If you’re investing time and energy into content and SEO, but overlooking internal linking, you’re leaving valuable traffic, leads and conversions on the table!
Internal linking isn’t just best practice, it directly influences the success of your SEO strategy. Without robust internal linking, search engines can’t do their job of crawling, indexing and understanding your website and subsequently, can’t rank it within the search engine results page (SERPs). Not only that, it also means that users are less likely to engage and dive deeper into your website, leading to missed opportunities. If you want to take your ecommerce website to the next level in 2025 and beyond, it’s time to prioritise your internal linking strategy to drive results. Here’s exactly why your ecommerce brand should start utilising internal linking, right now:
1. It boosts your SEO efforts
When it comes to ecommerce SEO, your internal linking strategy can genuinely make or break your site’s success. Google, Bing and other search engines love a well-structured and easy-to-crawl website. Without a clear site structure and seamless navigation, search engines can’t crawl, index and understand your web page content, therefore they can’t rank it either. Strategic internal linking ensures that search engines can rapidly discover your website’s most important pages and gain an understanding of how each piece of content is thematically connected. In turn, allowing search engines to rank your content and present it to users when they enter a relevant search query or keyword. If your product pages, blog posts or landing pages are isolated and difficult for crawlers to find, they’re less likely to rank well and less likely to get valuable traffic. Put simply, internal linking provides search engines with a roadmap to your website, showing them how different pages relate to one another and how to get there. So, if you’re not seeing many results from your existing SEO strategy, your internal linking could be the one aspect that’s letting you down!
2. It improves user experience and engagement
Internal links literally act as signposts for your site visitors, seamlessly guiding them through your website pages, products and content to keep them engaged and consuming your content. Internal links are excellent tools that can be used to provide users with pathways that guide them deeper into your website, helping them to find even more relevant products, helpful content and more. Here are a few ways that internal linking can improve the customer journey and lead to more user engagement:
- Guiding blog readers to relevant products that are likely to be of interest to them
- Recommending related products on product pages
- Linking to size guides, FAQ pages, delivery info or returns policies
- Including contextual links within blog post content, ensuring anchor text is relevant
3. It helps structure your content
Content structure is increasingly important for both search engines and users alike. Mindful internal linking can help to create a logical flow between web pages and create hierarchy within blog posts and articles. Why is structure important when it comes to ecommerce SEO? It helps search engines to better understand the importance of web pages and their relevance to one another. Ensuring that all of your internal links, from your main navigation menu to product categories, sub categories, product pages, blog posts and other valuable pages are structured in a logical and intuitive way not only boosts navigation for users, it allows search engine crawlers to prioritise the pages with the most link equity. Put simply, this means passing on page authority from a high-ranked page to a new page or one that’s ranking lower, to show search engines that it’s important to your site. The more link equity a page receives, the more it’s prioritised in the eyes of Google, Bing and other search engines. If you haven’t recently audited to your website’s navigation, it might be an opportune time to review this and improve it with the help of some SEO gurus, if you’re wanting to boost your ecommerce SEO performance, but don’t know where to start!
4. It support topic clusters and semantic SEO
Topic clusters are essential to developing a successful content strategy, underpinned by in-depth keyword research and led by your overarching SEO strategy. All too often, businesses overlook the importance of implementing considered internal links between content pillars and topic clusters, but doing this can really take your site to the next level and push your pages up the SERPs. By creating a main pillar page about a particular topic and linking that to various related posts that delve deeper into a particular sub-topic, you can demonstrate that you have expert knowledge about a particular topic or theme. In turn, boosting your site’s topical authority in the eyes of the search engines.
5. It reduces bounce rates & increases time on site
If you’re finding that your bounce rate is particularly high and user dwell time is low, but can’t quite pinpoint why, it could simply be the case that users don’t have anywhere else to click, even if they are extremely interested in your content. By incorporating descriptive anchor text that leads to relevant pages and building your site in such a way that encourages users to delve deeper into a topic, you’ll be able nurture site visitors and keep them actively engaged and consuming your website content.
How can I build a successful internal linking strategy?
If we’ve convinced you to implement an internal linking strategy, we’ve got a few tips for how you can get started! Firstly, it’s paramount to undertake thorough keyword research to ensure you’re targeting the most appropriate terms and phrases that your customers are actively searching for. Next, identify your content pillars and take time to ideate various related sub-topics that users may be interested in. Finally, ensure that your website structure is top-tier and laid out in a logical way that encourages users to delve deeper into your content. When implementing internal links, it’s essential that you are mindful as too many links can be overkill and actually put-off potential customers and indicate spam to search engines. If you follow all of the above, we’re pretty sure you’ll be onto a winning strategy!
Need a helping hand with your SEO strategy, GA4 tracking setup or ecommerce SEO, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
