Making sure Google — and customers — can actually get around your site

Why internal links matter as much as backlinks

Backlinks from other websites get most of the attention in SEO conversations, but internal links — the links between your own pages — are just as important and entirely within your control. They're how Google discovers new pages on your site in the first place, and how it works out which pages you consider most important. A page with no internal links pointing to it is much harder for Google to find, crawl regularly, or rank highly, no matter how good the content on it is.

What "link equity" actually means

Think of link equity as a kind of trust or authority that flows through links, both from other websites into yours and between your own pages. Your homepage usually accumulates the most of this trust, since it's the page most commonly linked to. Internal linking is how that trust gets distributed to the pages that actually need it — your key service and location pages — rather than sitting unused on the homepage alone.

Finding and fixing orphaned pages

An orphaned page is one that exists on your site but has no internal links pointing to it from anywhere else — it might still be indexed by Google, but it's effectively invisible to anyone browsing the site, and gets very little of that link equity passed to it. These pages build up over time: an old landing page from a past campaign, a location page added and never linked from the main menu or another page. Part of an internal linking project is finding every one of these and connecting them back into the site properly, or removing them if they're no longer needed.

Anchor text: getting it right

Anchor text is the clickable, visible text of a link — and it matters more than most people realise. A link that simply says 'click here' tells Google nothing about the page it points to. A link that says 'emergency boiler repair in Leeds' tells Google exactly what that destination page is about, reinforcing its relevance for that exact search. Getting this right across a site, without it looking repetitive or unnatural, is a big part of what makes internal linking effective rather than just decorative.

How internal linking supports new content

Every new blog article or service page is an opportunity to strengthen the pages that already matter most, by linking back to them with relevant anchor text. It works the other way too — older, established pages can link forward to new content to help Google discover and index it faster. We treat internal linking as an ongoing habit built into every other piece of content work, not just a one-off technical clean-up.

Internal linking and site navigation aren't the same thing

Your main menu is one form of internal linking, but it's not the whole picture — every link inside the body of a page counts too, and often matters more for SEO because it's contextual: it tells Google exactly why one page is relevant to another. A site can have a perfectly tidy navigation menu and still have poor internal linking, if individual pages never reference or link to each other in the actual content. We look at both, but the in-content links are usually where the real opportunity is.