Internal Link Optimisation for SEO: The Complete Guide

In the fast-moving world of SEO, sometimes fundamentals get forgotten. Internal links are often an element of websites that we can take full control of, and internal link optimization can often have a significant impact on rankings. So it begs the question, why don't we focus on it more than we do?

This guide looks at why internal linking is important for SEO, what you need to consider when developing an internal linking strategy, then goes on to demonstrate some of the techniques you can use to optimize your own internal links.

Thanks to Ramona Joita, Liz Bowers, Kelly-Anne Crean, Jolle Lahr-Eigen, Maeva Cifuentes and Sophie Roberts from the Women in Tech SEO community who also share some fresh 2026 insights in this article.

Table of contents

• What is internal linking?

• Why is internal linking important for SEO?

• Common internal linking issues

• Finding pages with too many or too few internal links

• Finding pages too deep within your website

• Finding anchor text optimization opportunities

• Finding internal link opportunities with Google

• How to prioritize internal link optimization opportunities

• Presenting internal link optimization opportunities to clients

• Implementation methods for internal link optimization

What is internal linking?

At its simplest, an internal link is a link from one page on your website to another webpage on your site.

“Internal links are one of the most consistently overlooked opportunities in SEO. Done well, they do two things at once: they signal to crawlers which pages matter most, and they create a genuinely useful experience for visitors. Think category pages that cross-link to related categories with descriptive anchor text, FAQ sections pointing to relevant deep-dive content, or glossary pages, which LLMs like ChatGPT increasingly favour as reference sources. These aren't nice-to-haves. They're structural signals that can meaningfully move the needle on your SEO strategy.”

Ramona Joita   SEO & AI Visibility Consultant

Why is internal linking important for SEO?

“Internal linking is one of the most underrated levers in content SEO. When you're intentional about how pages connect to each other, you're helping Google understand your site's structure as well as actively signalling which content deserves authority. A well-linked page with strong, contextual anchor text can outperform a technically superior page that's been left to fend for itself. In 2026, with AI Overviews reshaping how content gets surfaced, that topical context you build through internal links matters more than ever.”

Sophie Roberts   MD at Koozai

Many factors go into how search engines crawl, index and rank websites. Internal linking is up there as one of the most important. It should also be noted that creating and optimizing internal links is one of the easiest things you can do on your site to help with indexing and ranking.

So why is internal linking good for SEO?

1. It can help existing content rank better

Search engines use the position of the link, the number of internal links, and the anchor text of those links, to help them understand what a given page is about and how important particular pages might be in the overall structure of the site. If you've read Maret's post on topic clusters, you'll understand the importance of using content structure and internal linking to build themes and contextual flow between them.

Through deliberate and smart internal linking, you can help the pages that you want to rank higher… well, rank higher.

2. It can help new content rank faster

While search engines - particularly Google - are good at finding new content fast, it doesn’t mean that content’s going to rank right away.

Say you have a piece of new content that you believe will do well - or is particularly important to your business or SEO strategy. Internal links tell Google “hey, this page is important. Rank me.”

So don't just press the publish button and hope for the best.

Push the publish button and then edit older content by adding fresh internal links to your new page.

Send Google the signals you want it to pick up. Google is smart, but it’s far from perfect.

3. It helps you build topical authority

Here's something the basic "internal links pass equity" explanation misses.

Google doesn't just use internal links to assess individual page importance, it uses them to understand how your content relates to itself. A tightly linked cluster of pages on the same topic signals that you actually know what you're talking about, not just that you've published something on it.

The way most SEOs structure this is through pillar and cluster content.

The pillar page is the broad, comprehensive treatment of a topic. The cluster pages are the specific, in-depth pieces covering subtopics within it. You link between them - cluster pages link up to the pillar, and the pillar links out to the clusters - and the whole thing reinforces the topical signal Google picks up.

So if you've got a pillar page on, say, technical SEO auditing, and you've got individual pages on crawl budget, log file analysis, indexability etc, those pages should be linking to each other, and to the pillar. Not just because the equity flow matters - but because the link structure itself is part of how Google understands that your site is genuinely authoritative on the topic, not just publishing individual articles into the void.

Maret's post on topic clusters goes into the content side of this in a lot more detail — worth reading alongside this.

The implication for internal link optimisation is simple. When you're auditing link opportunities, it's worth asking not just "which pages have too few inlinks?" but "does our link structure actually reflect our content hierarchy?"

Often it doesn't. And that's a real gap.

