Internal Linking Strategy: A Practical Guide for Small Businesses

An internal linking strategy is a plan for how the pages on your own website point to each other, so visitors find what they need and Google understands which pages matter most. For a small business, the practical version is simple: decide your most important pages, make sure every page you care about has links pointing to it, use short descriptive anchor text, and review it every few months. You don’t need a tool subscription or a huge site to do it well.

We see the same thing again and again with small business websites. The homepage looks lovely, the services pages are decent, the blog has a dozen useful posts, and none of them talk to each other. The website isn’t broken in one obvious way, it’s just quietly leaking attention. This guide shows you how to fix that.

TL;DR

• Internal links connect one page on your site to another. They help Google discover pages and help visitors move towards enquiring.
• Start with a short list of money pages (the ones that bring in customers) and link to them from your blog posts and related pages.
• Use brief, descriptive anchor text. Avoid “click here” and avoid stuffing the same keyword everywhere.
• Check for orphan pages: any page you care about needs at least one internal link pointing at it.
• Whether you use Elementor or a custom theme, what matters is that links are real, crawlable links and that you can edit them easily.

Table of Contents

• What internal links are, and how they differ from external links
• Why internal linking is worth your time
• Step 1: Decide which pages matter most
• Step 2: Shape a simple site structure
• Step 3: Audit what you already have
• Step 4: Write good anchor text
• Step 5: Put links where people will actually use them
• A worked example: a small trades business
• Elementor or a custom theme: does it change your linking?
• Our view: links are a habit, not a project
• Where TTOY Digital can help
• A simple internal linking checklist
• FAQ
• Sources

What internal links are, and how they differ from external links

An internal link connects two pages within the same website. An external link points from your site to a different domain. MDN’s web development guide describes hyperlinks in exactly those terms, and it is as technical as the definition needs to get.

The difference matters because you control both ends of an internal link. You decide what the page is called, where it sits and what it says. An external link depends on someone else’s site. (If you want the outside-facing side of the story, our piece on website backlinks and why they matter covers it.)

A few everyday examples of internal links:

• The main menu at the top of your site
• A line in a blog post saying “if you’re comparing options, see our pricing page”
• A “related services” box at the bottom of a service page
• The footer links to your contact page and your privacy policy

None of that is exotic. The skill is in choosing which links to add, and where.

Why internal linking is worth your time

There are two audiences for every link: people and search engines.

For search engines, Search Engine Land’s guide to internal linking lists the main benefits: links help search engines discover and index content efficiently, they distribute authority (often called link equity) to important pages, and they improve the user journey. Semrush makes the same point: pages that already carry authority can pass some of it to weaker, relevant pages.

For visitors, a link is a clear path to related information. The same Semrush guide notes that this keeps people on the site longer and can increase engagement and conversions. Put simply, if someone has just read about how local SEO works, the sensible next step is a link to the page where they can ask for help with it.

Sam Nemzer of SearchPilot compares internal linking to building a roadmap, helping search engines understand your site hierarchy. You can read his thinking in SearchPilot’s write-up on the impact of internal linking. It’s a useful picture: without a roadmap, even a good destination is hard to find.

One honest note. Internal links are not a magic switch. They work alongside good content, a fast mobile-friendly site and decent local signals. Google’s own guidance is that there’s no magical ideal number of links a page should contain, only that links should help people and search engines make sense of your site. You can see that in Google Search Central’s link guidance.

Step 1: Decide which pages matter most

Before adding a single link, write down your priorities. Most small business sites have far fewer important pages than owners think.

Take a plumber in Chesterfield, for example. The pages that make money are probably “Boiler servicing”, “Emergency call-outs” and “Bathroom installation”, plus the contact page. The blog posts about “how often should a boiler be serviced” are there to support those pages, not to compete with them.

A simple way to sort your pages into three groups:

1. Money pages: services, pricing, booking and contact. These are where enquiries happen.
2. Supporting pages: guides, case studies and FAQs that answer questions before someone buys.
3. Housekeeping pages: privacy, terms, cookie policy. They need to exist, not to rank.

