Mastering Internal Linking

Summary

Voices of Search Podcast – Episode Summary: Mastering Internal Linking

Release Date: December 17, 2024

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Introduction to the Episode

In the latest episode of Voices of Search, hosted by Tyson Stockton from Previsible.io, listeners are treated to an in-depth discussion on Mastering Internal Linking. Joining Tyson is Gabby Troxler, an independent SEO consultant specializing in finance, baking, and e-commerce. Building on their previous conversation about effective product page optimization, Tyson and Gabby delve into the pivotal role of internal linking in enhancing SEO performance, especially within the e-commerce landscape.

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The Importance of Internal Linking in SEO

Gabby Troxler emphasizes the growing recognition of internal linking since 2020, highlighting its critical role in search engine perception and indexing.

"A page that isn't linked to as often will just not get as much attention in the eyes of search engines." (04:30)

Gabby notes that consistent internal linking accelerates the indexing process and can significantly improve a page’s ranking potential. Tyson concurs, underscoring that internal linking is sometimes overlooked amidst the myriad SEO strategies but remains a powerful lever, particularly for large e-commerce sites.

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Tools and Techniques for Effective Internal Linking

To identify internal linking opportunities, Gabby shares her preferred toolkit:

• Screaming Frog: For comprehensive site crawling and link analysis.
• Google Search Console (GSC): Leveraging the "Search Analytics for Sheets" extension to bypass data limits and integrate with Google Sheets.

"When I'm publishing something new, I like to go old school and just use the site operator in Google Search and see if I can identify linking opportunities." (04:54)

Gabby advocates for a systematic approach: using crawling tools to generate link reports, analyzing top and underlinked pages, and employing manual searches to find contextual linking opportunities. This blend of automated and manual techniques ensures a robust internal linking framework.

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Conducting Link Audits: Determining the Right Number of Links

A common question arises: "How many links do I need to have on the page?" Tyson poses this to Gabby, seeking actionable advice.

Gabby responds by shifting the focus from absolute numbers to performance-based analysis:

"You don't need to look for exact numbers, but you can just do an analysis of which pages receive the most links and which pages receive the least links." (06:20)

Using Screaming Frog, Gabby advises comparing internal link distributions across pages, ensuring that underlinked pages are brought up to par with top performers. This comparative method allows SEOs to tailor their strategies without adhering to rigid link counts, accommodating the vast diversity in e-commerce site sizes.

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Identifying Common Opportunities in Internal Linking for E-commerce

In the context of e-commerce, Gabby highlights specific areas ripe for internal linking enhancement:

1. Product Pages Over Blog Posts:

   "Focus on linking more to products than to Blog posts. But I'm not against linking out again from products to blog posts or informational content." (08:19)

2. Similar Products and Bestsellers: Linking similar products or bestsellers ensures relevance and aids in customer decision-making.

3. Informational Content Integration: Including links to informational pages from product pages can assist users in their purchasing journey without hampering the user experience.

Tyson adds that product pages often suffer from underlinking, especially when relying solely on category pages for links. By strategically placing internal links, SEOs can enhance visibility and performance of individual products.

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Implementing and Testing Internal Linking Strategies

Gabby outlines a practical approach to implementing internal linking:

1. Establish a Linking Pattern: Start by identifying key products and creating consistent linking structures.
2. Iterative Testing: Change one variable at a time to monitor impacts on rankings and traffic.

"Once you have established a few products, a linking pattern, then you can actually start testing." (12:30)

This methodical testing ensures that changes are data-driven and their effects measurable, allowing for continuous optimization without overwhelming the team with too many variables.

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Avoiding Common Mistakes and Leveraging Missed Opportunities

Gabby advises SEOs working with established sites to conduct thorough internal linking audits, as this often unearths performance issues tied to underlinking. For new brands or when publishing new content, integrating internal linking into the publishing process is crucial.

"Internal linking really plays into the distribution part. So not just sharing your content piece on socials, but also set 5 to 10 links or whatever makes sense." (13:32)

Tyson reinforces this by encouraging in-house SEOs to prioritize internal linking due to its high impact and low resistance compared to visual changes like navigation menus.

"Internal linking has always been one of the really impactful levers that you have that I think oftentimes too you're typically met with less resistance from internal politics." (14:23)

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Conclusion and Key Takeaways

The episode wraps up with Tyson and Gabby reiterating the significance of internal linking as a foundational SEO strategy, especially for e-commerce platforms. They emphasize that when executed thoughtfully, internal linking not only boosts SEO performance but also enhances the overall user experience by supporting the customer journey.

