Before you invest in internal linking

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Before you spend anything on internal linking, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

Descriptive anchor text beats "click here" every time. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Orphan pages rarely rank at all. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to tell if yours is fine

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about internal linking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.