Your aim is for the second group to feed the first. Every supporting page should point to at least one money page where it makes sense for the reader.

Step 2: Shape a simple site structure

The commonly recommended shape is a pyramid. The homepage sits at the top, a handful of main category or service pages sit underneath, and individual pages and posts sit under those. Ahrefs describes this pyramid structure as part of effective internal linking, along with placing important links early in the content.

In practice, for a small business this might look like:

Keep it shallow. If a visitor needs more than three clicks to get from the homepage to a service page, the structure is probably too deep for a small site.

Topic clusters, without the jargon

You’ll hear the phrase “topic cluster”. It means one main page (the pillar) on a subject, linked both ways with several smaller pages on related subtopics. Ahrefs explains that linking a pillar page reciprocally to related subtopic pages helps search engines understand topical relevance.

Here’s how that looks for an SEO topic on our own site. The pillar is SEO: what it is and how it works. Around it sit narrower pieces, such as how keyword optimisation enhances web design and how AI search is changing local SEO. Each one links back to the pillar, and the pillar links out to each one.

Step 3: Audit what you already have

Most businesses already have some internal links, just not good ones. An audit shows you what’s there.

Semrush’s guide recommends planning your structure, auditing to find gaps, and then using tools to spot linking opportunities from your most authoritative pages. You can do a lighter version by hand on a small site.

A 60-minute manual audit

1. List every page. Export your page list from WordPress, or use your XML sitemap. A spreadsheet is fine.
2. Add a column for “links in”. For each page, count how many other pages link to it. Searching your site for the page title is a quick way to spot mentions that aren’t linked yet.
3. Flag orphans. An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it. Google says every page you care about should have at least one internal link pointing to it so it can be found.
4. Find your strongest pages. Which pages get the most visits, or have earned links from other sites? Google Search Console shows both. Semrush suggests using backlink analysis to identify these high-authority pages, then linking from them to weaker, relevant pages.
5. Mark the gaps. Note money pages with few links in, and strong blog posts with no links out to a service.
6. Fix broken links. Any link that leads to a missing page is a dead end for both visitors and Google.

The result is a short to-do list. For most small sites that’s 20 to 40 links to add, not hundreds.

Step 4: Write good anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable wording of a link. It tells people, and Google, what’s on the other side.

The rules are straightforward:

• Be descriptive. Ahrefs recommends descriptive, varied anchor text rather than the same phrase repeated.
• Keep it brief. Semrush suggests five words or fewer and warns against generic phrases like “click here”.
• Make it honest. If a link doesn’t give the reader something of value, Google may be confused about what you’re offering, which can make your site less relevant to searches.

Examples: weak against strong

A good test: read just the linked words out loud. Do they still make sense without the sentence around them? If so, the anchor is doing its job.

Step 5: Put links where people will actually use them

Placement matters as much as wording. Links high up in the main content are more likely to be noticed by readers, and Ahrefs recommends placing important links early in the content.

Three habits that work:

• Link at the moment of need. If a post mentions migrating a website, link right there to a guide such as our one on SEO best practice during website migration.
• Update old posts. When you publish something new, go back to older, relevant posts and add a link to it. Ahrefs notes that updating older content with links to newer material helps give visibility to new pages.
• End with a next step. Finish a guide with a single, clear link to the page where a reader can act, not a pile of ten.

Don’t link for the sake of linking. Each link should have a purpose and connect pages that offer value to the user.

A worked example: a small trades business

Let’s make this real. Imagine Sarah runs a bookkeeping practice in Sheffield. Her site has a homepage, four service pages, a contact page and eleven blog posts. After a quick audit she finds:

• Her “Self-assessment help” service page is linked only from the menu.
• Three blog posts about tax deadlines don’t link to any service page.
• Two older posts link to a page she deleted last year.
• Her case study page has no links pointing to it at all.

She spends an afternoon fixing it. Each tax-deadline post gets a link in the first third of the article to her self-assessment page, using anchors like “self-assessment support”. The broken links are pointed at the nearest live page. The case study gets linked from the relevant service page and from two blog posts. Nothing glamorous, but suddenly every page has a clear route to an enquiry.