“An internal link with the anchor text 'Click Here' is a wasted opportunity to define your expertise. In the era of Entity-Based Search, your anchor text is the 'label' you give your knowledge. If you don't use descriptive, keyword-rich anchors, you’re leaving it up to a machine to guess what your page is about. Don't let the AI guess—tell it.”

Liz Bowers   SEO Manager

Common internal linking issues

Both internal links and backlinks can affect the ranking of your site. Internal links are important for usability and keeping people on your site. They’re also valuable for SEO.

Here’s a few tips and tricks for ensuring your internal links are giving you maximum value:

Check for nofollow tags
Nofollow tags prevent Google from distributing link value, or equity (I refuse to call it 'link juice') from the linking page to the linked page. Keep an eye out for these in your research.

Remove redirect chains
Internal links that are part of a redirect chain are not particularly a problem for usability (the user always ends up at the destination URL) but can be problematic for SEO. The link equity will be diluted with every extra redirect Google has to follow. You want to make your internal links as strong as possible. Get the chains fixed to allow that to happen.

Check how you're handling paginated content

Back in March 2019, Google announced that it hadn't been using rel=next and rel=prev for indexing for quite some time. (Yes, they forgot to tell us. Yes, that was annoying.)

What does that mean in practice? Google can figure out paginated content on its own. It treats paginated pages as regular pages now — which means you should think about them the same way you'd think about any other page: make sure they're crawlable, indexable, and linked to properly.

If you've already implemented rel=next and rel=prev, there's no need to rip it out. Bing still uses it as a discovery hint, and it helps with web accessibility and W3C compliance. But don't implement it expecting Google to do anything useful with it.

What you should actually focus on:

• Make sure paginated pages are crawlable and indexable (don't noindex or robots.txt them out)

• Don't canonical page 2+ back to page 1 — Google needs to follow those links to discover content deeper in the site

• Use proper <a href> links between paginated pages, not just rel tags in the <head>  Google doesn't crawl URLs referenced only via rel tags

Faceted navigation
It’s always a good idea to keep your faceted navigation and filters in check to preserve your precious link equity. That’s a whole article in itself though so for now, I'll just say keep your faceted navigation to a minimum.

Now, let’s get stuck into finding ways to optimize your internal links.

Finding pages with too many or too few internal links

First of all, you need to locate pages with too few internal links pointing to them.

Equally, it’s worth looking at pages with too many internal links. Are some less important pages benefiting from a greater number of internal links than your more (or most) important pages? If so you might want to reduce the amount of links to those pages. It’s all about sending the right signals to Google.

So how do you find them?

Here’s a few methods.

With Sitebulb

Step 1. Head over to the best website audit software ever and create a project for the site you’re working on.

Step 2. Go and watch a couple of videos on YouTube while the crawler gathers all the data for your site.

Step 3. Sitebulb has an in-built website link crawler, so just head over to the Links section and click that. Look at all that data and pat yourself on the back.

Step 4. Find the right data. This is pretty simple.

Step 5. Have a look at the graph called Incoming Internal Followed Links. Here you’ll get a quick overview of the number of URLs and the link range numbers.

Step 6. You’re going to want to dig into the data in a bit more detail. Luckily that’s pretty easy. The easiest way to get started is by clicking on the hints section. This will allow you to spot potential opportunities.

Step 7. In the example below, we can see that Sitebulb has flagged 61 URLs with only one incoming internal link. That means these pages may struggle to rank.

Export that data and you can dig deeper into those pages - specifically those that are most important.

With Screaming Frog

Step 1. Fire up Screaming Frog and pop your URL into the box at the top of the tool.

Step 2. Take a nap.

Step 3. Head over to the Internal tab. Filter by HTML and then click Export.

Step 4. You now have a shiny CSV. Get rid of any columns that you don't need . Ideally, you would want to be left with Address, Status Code, and Inlinks.

Step 5. Turn your spreadsheet into a table - you can do this quickly with Ctrl A, and then follow that by pressing Ctrl L.

Step 6. You can sort the URLs by how many Inlinks each one has.

Step 7. Go through the process of finding pages with too few inlinks, and pages with too many.

Finding pages too deep within your website

The deeper a page is on a site (usually referred to the page's crawl depth.), the less chance it will have of ranking well (generally, anyway). Why?

The link equity becomes so diluted that the pages just don't have enough power to rank (unless they receive external backlinks from other sites). You may also find that Google struggles to find some of the pages, and as a result, doesn’t index them at all.

