Internal linking

Doors between the rooms of your site

Think of every page you publish as a room. Internal links are the doors. Somebody who lands on your gutter cleaning page straight from a search can only reach your estimate form, your service area page or your reviews if there is a door leading there.

Crawlers move the same way. They arrive on a page, collect the links they find, and follow those links to the next page. A page with nothing pointing at it is an orphan page, and it is exactly as easy to overlook as a room with no door.

Our own learning library runs to 361 in-depth guides at kellywm.com/blog. Without deliberate links between them, most of those pages would sit alone in the dark, reachable only by somebody who already had the address.

The pages nobody can reach

This problem is almost never visible from the front page. It shows up later as pages that quietly do nothing.

Here is the pattern, and it is common. A roofing company adds a page about storm damage inspections. The page goes into the sitemap file. It never gets added to the menu, and nothing else on the site mentions it. Six months on, the owner asks why the storm page never ranked. Nothing on the site ever pointed at it, so nothing treated it as important, the owner included.

The opposite failure is a site where every page links to every other page. Forty links stacked in a footer means each page recommends everything equally, which amounts to recommending nothing. Links written inside your sentences are the ones that carry meaning, because a person chose to put that particular link in that particular place.

For a local business the useful shape stays simple. Service pages link to the city pages where that service is offered. City pages link back to the services they cover. Both link to the one page where somebody can actually book. Working out what connects to what belongs to the same job as deciding what to publish in the first place, which is where our content marketing work sits.

Menu links, footer links, and links inside the writing

All three are internal links and they are not interchangeable. Your menu is a promise about what the site is for, so it should hold the handful of pages that matter most and nothing else. Your footer is the catch all, useful for pages people look for by name, such as hours, service areas and policies.

Links written into a paragraph do the work the other two cannot. They carry anchor text that describes the destination, and they reach a reader who is already thinking about that subject. A link inside a sentence about ice dams, pointing at your ice dam page, is worth more than the same link buried in a column of thirty footer links. If you only fix one kind, fix this one.

There is a fourth kind that gets forgotten. Breadcrumb navigation, the trail of small links running across the top of a page, quietly tells a visitor where they landed and links every level above them. On a site with services split across a dozen cities, that trail is often the only thing keeping somebody oriented after they arrive from a search deep inside your site rather than at the front door.