Key Takeaways:

• Educate Stakeholders: Ensuring that clients or internal teams understand the value of internal linking is paramount.
• Leverage the Right Tools: Utilize tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console for comprehensive internal link analysis.
• Performance Over Quantity: Focus on the correlation between link distribution and page performance rather than adhering to specific link counts.
• Strategic Linking in E-commerce: Prioritize linking to product pages and relevant informational content to aid customer decision-making.
• Continuous Optimization: Implement iterative testing to refine internal linking strategies based on data-driven insights.

For those looking to enhance their SEO strategies, this episode provides actionable insights and expert advice on harnessing the power of internal linking to drive organic growth and improve search engine visibility.

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Additional Resources

• Connect with Gabby Troxler: Gabby’s LinkedIn Profile | Gabby’s Website
• Previsible.io: For comprehensive SEO consulting services, visit Previsible IO
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: Monitor your website’s SEO health for free at Ahrefs AWT

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Stay tuned to Voices of Search for more expert discussions on SEO and content marketing strategies to elevate your digital presence.

Transcript

[Ben Shap]

The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the iHear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, iHear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the iHear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Tyson Stockton.

[Tyson Stockton]

Hey, what's going on? My name is tyson from Previsible I.O. and joining me today is Gabby Troxler who is an independent SEO consultant specializing in finance, baking and E commerce, providing services for digital marketing solutions for businesses of all sizes. Yesterday Gabe and I talked about effective product page optimization and today we're continuing the conversation by discussing Mastering Internal Linking.

[Ben Shap]

This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO health backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster [e-mail] AWT. That's a H R E F S.

[Tyson Stockton]

With that, here's my conversation with Gavi Trucks, our independent SEO consultant. Gavi, welcome back.

[Gabby Troxler]

Thank you so much. I'm excited for today.

[Tyson Stockton]

Yeah, so today I feel like is one of my favorite topics within E commerce internal linking. Most e commerce shops like you're dealing with large websites most of the time. A lot of our conversations in SEO gravitate towards, I mean at least in the last few years it's gravitating towards content. Content. Let's throw in some generative AI in there. And then also you know, a little bit kind of on like the page performance, core web vitals stuff. But I feel like internal linking maybe doesn't get enough love that it deserves. Especially in like the world of E Comm where you have so many levers to pull. So to start things off for the listeners, like how would you advocate for internal linking as far as an SEO initiative or a potential lever that we have as SEOs to pull?

[Gabby Troxler]

Yeah, I think what you said about internal linking maybe not being not having as much buy in is really true. Although I've seen it really take off I think since 2020 when we started or when I started FEI in 2020 really no one was talking about internal linking but nowadays I see it a lot more. Yeah. So I would really. It depends if you're an in house SEO or working at an agency, but really advocate by educate right. Your client and telling them that basically a page that isn't linked to as often will just not get as much attention in the eyes of search engines. That's like a really, really simplified way of putting it. And that pages that you might be publishing regularly, like new blog posts, new products that you really. If you invest in internal linking and not just publish and pray, then you can really help these pages take off, be indexed quicker and rank higher potentially.

[Tyson Stockton]

Absolutely. And what tools would you be using in. I mean I guess there's going to be probably like multiple touch points but even from a general analysis piece, like how are you thinking about identifying those targets of opportunities or like kind of what's your system to identify what would potentially need to be changed?

[Gabby Troxler]

Yeah, so what I always do like my tool stack is basically screaming frog any crawler and Google Search Console and I like to kind of circumvent the thousand row limit in Search Console by pulling the data into Google sheets with an extension called Search analytics for sheets. There's other ways. I mean you could use a bigquery, you could use SEO Stack or any other tools that help you there. But that's kind of how I do it and that's going to be my base like the link report as well in Search Console and then a crawl screaming frog and doing the link analysis there. So when I'm publishing something new I like to go old school and just use the site operator in Google Search and see if I can like really low key identify linking opportunities. So any other Pages where this keyword pops up and then I'll just place five to ten links. And that's kind of the process, I would say, when I publish a new product and I'm not doing a proper.

[Tyson Stockton]

Link audit, which I think is kind of a perfect segue to my next question. And I feel like it's oftentimes you get the question of, well, how many links do I need to have on the page? What advice can you give to the listeners when they're kind of met with that question?

[Gabby Troxler]

That's kind of what off page SEOs here as well, right? Yeah. So the big advantage of using Screaming Frog is that you don't need to look for exact numbers, but you can just do an analysis of which pages receive the most links and which pages receive the least links. And then you can see are those top linked pages performing much better as well. And are there any pages that receive very little links or few links that you would like to strengthen and then your number just needs to be closer to the top performing pages and that's really it. So.