So, finding deep pages and linking internally to them is super important. Here are a few ways you can do it.

With Sitebulb

Step 1. Crawl your site with Sitebulb - you can read more about that here if it's your first time.

Step 2. When the crawl’s finished, head over to the Audit Overview tab.

Step 3. Scroll down to the Crawled URLs by depth section.

Step 4. You’ll see a graph like in the image below. This shows the Number of URLs and Website Crawl Depth.

Step 5. Click on the section that shows you have pages deeper than three clicks.

Step 6. From there, you can investigate pages that live deep in the site, despite being key to your SEO strategy.

Step 7. You then need to add optimized links from other important pages on your site, to these pages.

With Screaming Frog

Step 1. Fire up Screaming Frog and pop your URL into the box at the top of the tool.

Step 2. Make yourself a sandwich and have a cup of tea.

Step 3. Head over to the Internal tab. Filter by HTML and then click Export.

Step 4. You now have a shiny CSV. Get rid of the columns that you don't need. Ideally, you would want to be left with Address, Status Code, and Crawl Depth.

Step 5. Turn your spreadsheet into a table - you can do this quickly with Ctrl A, and then follow that by pressing Ctrl L.

Step 6. You can sort the URLs by the Depth of the pages on the site

Step 7. Go through the process of finding pages that are buried deep within the site. You can now create a plan for adding internal links to those deep (but important) pages.

With Ahrefs

With Ahrefs

Ahrefs has an internal link opportunities report built into Site Audit. Here's how to get to it.

Step 1. Log in and run a Site Audit on the domain you're working on. If you've already got a recent audit, you can skip this.

Step 2. Open the audit and navigate to the Links section in the left-hand sidebar.

Step 3. Click on Internal link opportunities. This report cross-references the keywords your pages rank for with mentions of those keywords on other pages on the same site - and surfaces places where you could add an internal link but currently haven't.

Step 4. You'll see three columns worth paying attention to: the source page (the page that mentions the keyword but doesn't link), the keyword itself, and the target page (the page that ranks for that keyword and should be receiving the link).

Step 5. Filter by keyword difficulty or ranking position if you want to prioritise. A page sitting between positions 5–15 for a competitive keyword, with several potential source pages, is a better target than one already at position 1.

Step 6. Export to CSV and work through the opportunities systematically - sorting in Excel or Sheets by priority.

Step 7. Add the links.

Step 8. Win SEO.

Finding anchor text optimization opportunities

“Since the data warehouse leak, we have reason to believe that Google starts to ignore internal links once the same anchor text is found 200 times on the same domain. Independent of the target URL. We cannot know for sure and we don't know which links get counted vs. ignored. Thus it's a good idea to individualize anchor texts as much as possible. Use synonyms and different phrases in the main content. For link modules, teasers and CTAs that are used across entire segments of the site, add the product category, add the blog section, be as specific as you can.”

Jolle Lahr-Eigen   SEO Consultant

Anchor text is also critical when working on your internal link optimization. Anchor text is key to adding context to links and increasing their value. Unlike backlinks, we have full control of the internal link anchor text, so have the perfect opportunity to make sure it's relevant and optimized.

But how do review current anchor text, and how can we find new opportunities to optimize existing links?

What we’re going to show you in this section is how you take the target keywords for any given page on your site and how you find mentions of those keywords on other pages on your site. By discovering these in bulk you’ll be able to add new anchor text rich links to those pages.

So.

Here we go.

With Sitebulb

Step 1. Fire up the crawler. If you haven't already, you’ll need to set up a project. If you’re new to Sitebulb, you can find all the necessary steps here.

Step 2. Before you set the crawler off, we need to add the setting for finding those anchor link opportunities. It’s pretty simple.

Step 3. Find the section called Extraction and then click Content Search.

Step 4. You now need to add a rule. The button is big and green and has Add Rule plastered on it. Easy enough to spot.

Step 5. When you’ve clicked the button, you’ll get to see a little wizard. No, not the Harry Potter ones. And not Rincewind, either. Sorry to disappoint.

We now need to add our rule.

Step 6. Let’s keep this easy for the time being, and use the Basic setting. Add a keyword that you want to search ALL the text on your site for, as shown in the image below.

Step 7. Make sure you click the Ignore Case button. This will ensure you find as many opportunities as possible.

Step 8. If you have a bunch of keywords that you want to search your site for, you can just add another rule. And another. And another. So that's 3 for the Lite license. If you’re a fully paid-up member of the Sitebulb Appreciation Society and have a full license, there’s no limit.

