What to ask your agency about internal linking

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on internal linking, these questions are worth asking early.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Orphan pages rarely rank at all. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

In practice

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about internal linking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Orphan pages rarely rank at all — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.