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 birds-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 fuel's a page's
so-called "authority" or what's more officially called PageRank. And when a page has gotten quality backlinks,
it's able to pass a portion of its PageRank to the URLs it links to. Now, if a page doesn't have much "authority",
then it can't help boost a 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 PageRank at it via. internal links and even external links won't
be the best solution. And the third thing you need are competitors
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'll 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 US 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 that is 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 there. 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 pass PageRank 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:ahrefs.com/blog/ and then
a keyword related to the page I want to rank. Now, if you want to know which pages
actually have PageRank 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 in Ahrefs' Site Audit. And you can do this whether you're on
a free Webmaster Tools 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 make it 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 category 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 find stuff that they want to shop for. Alright, the next step is 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 Tracking 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 PageRank 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 1. In my opinion, a content update will have
a bigger impact, seeing as we haven't updated our 301 redirects post 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.