Step 9. Get the audit started.

Step 10. When it's all done, navigate to the Content Search section. Click on that and your rules will pop up. you’ll see the data Sitebulb’s found. There are two data columns: Total Found (this is how many instances of the word were found on the site) and Found on URLs (this shows how many unique URLs the phrases were found on).

Step 11. It's then a case of taking your data and adding internal links to those pages, using the keywords you’ve searched for.

If you want to learn some of the more advanced uses of Content Search, you can find more detail over here.

With Screaming Frog

Step 1. Fire up Screaming Frog, and add the domain into the box at the top of the site you're looking to find anchor text opportunities for.

Step 2. Before you crawl the site you need to head over to Configuration, then Custom, then Search.

Step 3. You should see a pop up like this.

Step 4. From here, Screaming Frog works similarly to Sitebulb. You need to add rules.

Step 5. The Add Rule button is tucked away at the bottom right-hand corner. Click that.

Step 6. You then need to add in your rules, like you can see in the image below.

Step 7. Once the crawl has finished, check the Custom section of Screaming Frog. Here you will see which URLs feature the keywords from your rules.

If you want to explore further, you can read here on combining Screaming Frog data with other datasets in PowerBI. It will teach you how to scale this approach when working with bigger sites.

With Ahrefs

Ahrefs recently released an interesting little internal linking tool. So let's take a look at how you can use it to optimize your internal links, and find opportunities.

Step 1. Log into your account and go to the dashboard. You then need to choose the site you want to work on, to make sure you've run a site audit.

Step 2. Click on the little Health Score icon.

Step 3. Locate and click on link opportunities.

Step 4. You should then should see a new dashboard like in the image below

Step 5. You now need to pick a way to narrow the data down - in this example we’ve chosen a keyword word count of 3.

The tool will display several data points:

• Source page shows pages featuring text that other pages rank for - but isn't linking to that page

• You get context

• The volume

• Then the page that does rank for that keyword

Step 6. If you are happy with the rule you've set up, export to CSV.

Step 7. Filter in excel for the best opportunities.

Step 8. Add links to those source pages.

Step 9. Win SEO

Finding internal link opportunities with Google

Not everyone is able to pay for a tool to help with finding internal link opportunities, so here’s a quick and dirty way to use Google instead.

Step 1. Head over to Google.

Step 2.  Enter site:yourdomainname.co.uk “keyword that you want a really good page to rank for” into the search box.

Step 3. In this case, we’ll say that we want to send internal link signals to this page https://sitebulb.com/product/crawl-maps/, and we want it to rank for “crawl maps”.

Step 4. Your Google search operator would look like this site:sitebulb.com "crawl maps."

Step 5. Google will return pages that include the phrase “crawl maps”.

Step 6. You can then use a tool like SEO Minion or MozBar to download all the pages from Google’s search results.

Step 7. To avoid clicking through multiple pages of results, use a browser extension to scrape all results in one go. SEO Minion (mentioned in Step 6) has a "Highlight & Copy Links" feature that can pull the visible URLs from the page.

Step 8. Work through the exported URLs and check each one to see if it links to your target page.

Step 9. Add links to the ones that don't.

Step 10. That's it, you're all done.

How to prioritize internal link optimization opportunities

So you’ve got your data.

If you’re working on a small site, prioritizing what to focus on shouldn’t be hard. You just do all of them!

But what if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of opportunities? What do you do then?

As with a lot of things in SEO, the answer is “it depends”.

That said, here’s a few things to consider to help you make the best choices for the site, and the business in general.

• The importance of the target page to the business

• How many opportunities there are

• The difficulty score of the keyword/s of the target page

• Where you currently rank for the target keyword/s

• The strength of the pages with said opportunities

“During audits, I often find valuable pages that receive very few internal links while less important pages sit higher in the structure. Adding links from authoritative and relevant pages quickly improves discoverability and reinforces site architecture. It’s one of the fastest ways to make sure your most important content gets noticed by both users and search engines.”

Kelly-Anne Crean   Head of Operations, Koozai

Presenting internal link optimization opportunities to clients

Tell a story

Clients have employed you because you’re the expert. But that doesn’t mean they’ll listen. You have to sell technical SEO optimization. While link building is generally an easy sell, clients often don't see the value in internal link optimization.

Explain why it’s important.

Demonstrate the value it could bring when scaling up.

