collective provide the best responses to a given searcher's query or searcher's intent.
To direct traffic to reduce bounce rate
It happens when your website doesn't align with searcher's intent well. In this case, searchers tend to quit your website and to to someone else's which they assume would better respond to their queries. Internal Links, in this case, provide a good opportunity to save the day and eliminate the bounce, and we all know what bounce rate means to SEO.
Alternatively, if your site has indeed provide the right response to the searcher's query, you mostly likely don't want them to just take the information and leave (likely a bounce). in this case, Internal Links, if strategized well, provide a good "exit strategy" for you to direct traffic to pages that you think are more strategically important to your business, to move the traffic further down the marketing and sales funnel.
There are many ways to creatively use Internal Links and one thing is certain: Internal Links should be taken seriously. To discuss your marketing strategy, you can schedule a free consultation here.
