You've written good service pages and a handful of blog posts, but the pages that should bring in work barely get seen, by Google or by visitors. On a lot of small business sites, the reason is simple: those pages are islands. They exist, but almost nothing else on the site links to them.
Internal links are the links from one page on your site to another. Adding the right ones costs nothing, needs no outside help, and fixes two problems at once: Google understands which pages matter, and visitors find their way from a blog post to the page where they can hire you.
The quick answer
- In Google Search Console, open Links, then the full Internal links list, and find the important pages with few or no links pointing to them.
- From every blog post, link to the service page that solves the problem the post describes.
- Make sure every service page links to your contact page and to at least one related post.
- Use link text that says where the link goes ("our cybersecurity services"), never "click here".
How internal links work
Think of your site as a building. Each page is a room and internal links are the hallways. A room with no hallway leading to it is hard to find, for people and for Google.
Google finds pages largely by following links. Its own guidance says Google "uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl", and that "every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site." A page nothing links to (SEOs call it an orphan page) can still get found through your sitemap, but Google gets no hint from your own site that it matters.
Links also pass importance around. When a strong page, usually your homepage, links to another page, some of that weight flows to it. A single link from the homepage to a service page buried three clicks deep can make a real difference.
Find your orphan and under-linked pages
In Google Search Console
If you haven't set up Search Console yet, start here. Then:
- Open your site in Search Console and click Links in the left menu.
- Under Internal links, click More to open the full list. It shows each page and how many internal links point to it.
- Sort by the link count with the smallest first (click the column header), or click Export and sort it in a spreadsheet.
- Look at the bottom of the list. Any important page with only one or two links pointing to it needs more.
- Check whether your key pages appear at all. Google's Links report help notes the report isn't a complete list of every link, so a page that's missing isn't proof it's orphaned, but it's worth checking by hand.
Click any page in the list to see which pages link to it. That's often eye-opening: the service page you care most about may only be linked from your menu.
Without Search Console
Make a two-column list. In the first column, write your 5 to 10 most important pages (usually your core service pages, contact page and best blog posts). In the second, note every other page on the site that links to each one. You'll find the gaps quickly.
How to add a link in your editor
Linking to your own page takes about thirty seconds.
- WordPress (block editor): highlight the words you want to link, press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on a Mac) or click the link icon in the toolbar, then start typing the title of the page you want. WordPress searches your own pages and posts; click the right one and it's linked.
- Wix: select the text box, highlight the words, click the Link icon, choose Page as the link type and pick the page from the list. Then publish. Wix's help article has the current steps for each editor version.
- Squarespace: edit the text block, highlight the words, click the link icon in the text toolbar, then choose or paste the address of the page on your site, and save.
Use the page's normal address, not a tracking link, and check it opens the right page after you publish.
Anchor text: what the link says
Anchor text is the clickable words. Google uses them to understand what the linked page is about, and its link guidance puts it simply: good anchor text is "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant". Its test is to read the anchor text on its own and see if it still makes sense.
Say you're writing about phishing and want to link to your security services:
- Weak: "To learn more about our services, click here."
- Strong: "This is why small business cybersecurity starts with email protection."
The second tells both the reader and Google what's on the other side. "Click here" and "read more" tell them nothing.
Don't overdo it
Google's guidance also warns against stuffing keywords into anchor text. You don't need every link to your security page to say "small business cybersecurity". Vary it the way you'd talk: "cybersecurity for small businesses", "protecting your business from cyber threats", "our security services".
A structure that works for most small businesses
The path you want is blog post → service page → contact. A blog post should never be a dead end.
- Your homepage links to the services that make you money.
- Each service page links to your contact page, at least one related blog post, and a related service where it makes sense.
- Each blog post links to the service that fits the problem, one or two related posts, and a next step.
How many? Google says there's "no magical ideal number". Link where it genuinely helps the reader: after you explain a problem, right after you describe a fix, in FAQ answers, and just before your call to action. A sentence like "If a leak caused this, our mold testing can confirm what's happening before it spreads" is a useful sentence and a useful link.
Keep it going
- Link new to old, and old to new. Each time you publish, add links from the new post to two or three related ones, then go back to two or three older posts and link them to the new one.
- Recheck quarterly. Rerun the Search Console check above. New pages tend to start life as orphans.
- Fix broken links. When you rename or delete a page, update the links to it, or set up a redirect.
Checklist
- Every service page links to your contact page.
- Every blog post links to the related service page.
- Your homepage links to your main services.
- Each of your top five pages has at least three internal links pointing to it.
- Link text describes the destination.
- No important page is missing from Search Console's Internal links list.
When to get help
Most sites under 50 pages can do all of this by hand. Get help if Search Console shows important pages as not indexed even after you've linked to them, if your menu or footer links are built in a way Google can't follow (Google can generally only follow standard HTML links), or if you're restructuring the site and changing a lot of URLs at once.
Internal linking is part of on-page SEO, and it's how the trust you earn from backlinks reaches the pages that bring in customers. If you'd rather have someone map it out, it's part of our SEO and marketing service.
