Most small business sites I audit have the same quiet problem: good pages that nothing points to. A service page linked only from a dropdown menu, a blog post that ends without sending the reader anywhere, a city page that exists in the sitemap and nowhere else. An internal linking strategy fixes that with no new content, no ad spend and no tools beyond a spreadsheet, which is why I call it the cheapest SEO win available to most owners.
This post is the deeper version of the short internal links section in my technical SEO checklist. That checklist tells you to link your pages together. Here I walk through how I actually decide which page links to which, what the anchor text should say, and how to find the pages you have accidentally orphaned.
What internal links do, according to Google
Google is unusually direct about this. Its link best practices page says internal links help people and Google navigate and make sense of your site, and that every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. That single sentence is the floor. Most of what follows is about doing better than the floor.
Links do two jobs at once:
- Discovery. Google finds pages by following links. Its sitemap documentation says that if your pages are properly linked, Google can usually discover most of your site, and that a small site of about 500 pages or fewer that is comprehensively linked from the homepage might not need a sitemap at all. I still ship a sitemap on every site, but the point stands: links are the primary map, the sitemap is the backup.
- Meaning. The words you link with tell Google what the destination is about. The same Google page describes good anchor text as descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to both the page it sits on and the page it points to.
There is a third job that matters more to a business owner than either of those: links move a reader from an article that answered their question to the page where they can hire you. A blog post with no path to a service page is doing SEO work for nobody.
First, make sure your links are links
Before strategy, a technical check. Google's documentation says it can generally only crawl a link if it is an <a> element with an href attribute. Its list of examples marks things like a <span> with an href, a javascript: URL, or a click handler that navigates without a real href as links it cannot reliably follow.
This bites site builders more than people expect. I have seen card grids where the whole card is a clickable div, "Learn more" buttons that are really <button> elements running a script, and single-page apps that switch views with #/services style fragments. Google's JavaScript SEO basics says not to use fragments to load different page content and to use the History API for client-side routing instead. Next.js, which I build most sites in, renders its Link component as a normal anchor with an href, so this is mostly a problem with page builders and hand-rolled widgets.
The quick test: right-click the thing you think is a link. If your browser offers "Open link in new tab," it is almost certainly a real anchor. If it doesn't, look at the code.
Image links need alt text
If a logo, a product photo or a project thumbnail is the link, there is no visible text for Google to read. Google's image SEO guide says alt text on an image is useful as anchor text when the image is used as a link. So "Epic Home Healthcare website case study" is a far better alt for a linked thumbnail than "image1" or nothing.
The structure I use: hubs, spokes and money pages
I don't think of internal linking as sprinkling links around. I think of it as three kinds of pages with a direction of travel between them.
| Page type | Examples | Should link to | Should receive links from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Money pages | Service pages, a booking page, a quote form, location pages | Contact, the closest related service, one or two proof pages | Homepage, main navigation, every relevant hub and article |
| Hubs | A category page, a "services" overview, a long guide that covers a whole topic | Every spoke in its topic and the matching money page | Navigation, homepage, every spoke beneath it |
| Spokes | Individual blog posts, FAQs, case studies | Their hub, one money page, two to four sibling spokes | Their hub and siblings that genuinely relate |
The direction matters. Articles attract searchers with questions. Service pages convert people who are ready. Internal links carry both readers and relevance from the first group to the second, so every spoke should end up one click from a money page.
On my own site the structure is built into the templates rather than left to memory. Every post renders a breadcrumb trail of Blog, then its category, then the post. Each category has its own page listing its posts. At the bottom of each article, three related posts are picked by scoring other posts on whether they share the same category and how many tags they have in common, and there are previous and next links by date. None of that replaces the links I write inside the body, but it means no post is ever stranded, even on the day it publishes.
Anchor text: what to write inside the link
Anchor text is where most owners either undercook it ("click here") or overcook it (the same exact keyword on every link). Google's guidance suggests reading only the anchor text out of context and checking whether it makes sense by itself. It also warns against cramming in keywords, noting that keyword stuffing violates Google's spam policies.
That out-of-context test has a second audience. The accessibility standard WCAG 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context), a Level A requirement, says the purpose of each link should be clear from its text alone or from its text together with its surrounding context. Screen reader users often pull up a list of every link on a page, and a list of ten "read more" links is useless to them.
Some examples from the kind of sites I build:
- Weak: "To learn more about our services, click here."
- Stuffed: "We offer best home health care Dallas TX home health agency services."
- Good: "If you are comparing options after a hospital discharge, our skilled nursing at home page explains what Medicare covers."
Vary the wording naturally across pages. If ten posts all link to your skilled nursing page, some can say "skilled nursing at home," others "in-home nursing visits," others "what a home health nurse does." That is how people actually write, and it gives Google a wider sense of what the page covers.
