Improve You Internal Links with Google Search Console

in the latest episode of hack my growth we're going to be taking a look at search console and how we can leverage it to improve the internal linking within our website thanks for checking out this video if this is your first time watching or maybe been watching a while and you have not yet subscribed please do so now we create new content each and every week to help you get the most out of your digital marketing activities if you've got a question along the way feel free to add a comment and we'll engage with you below all right let's get into the video in this video we're going to be looking at how we can leverage search console to improve our internal linking strategy so search console is one of the best tools that seos have at their disposal it gives us real data from google search that we can use to inform our strategy make better decisions and also to see how we're performing when it comes to seo and the results that we're trying to get so internal linking is extremely important and i know a lot of times we talk about you know backlinks in seo and the value there i've mentioned it a couple times on this channel about how backlinks have lost a lot of their steam mainly due to the fact of one they've been been abused and the second that search engines are becoming more semantic they're much smarter than they've ever been and they understand context better now that they have you know machine readable information that we can supply now in this video we're going to talk about internal links right and the value that they present and internal links help crawlers find information they also help users continue their journey on our website so again this is an area where this is going to benefit both the user experience as well as the search engines when it comes to our strategy now in search console there's actually a section down here called links we can go ahead and click that you see it's got external links so pages that you know are getting links it'll tell us some of the top linking websites and it'll show us internal links so these are the links within our sites from one page to another if you click more it's going to have a list of all your internal links and the pages with the most links and also the pages that are really missing out on those opportunities you can filter here and see the internal links or your target pages and you can also change this right here where you can go ahead and see which of your pages have low number of internal links i like to take this information and work off a spreadsheet so you can actually export this to google sheet which i've already done over here and then i've added a filter and flipped it up so again we see the pages here that are missing out on some of these internal linking opportunities and what you can start with is going through this list and looking at content maybe you're trying to work on a specific niche of content on your website or specific section or topic and you want to improve the topic authority and you want to see how your content in that area is currently performing and where you could possibly improve the performance with the help of internal links so right here is a page let's say i'm working on creating uh more visibility for helping business owners find their niche online so i'm going to go ahead and highlight this and then i'm also going to go over to this page because i want to see it in in real time as well if i open up a new tab and put this up you'll see this page is about helping business owners find a niche for themselves online to help really define that and go a little bit deeper in the topic as you can see you know this is you know a good well-written article but we're not seeing a lot of internal links even from this page not until we get down here to the bottom and we've got some links to to other pages on our site as well as the sites that we're citing within the content but this site or this page itself only has one page linking to it and we want to change that but we want to know what pages should we link to it because you don't want to just put internal links there they need to have the right context google looks at content and topics and groups you know we've talked about having topic authority and how that's important and how when you have topic authority it improves the keywords that you're ranking for and the other variants that you're ranking for so we don't just want to go and add internal links to anything we want to make sure that they're contextually relevant once again we can go back to search console and right now i'm in the the search results section under performance and you see we can have data here for you know up to 16 months at our disposal so you can go ahead and hit apply and you've got a ton of search data right here now if we go in here we can take that target keyword and for this case i'm actually going to just use the word niche and i'm going to look at other pages that are also ranking around this concept or have some sort of search visibility for this concept so once search console does its magic you're going to start seeing some other pages show up here so we've got an article or a page called the importance of finding your niche well that's important right here's the article that we're working on right now some of these are about digital marketing tools or link building we're going to ignore those because we're talking more from a business perspective so these back links and linking videos or pieces of content might not be super important and as you notice here we've got 17 pieces of content showing up in this filter so let's just go ahead and see all of them in one screen we've got one that talks about copywriting uh this is one that's ranking for a featured snippet that's why we have that little hash there awesome so we've got some pieces of content that we can work with so what do we do we take these pieces of content and we start copying the urls now you can use this same sheet here and you can say all right we're going to be targeting niche and we're going to have our target url and our internal links so we'll go back to this page here and we'll grab our our target url the one that we're focused on right now and then we're gonna put this here and we're gonna start adding all of those other relevant links that we've uncovered here to this to this sheet as well so you go through and copy these and then from here you can start to create your plan of how you're actually going to add these links to the site so let me fill this sheet out really quick and then we'll talk about how we add them into our page so now that we've got all of these articles here and as a result of that research we've got five articles and all these articles really talk about finding that audience you want to talk to that's very narrow and focused around your business goals so what we would then do is go to these articles here that we've just found and we'd start to look for opportunities to add in a link for business owners so we want to copy those articles and we actually want to go look at these pieces of content and see where a link might make sense so talking about how we could leverage it a little bit deeper how we could add internal links in here and really start to link back to this other piece of content so then we want to look at this piece and see if there's opportunities linked to these articles what we're starting to do is create topic authority within our site so we're actually internally linking all these relevant pieces of content it's going to enrich how the crawlers understand these different topics on our website it's going to improve how quickly or how easily they can find the content on our site and it may improve the visibility and how easy these pieces of content are showing up in search now that we have this really defined topic of expertise within our site that's all connected and really making sense so internal linking is extremely important search console is a great way to help us find and uncover opportunities to create better internal linking on our website and see how we can add links naturally you don't want to stuff them in you don't want to make it look funky but you want to add them as naturally as possible and that may mean you know just making a slight update to some of your content and to work it in and a little bit more naturally so i hope this video was helpful go ahead and get into search console start digging around and find better ways to create better internal linking strategy and really make that content that you've spent so much time and effort on more discoverable and easier for your users to engage with thanks a lot for watching if you've got any questions comment below and until next time happy marketing [Music] you

Channel: SMA Marketing

Views: 4,788

Keywords: SEO, SEO TIPS, search engine optimization., seo tips 2021, internal linking, internal links, search console tutorial, search console training, google search console, search console

Id: XzWGQk-foqY

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021