[Tyson Stockton]

And I think that's an important piece maybe to dogpile on a little bit there. Is that a lot of that then is you're doing a comparison to yourself. It's not like an absolute term of oh well, I need to make sure every single page has 10 links. So it's like you're not viewing this in absolutes, but more of what correlations can I identify between number of links and performance of the URLs? Correct.

[Gabby Troxler]

Yeah, because I mean E commerce stores are so varied. There's like the odd ecommerce store with 10 products and then there's the big ones with millions and millions of pages. And of course link numbers are not going to be the same here.

[Tyson Stockton]

And I feel like oftentimes too without some of those additional link packs, the product pages in particular seem to be URLs that have a potential to be underlinked. Like, especially if you're just relying on the category pages to feed into those. What do you feel like are some of the more common opportunities from internal linking? Like, are you looking at page types or kind of specific URLs? Like, what are, what's the common areas that you might find yourself looking for these opportunities?

[Gabby Troxler]

Yeah, exactly. I find like if I want to give guidance on a team member on how to approach this, and I really want it not to, or want them not to spend too much time and resources on it, all I say is really focus on linking more to products than to Blog posts. And that's like rule number one. But I also am not against linking out again from products to blog posts or informational content. I've had bosses in previous roles that would say, oh, this is an absolute no go, we're going to lose people. But I find still users, they're going to click. If they want to leave, they leave. They're going to open the link in the new tab. So they're kind of their own person and they're smart enough to not lose themselves within the universe of your website. But really, to go back to the Houseplant example, if you really, if you're on a product page and you're on the verge of buying this particular plant, but you still have some uncertainties as to if it really is a great fit for you, then it might make sense to go back into some more informational content where maybe a lot of products or in this case plants are compared to one another and that will help you in your buying decision. So I wouldn't say it's always, always, always linking products only, but really which link is the most helpful in this scenario?

[Ben Shap]

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[Tyson Stockton]

And so it's again you're revisiting back to the customer journey and their decision making process and how are we supporting in that rather than just viewing this in kind of binary analytic terms?

[Gabby Troxler]

Yeah, exactly. I think in the long term you shouldn't just focus on the one purchase but on the experience because that's what in my experience also lets your customer come back to you time and time again.

[Tyson Stockton]

And so staying within this E commerce focus of it, I feel like the different linking modules that we have is like similar products, super common. One great opportunity to have that kind of, I guess, cross link from one product page to another product page. How much would you play around with the number of similar products on a page or the number of kind of modules for internal linking? How do you kind of do those reiterative tests to identify how many or how few is actually going to be driving the most impact?

[Gabby Troxler]

Yeah, I think when I really started with this, I wouldn't really think about absolute or even relative numbers and we would just throw links in there. And that's, I mean that's absolutely fine when you're starting off and you're just having to focus on linking to products. And as you said, similar products are similar in terms of care, for example, or terms of color or whatever, that always works well or bestsellers as well. And then I feel like it's really, once you have established a few products, a linking pattern, then you can actually start testing. So you'll just make sure to really just only change one variable and then see if you see something change in the rankings and the traffic you get on a certain page. So that's really pretty straightforward process, I would say.

[Tyson Stockton]

Agreed, agreed. What else would you kind of advocate for? Like what are some of maybe the missed opportunities that we have as SEO within internal linking?

[Gabby Troxler]

I think if you're working on a site that's been there for a while, then for sure take your time to actually do an internal linking audit. Because a lot of the times it could be the missing piece of why a certain page doesn't perform as well or a new page specifically doesn't perform as well. And if you have, or if you're starting a new brand or publishing new pages, then just make sure that internal linking is always part of the publishing process. And publishing shouldn't be the last step of your process, of your content process or whatever, but distribution as well. And I feel like internal linking really plays into the distribution part. So not just sharing your content piece or whatever on socials, but also at least set 5 to 10 links or whatever makes sense in your size of business Absolutely.

[Tyson Stockton]

And again and again to especially the in house SEOs out there, don't, don't overlook this. In my experience too. Yeah, internal linking has always been like one of the really impactful lovers that you have that I think oftentimes too like you're typically met with less resistance from like internal politics where typically a lot of people are going to have opinions on navigation menus and page titles and things like that that are very visual elements. But oftentimes if you're expanding a similar product carousel from three to five, you're not going to catch a lot of attention or kind of pressure from the organization and it's something that has that high potential of having that positive impact on the website.

[Gabby Troxler]

That's a really good point. Yeah.

[Tyson Stockton]

Excellent. Well, with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Surge podcast. Thanks again to Gabby Troxler for joining us. And if you'd like to get in touch with Gabby, be sure to go ahead and take a look at her LinkedIn profile which is in the show notes and go on over and check out her website at fay check.

[Ben Shap]

Okay. Thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E IO And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster [e-mail] that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben J Shap B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.