THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX WTH INTERNAL LINKING
- Joe Johnson
- 14 hours ago
- 3 min read
Non-templated internal links (i.e. links NOT in places like mega menus, footers and dropdowns) have huge potential to boost rankings and traffic for your most important 'money pages'. But where and how do you find opportunities to link internally?
The best opportunities will lie with pages that have the most and/or most POWERFUL external links. These pages are the ones that have the ability to distribute page rank to areas of the site you really care about.
In my experince, these opportunities are often found in the most unexpected places.
When I worked on the esure site in 2019, chasing better rankings and more traffic was all about making the best of content that already existed. The site had under 300 pages, so predictably there were very few technical issues to fix, but there were many unstapped opportunities when it came to internal linking, or rather, channeling page rank efficiently.
The best way to start with something like this is using SEMRush or Ahrefs to find out which pages have the most referring domains (RDs)
As you can see below, the multiple versions of the homepage have the most RDs (unsurprsingly) but we have a few ideas for where can place links from what I'd call 'inconspicious BAU' pages to our money pages e.g.
It was fortunate that this was such a simple site, that it was built on Drupal, and that I had CMS access.
These three factors meant that not only was it easy for me identify the most powerful pages to implement internal links from, it was also easy to actually do it myself. The importance of this can't be understimated. I've worked in businesses where it would have taken months to get something like this implemented if I had to wait for the dev team to do it (not their fault of course).
If we look at the kind of links pointing to one of these inconspicupus BAU pages in this case, the contact us page (https://www.esure.com/contact-us), we can see that there is some decent PageRank that's been accumulated. I've sorted the RDs based on SEM Rush's version of Domian Authority, the slightly less catchy 'Authority Score'
Given that the contact us page is highly unlikley to drive any conversions or rank for non-brand keywords, this accumulated PageRank is redudant unless we funnel it somwhere else, and that's exactly what I did.
You can see below that not only have I funneled PR from the contact us page to two of the most important money pages, i.e.
I've also used exact match anchor text. You might call it 'spammy', but in this context it makes perfect sense and arguably benefits the user (maybe they want to visit those pages), so I'm going to refute that
I scaled this up (as much as you can scale anything on a 300 page website) across a bunch of different BAU pages and got pretty good results. By October 2019, esure held a number 8 ranking for 'car insurance', and at a time when SERPs were much less culttered than they are now, that drove a ton of traffic.
'car insurance is an incredibly competitive term with a search volume over half a million Google searches per month in the UK, so getting onto page 1 was no mean feat.
The point of this post is that this was acheived with a budget of essentially £0, simply by leveraging existing assests (RDs) and making them work harder (using internal linking). I was going to say 'smart internal linking', but it's not even that smart, it was pretty easy in all honesty.
Many websites will be harbouring a treasure trive of links on 'BAU' pages like;
Contact us
Modern Slavery
About Us
Location(s)
Press Releases
Careers
All it takes is a quick check on SEM Rush or Ahrefs, and the autonomy to edit those pages, and you're good to go.
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