Google's own documentation is worth paraphrasing here. When Googlebot discovers a page's URL, it visits the page to find out what's on it - and one of the main ways it finds new URLs is by following links from pages it already knows about. A hub page linking to a new blog post, for example, is how that post gets discovered.

Source: Google Search Central

“You mentioned internal linking, that’s really important. The context we pick up from internal linking is really important to us… with that kind of the anchor text, that text around the links that you’re giving to those blog posts within your content. That’s really important to us.”

Source: John Mueller, 2019

Show your data

When we say to show your data we don't mean for you to bombard your clients with Excel files. Odds are, they’ll be ignored.

So how do you show your data?

Whether you pitch in an email or other format, you need to find a few select graphs showing the opportunity. You can grab some of these from Sitebulb as you can see below. Ahrefs and Semrush also have graphs that will help you make your case.

If your competitors have an excellent internal linking strategy, then drop those in there as well. Nobody likes losing out to their main competitors.

Don't be afraid of PowerPoint

PowerPoint is your friend. When putting your case together, reducing  it to the most pertinent facts and data points can help. Don’t ramble. Your client (likely) won’t pay attention.

Make it as accessible as possible.

Drop it into Powerpoint. Ditch the bullet points and tell the story efficiently and with brevity. It’s much easier to get buy-in this way.

Present in person

Fire up Zoom or Google Meet and make your case.

It doesn’t have to be a long meeting - in fact, the shorter, the better. When you have a story, data, and slides, you can get through it pretty fast.

Another advantage of doing it person is you can make the case with your enthusiasm for the subject. Your clients don't have to love SEO, but when they can see that you do it's easier to get that crucial “yes, let’s do this”.

Don't shy away from case studies

If you work for an agency, case studies can be pretty easy to get hold of. However, we aren’t talking about the kind of case studies that exist to convince you to buy a service.

They don't have to be that in-depth.

Grab data from another client you’ve worked with on internal linking, and show its impact. It doesn’t have to be more than a couple of slides in the pitch. Just show that it works. Whether you grab the data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or your rank tracking software - it doesn't matter.

Just show the client that it does work.

Implementation methods for internal link optimization

“On a recent audit for a client, we also found over 800 internal links pointing to redirected URLs instead of final destinations. Nobody noticed because the pages still loaded fine for users, but it was slowing down crawling across the whole site. Internal linking is one of those things where the process matters as much as the links themselves. Every time we do an internal linking sprint we see the whole cohort grow by 10-20% within weeks - it's important to make it a part of your quarterly reviews. AI can help a lot in the process these days. We've also found that the sweet spot is 10-20 internal links to each page. After 20, we've noticed it gives diminishing returns, but I aim to try to have more than 10.”

Maeva Cifuentes   Founder, Flying Cat Marketing

Let's look at some of the most common ones.

Manually Adjusting Links

Yep. Manual is still a decent option. Especially for smaller sites. As you might suspect, you go to the pages that you want to add internal links to, then just edit the text in your CMS.

Changing the Existing Template

One of the easiest ways to create links to an important page en-masse is to simply adjust an existing template. Add a link into the template, and you’ll get new links every time you use it.

What do we mean by a template?

A template is a resource that is pre-designed by a web developer with a specific layout. This allows them to create pages fast by using this pre-designed layout - or template.

Examples of templates might be category pages or product pages. The developer can add the specific content into the template and not have to create pages from scratch each time.

Dynamic Link Generation

WordPress Plugins

Okay - be careful with this one. Back in the day we all used to use internal linking tools to add links to every single mention of a particular keyword. And that's just not very helpful for users.

So you have to tread carefully.

What do we recommend?

You might be familiar with Yoast, and they have a nifty tool for suggesting (not automatically adding) internal links. You can base the suggestions around what they call cornerstone content. You can read more about their internal linking suggestions tool here.

Related Items

So this one is more useful for your users, can help you sell more products on your ecommerce site, and can help with optimized internal links.

There are plenty of ways to implement this yourself, with minimal work.

Using Breadcrumbs

This is a really easy way to implement internal linking  - and it's user friendly to boot. Not only does it help users remember where they are on your site, and how they got there, but with simple optimization you can get more anchor text internal links pointing back to your main category pages.

It's a win-win situation.

The End

Phew.

That was a little bigger than we thought it would be, but I was determined to convince you of the importance of internal linking for SEO.

And hopefully, you now have the tools and tips you need to get started with better internal link optimization.

If you're looking for an even more in-depth, step by step guide along with some additional techniques, have a look at this guide on how to find internal link optimization opportunities with Sitebulb.