Pointing Links At Your Pages Shows Their Relevance
One of the biggest mistakes made in link building is to assume that relevance only applies to the website that you’re placing the link on, but that’s not the case.
If you’re looking to learn how to use relevance in link building, then your first lesson should be that there are many different factors involved.
As well as the site itself, it’s also the anchor text, sentence and page on which your link is placed that all show relevance.
For external backlinks, you often don’t have much control over these factors, as the website will write the content and set the anchor text.
You might be able to reach out to them after the link has been placed and ask them to edit the anchor text or the text surrounding your link, but this isn’t an ideal situation.
However, when you’re using internal backlinks, you have complete control over how they’re integrated into the content.
Everything from anchor text to the content itself is under your control, so you know that the backlink will be relevant.
Google Takes Notice Of Internal Backlinks
One of the biggest objections to using internal backlinks is that they don’t get noticed by search engines, but this simply isn’t true.
The reason that many people believe that internal linking doesn’t benefit their SEO is because Google’s web crawlers often find new websites to index, and rank accordingly, from backlinks from established websites.
However, internal backlinks can help Google to establish the relevance of your webpage. They’re not as useful for boosting your rankings as external backlinks, but they can help the search engine’s algorithms to understand the purpose of your webpages.
For example, if you have a webpage that is optimised for a specific term, then Google can understand that it is about that topic.
However, it might struggle to understand the audience or the purpose of the page from keywords and on-page SEO techniques alone.
Internal backlinks that point to the page and indicate that readers can buy from it, or learn more information about a part of your business’s offering, can help guide the algorithm and provide it with more information on your page's purpose.
The more information Google has about your website and each page, the better it can understand its relevance.
The search engine can then make informed decisions about how to rank your site, which could work in your favour if you combine internal backlinks with consistent, relevant content that helps you build external backlinks and grow your audience.
They Drive Traffic To Your Pages
As well as helping your boost your website’s search rankings, internal backlinks can also drive traffic to the webpages that you link to in your content.
After all, readers might be interested in your web pages or finding out more about a specific part of your offering.
As such, they could click on the internal backlink in your content and visit your pages. This will help to boost the traffic to your webpages.
Organic traffic growth is a key metric that search engines and SEOs use to value your website, so the more visitors that you get to your page, the more relevant and useful your page will seem.
Internal Backlinks Are An Integral Part Of Your Sales Funnel
In digital marketing, nothing is done aimlessly. If you want to optimise your site for both SEO and sales, then you need to make sure that every internal backlink is a part of your sales funnel.
When you’re creating your sales funnel, you can use internal backlinks in content such as articles or blog posts to drive readers through the sales process.
Using internal backlinks, you can get an overview of the interests of each website visitor, and use this data to personalise their buying experience.
You can also push them towards items or services that they might be interested in buying from your business.
Without internal backlinks, they could simply abandon your webpage without buying from your company.
That’s why internal backlinks, when used correctly, can help you to boost your sales as well as your business’s SEO.
The key is to make sure that the content in which your backlink is placed is relevant and that it makes it clear what the link is for and what readers can expect from the page.
Conclusion: Internal Backlinks Are Essential
As this article proves, internal backlinks offer many benefits to your website’s SEO, and they’re free! You have complete control over them, and you can add them where you need to on your site.
Internal backlinks need to be used as part of a robust SEO strategy that includes external linking campaigns, content creation, social media marketing and more.
However, they should never be overlooked by companies seeking to optimise their website for search and improve their rankings. We hope that this article shows you the benefits of internal linking and helps you to use it effectively in your digital marketing strategy.