One more rule from the same Google page that I see broken often: don't chain links right next to each other. Three adjacent links in a row make it hard for readers to tell them apart and strip away the surrounding words that give each one context.
Finding orphan pages and weak spots
An orphan page is one with no internal links pointing to it. You can't fix what you can't see, so this is the audit I run, in order.
1. Start with Search Console's Links report
Google's Links report includes a table of your top internally linked pages, and selecting a URL shows which of your pages link to it. Google suggests using it to confirm your core pages, like the home and contact pages, are properly linked. It also notes the report is a sample, not a complete list of every link, so treat it as a health check rather than an inventory. If you haven't set it up yet, my Search Console beginner's guide walks through verification and the reports worth opening first.
What I look for: is your most important service page near the top? If a privacy policy or an old blog post outranks your main service in internal links, your navigation or footer is pointing weight in the wrong direction.
2. Compare your sitemap against your links
Export the URLs in your sitemap into a spreadsheet. Then run a crawler (Screaming Frog's free version handles small sites) from your homepage and export every URL it found by following links. Any URL in the sitemap that the crawler never reached is an orphan or close to one. On sites that have been through a platform change, this is usually where old landing pages and forgotten location pages turn up.
3. Check click depth for money pages
Count how many clicks it takes to reach each service page from the homepage. My rule of thumb, not a Google rule, is that anything you sell should be reachable in two clicks or fewer, and the pages that bring in most of your revenue should be one click away. Deep pages aren't invisible, but they tend to get less attention from both crawlers and visitors.
4. Read your top posts as a visitor
Open your five best-performing blog posts and ask one question of each: when I finish reading, where does this page want me to go? If the answer is "nowhere," add a contextual link to the relevant service page and a closing paragraph that names the next step. This is often the single highest-value change on a small site.
When not to add a link
More links aren't automatically better, and I push back when a client wants to link everything to everything.
- Don't force irrelevant links. A post about caregiver hiring doesn't need a link to your logo design page just because both exist. If the reader wouldn't click it, it is clutter.
- Don't stack dozens of footer links. A footer with every city and every service in it dilutes the signal of the links that matter and reads like a keyword list.
- Don't link to redirects. After a redesign, update internal links to point at the final URL rather than relying on a 301 forever. It's cleaner for crawlers and faster for visitors. My website redesign checklist includes this in the post-launch steps.
- Don't link to thin pages you'd rather Google ignored. Tag archives with one post, empty location pages and duplicate filter URLs shouldn't be promoted from your best content.
A one-afternoon internal linking plan
If you only have a few hours, this order gets you most of the benefit:
- List your money pages. Usually three to eight URLs: each core service, contact or booking, and any location pages.
- Confirm each is in the main navigation or linked from the homepage body.
- Group your blog posts by topic and match each group to one money page. If you haven't planned topics yet, my guide to keyword research for small businesses shows how I build the topic list in the first place.
- Add one contextual link from every post to its money page, using descriptive anchor text.
- Add two to four sibling links between posts that answer related questions.
- Fix the technical blockers: fake links, image links without alt text, internal links pointing at redirects.
- Make it a publishing habit. Every new post links to at least one older post and one money page, and you go back and add a link to the new post from one or two older ones.
That last step is the one people skip. New posts start with zero internal links pointing at them. Linking back from older, already-indexed pages is what helps a new page get found and understood.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal links should a page have?
Google doesn't publish a number, and I'd be wary of anyone who does. I aim for links that a reader would actually use: in a typical 1,500 word post, that tends to be one link to a service page, a few to related posts and one to contact. Navigation and footer links are on top of that. If you're adding links to hit a count, stop.
Do internal links help rankings or just crawling?
Both, in Google's own framing. Its link best practices page says internal links help Google find pages and make sense of your site, and that anchor text helps Google understand what the linked page is about. How much any single link moves a ranking isn't something Google quantifies, so I treat internal linking as foundational hygiene rather than a ranking trick.
Should I use exact-match keywords in anchor text?
Sometimes, when it reads naturally. Google's guidance warns against cramming keywords into anchor text and points to its spam policies on keyword stuffing. Use descriptive phrases that a person would write, and let the wording vary across your site.
Do I still need a sitemap if my internal linking is good?
Google says a small, comprehensively linked site might not need one. I still add one, because it costs nothing on modern platforms and helps Google pick up new and updated pages. Think of good internal linking as the thing that makes the sitemap almost redundant, not as a replacement for it.
Are navigation and footer links enough?
They cover discovery for your main pages, but they say little about how your content relates. Contextual links inside body copy carry surrounding words that explain why the destination matters, which Google's guidance specifically encourages. Use navigation for structure and body links for meaning.
Want me to map yours?
On agency sites like Lonestar Home Healthcare, the work is mostly deciding which pages matter and making sure every article leads to them. If you'd like a clear list of your orphaned pages, weak anchors and missing paths to your services, send me your site and I'll tell you what to fix first.
