How Internal Link Strategies Support External Link Building Goals (and Why It Helps Business Growth)

When it comes to online business growth, backlinks (links from external sources to your website) often steal the spotlight. However, internal links lay the foundation for backlinks to work, helping readers and search engine bots navigate and understand your content (and offer).

Here’s how a solid internal linking strategy can help you improve your website and reach your business goals.

Distributing Link Juice

Link juice, or link equity, is the power that a backlink gives to the page it links to. It is a search engine ranking factor and the reason so many people invest in building links in the first place. While not all backlinks give you the same amount of link juice (and some can be negative), they still act as a vote of confidence for your website and your business.

So, how do internal links help? The page that receives link juice from an external source can further distribute this power to other related pages on your site by linking to them.

Let’s say the page is a guide on remote team collaboration tools. Its internal links can lead the reader to your product pages, pricing details, or customer testimonials. This lets you guide the buyer, address their concerns, and strengthen your product’s appeal.

When you distribute your link equity naturally, it helps your SEO by strengthening your site’s overall authority.

Boosting High-Quality Content

Content that is well-linked internally is more easily discovered by readers and it lets them explore your content more deeply. Consequently, the chances that the reader shares one of your pages increase, too, leading to organic backlinks.

This can boost other engagement metrics, too, including your bounce rate, time on page, and the average session duration (time readers spend on your website). Engagement metrics like this signal that the readers find your content valuable and directly influence your search engine rankings.

Helping Crawlers Discover Content

Search engine bots, also known as spiders or crawlers, use internal links to move through your website. They also download and index the content, try to learn what each page is about and index them so the search engine can show them to readers, similar to what a librarian does.

Internal links to your new pages will make them more likely to get indexed soon, which means they can finally appear in search rankings.

Supporting Content Clusters and Topic Authority

Modern SEO is based on content clusters – groups of interlinked articles and other content on the same, central topic. Having solid content clusters helps your website become an authority on a topic, which improves your reputation in your niche.

This is a case in which a backlink to a page in the cluster brings link equity to the entire cluster underneath. This can increase your organic traffic and conversions. Essentially, like in many things SEO, one good element can support others, starting a self-perpetuating cycle.

Supporting Outreach Efforts

Pages with solid internal linking are more appealing to websites that may want to link to them. A well-integrated page will signal that you’re professional and that your company knows what it’s doing, which is especially important when you’re running an online, remote business. It also shows that the other website’s readers will find value beyond that one click.

Basically, solid internal linking can help you pitch your site to bloggers, other business owners, and industry publications. As outreach can be time-consuming and risky in itself, some business owners outsource it to a trustworthy link building agency that already has connections in their niches.

Customer Acquisition

Your website is a part of each customer’s buyer journey, and you can choose to optimize it or not. Look at your site’s content structure like a marketing funnel. If you know potential customers will arrive on a well-interlinked page through a backlink, you can create complementary pages that guide them deeper into the funnel.

This gives them a chance to read the content in the order that they want, addressing issues such as price, competitiveness in the industry, the choice of products, and the need for social proof (give them testimonials and social media reviews).

Bottom Line

A well-thought-out internal linking strategy can help your business benefit from link building, social media marketing, and other digital marketing strategies. It’s an integral factor in your website’s overall quality, providing value to search engines and your audience.