In this week’s video, I share an advanced internal linking strategy that helps funnel authority to deeper pages on your site that are “almost visible” in search results. Many times, with a few strategically placed internal links, you can bump a page on your site to the first page of search results – watch the video to learn how!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m piggybacking off of last week’s video about internal link structure and sharing an advanced tip to help you boost the performance of internal pages in your site.
I talked about the importance of internal links in your site on last week’s video. This week I’m taking it a bit further and sharing a process that helps funnel authority to pages in your site using internal links. Sometimes, a few strategically created internal links can be enough to increase the visibility of a page in search results – and we all love quick wins.
I’ve talked about this tactic in training courses at conferences for several years, and it’s a strategy that’s been around for probably at least a decade. As far as I’m aware, there’s no official name for this tactic, so it’s always a bit clunky to talk about. I really ought to come up with something easier…
But anyway, I call it “linking from most credible to almost visible.” At a high level, you do a bit of digging to find your most authoritative pages, and then you link to pages that are just on the cusp of having good visibility in searches, and then you add a few internal links from the good pages to the almost good pages.
Wait, what?
Hey, it’s my not really evil twin, we haven’t seen him for a few months. But yeah, it’s a bit complicated, so stick with me. Here’s how it works:
First, you need to find the pages on your site that have the most inbound links. Use your link research tools to download a list of all of your inbound links, then sort by which pages on your site those links point to. You can ditch all the home page links, we want internal pages. Once you have the list, set it aside for a few minutes.
Next, you need to find the pages on your site that are “almost visible” in searches. Log in to Google Analytics and set the date range to the last three months. Click acquisition, then click Search Console, then click Queries. Sort by average position.
Create an advanced filter that removes everything that currently shows on page one. Click “advanced” next to the filter box and set it to exclude anything with an average position of less than 11. Since page one has 10 sites, that gives you a list of everything that doesn’t rank on page one.
Pro tip: Save this as a custom report, so you can get to it quickly in the future. So now you have a list of everything that you’re showing up for in searches that doesn’t rank on page one. Pull out that list of most-linked-to pages that you created in the first step. Add a few links from pages with inbound links to pages that rank at the top of page 2 (so positions 11 through 15), and boom – you’ve just funned some authority to those pages. Sometimes, a few internal links is all it takes to boost those pages to page one.
Obviously, pay attention to what I said in last week’s video and be sure that the internal links make sense. If you’re a car dealer, you wouldn’t want to link from a service page to a new car page, or if you’re an attorney, you wouldn’t want to link to a dog bite page from a car accident page. As long as the links make sense and the page concepts are related, you can potentially add value to the pages without adding any inbound links.
That’s all the time we’ve got left for today, so you know what that means.
Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome.
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
