How to use Internal Links to Boost Google Rankings

People say the harder it is to get a backlink, the more valuable it'll be. But the thing is, you don't always need to work harder to boost your rankings in Google. Sometimes, all it takes is some internal linking, which has a 100% success rate. In fact, this is something that we've been doing with more intention over the past year and it seems to have helped us boost organic traffic to our site. Now, maybe you've heard that internal links can help, but you weren't able to get the results you had hoped for. Well, more likely than not, it's because at least one of three key ingredients were missing in your strategy. But before we can get to these ingredients, I want to give you a bird's eye view of how internal linking can help boost your organic rankings. And it's easiest to explain if I introduce you to the middleman method. This is a simple internal linking technique where you get lots of links to a page to build its so-called authority. And on this authoritative page, you can add internal links to money pages, effectively boosting their Google rankings. Now, there are three things that make this strategy work. The first is backlinks to the linking page. Backlinks are essentially what fuels a page's so-called authority or what's more officially called page rank. And when a page has gotten quality backlinks, it's able to pass a portion of its page rank to URLs it links to. Now, if a page doesn't have much authority, then it can't help boost the page's rankings because there's nothing really to pass. The second requirement to make this strategy work is to ensure the linked page matches searcher intent. Because Google's job is to provide the most relevant results for any given query, you need to make sure the page you're trying to rank satisfies the intent of a person who clicks to read it. If your page doesn't match intent, then throwing page rank at it via internal links and even external links won't be the best solution. And the third thing you need are competitors that you can actually compete against. For example, if you have a brand new website in the gardening space, you probably won't want to compete against these pages that have hundreds of backlinks. At least not yet. Instead, you'll want to compete with pages that are on a similar playing field as yours. Now, let's talk about actually finding internal link opportunities. And I'm going to talk you through how I might check for the three things we just went through along the way. So the first thing you should do is create a list of important pages on your site that you want to rank higher in Google. Now, importance will vary based on your company. But generally speaking, you'll want to find pages that have a balance of high business value and good traffic potential, where you're not currently ranking in the top position. Now, if you're a product-led company like ours, where most of your content shows how your product works to solve problems, you can consider prioritizing your pages based on your current rankings. To do that, you can use Ahrefs' Site Explorer with a paid or free Webmaster Tools account. Just enter your target and go to the Organic Keywords report. Then set a positions filter for something like 2-10 to find pages that can benefit from a boost. Now, as you look through the list, you'll want to pay attention to primary keywords that you're targeting. For example, this post on 301 Redirects looks interesting. And the page also has some nice plugs of our tool, Site Audit. According to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, it has traffic potential of over 3,000 monthly organic visits from the U.S. alone, which is good in my books. And it's never ranked higher than position 5 for a sustained period of time. Now, while there's no way to know why we haven't ranked past position 5 with absolute certainty, we can click on the SERP button to analyze who we're competing against. So from a content perspective, it seems that our page is matching the overall intent. So perhaps nothing would need to be changed here. Now, from a purely backlinks perspective, in my opinion, it seems that we're already competitive, but definitely not top dog. So adding internal links from relevant pages to past page rank might make sense here. Whether we get an immediate benefit or reap the SEO benefits later down the road as the pages we link from gather more authority. And that leads us to the second step, which is to find relevant pages to link from. Now, while it's ideal to link from pages that have PR to pass, it's perfectly fine to link from almost any page on your site where it makes sense. And for that reason, I'll show you three ways to find internal linking opportunities on your site. The first is with a site search in Google. So I'll search for site colon ahrefs.com slash blog and then a keyword related to the page I want to rank. Now, if you want to know which pages actually have page rank to pass, you can use Ahrefs' SEO toolbar and look at the number of referring domains to the page. Or use the URL rating metric, which is an Ahrefs metric that measures page level authority. The second place to find internal link opportunities is an Ahrefs site audit. And you can do this whether you're on a free Webmaster Tools account or paid account. Just run a crawl with site audit. And when it's completed, head on over to the internal link opportunities report. Next, open the advanced filters and set a target page filter and paste in the URL you want to link to. Hit apply and you'll see pages we recommend you link from, the content on that page where you can add your internal link, and the page we recommend you link to. And these recommendations are based on a combination of the source page's content and the target page's keyword rankings. Finally, the last place you can look is in the Best By Links report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer. And again, this can be done with a free Webmaster Tools account. Just enter your domain and run the search. Next, go to the Best By Links report. And finally, I'll set a filter to show just live pages returning a 200 response code. Now, to gauge the relevance of these pages, you can look at the titles and URLs of the pages. And to gauge page-level authority of potential donor pages, you can use the URL rating and or referring domains. For example, this search traffic study that we did clearly has a ton of referring domains and a high UR. And the page also talks about redirects. So it would make perfect sense to link from there. Now, I want to be clear that internal linking isn't all about passing PR. Internal links can also improve user experience by giving visitors relevant resources that they might want to read more on. For example, ecommerce stores will often link to seasonal categories and product pages from their homepage, which is usually the most authoritative on their site. And while it may help them to rank higher for seasonal queries, it also helps visitors to find stuff that they want to shop for. Alright, the next step is to track your keywords in a rank tracking tool. And this is an important step because it's going to tell you whether your internal links are helping or not. So what I've done in Ahrefs' rank tracker tool is I added the keywords with a specific tag and I also added an annotation for when I added the internal links from our various pages. So this is something that I'll keep an eye on over the next few months. Now, internal links are a great tool to have because they're a powerful way to pass page rank to important pages on your site. But often, you'll find that ranking higher will need more than just a few internal links. Sometimes, you'll need to actually build backlinks from external sources to boost the page's authority. And other times, you'll find that a content update is the best course of action. In fact, if I had to guess, I don't think the handful of internal links pointing at our 301 redirects page will take us from position 7 to position 1. In my opinion, a content update will have a bigger impact. Seeing as we haven't updated our 301 redirects posts since 2020. Now, if you want to know how we consistently get near instantaneous boosts in rankings, then you need to watch our video on how to republish content to rank higher in Google. I'll see you there.