That’s an illustration of the method, not a result we’re promising. How much difference it makes depends on your site, your competition and how long Google takes to revisit your pages.

Elementor or a custom theme: does it change your linking?

A question that comes up a lot: does it matter whether your site is built with a page builder such as Elementor or with a custom theme?

For internal linking, the honest answer is that the tool matters less than the output. What you need from either approach:

• Real links. Google’s guidance covers crawlable links: links Google can follow as proper links on the page. If a button or menu only works through a script, check that it still resolves to a proper link.
• Easy editing. You should be able to add a link to a page in two minutes, not two days. This is where many small businesses get stuck, especially when a developer has left.
• Sensible menus and footers. Site-wide navigation is the backbone of your structure, so it needs to be clean and easy to change.
• Speed and upkeep. A heavy build slows pages down, and a neglected one breaks. Whichever route you take, regular updates and backups keep it healthy.

A page builder suits many small businesses: you can drag a box here, drop a link there, and see the result immediately. A custom theme tends to suit sites with specific layout needs or larger content libraries, because it only contains what the site actually uses. Neither is automatically right. The sensible check is who will maintain it, how quickly you can edit it, and how it performs on a mobile phone. If you’d like to see how packages compare with one-off design, we’ve written about web design packages versus just paying for a website.

Our view: links are a habit, not a project

Here’s our perspective, from working with small businesses in Derbyshire and across the UK.

Most owners treat internal linking as a one-off clean-up. They fix it in a burst, then add six new pages over the next year and none of those get linked. We’d rather see it treated as a small, regular habit: every time a page goes live, someone asks “what should link to this, and where should it link on to?”

That’s partly why we build sites around ongoing optimisation instead of one-off projects. Unlimited content changes are part of how we work, so adding a link, rewording an anchor or restructuring a menu doesn’t turn into a billable event. For a small team with no spare hours, that removes the friction that normally stops this work getting done.

We also think links should lead somewhere useful for the business. A visitor who reads a guide and then reaches a clear contact route is far more valuable than one who bounces. That’s the thinking behind SmartFlowCRM too: when an enquiry arrives from WhatsApp, email or a form, it lands in one place, so the work you put into guiding people to a page isn’t lost once they get in touch.

If your site feels like a pile of separate pages, don’t panic. It’s one of the most fixable problems in digital marketing, and it rarely needs a rebuild.

— Chris

Where TTOY Digital can help

If you’d rather have someone else do the audit and keep it tidy, internal linking is part of how we approach our local SEO service, which starts from £150 per month. If you’re planning a new site, our web design packages run from Starter at £120 per month to Growth at £170 per month and Smart at £560 per month, with the structure planned in from the start. Already on WordPress and just want it kept healthy? WordPress maintenance is £30 per month per site.

A simple internal linking checklist

Print this, or paste it into your task list.

• Every important page has at least one internal link pointing to it
• Each blog post links to a relevant service or money page
• Anchor text is short, descriptive and varied
• No “click here” links
• Key links appear early in the content, not only in the footer
• Old posts have been updated with links to newer ones
• Broken links have been fixed or redirected
• Menus are clean, and no important page is more than three clicks from the homepage
• You review all of this every three to six months

FAQ

How many internal links should a page have?

There’s no magic number. Google says there is no ideal count and that links should help people and search engines make sense of your site. A good rule of thumb is to link wherever a reader would genuinely want the next step, and nowhere else.

What is an orphan page?

It’s a page with no internal links pointing to it, so neither visitors nor search engines can easily find it. Google advises that every page you care about should have at least one internal link pointing to it. Your audit will show you which ones are affected.

Should internal links open in a new tab?

In general, no. Internal links are part of one journey through your site, so keeping them in the same tab feels natural and lets the back button work as people expect. Reserve new tabs for outside sites where you don’t want to lose the reader.

How often should I review my internal links?

A light review every three to six months is plenty for most small sites, plus a quick pass whenever you publish a new page. Check for orphan pages, broken links and new opportunities to link from your strongest content to your money pages.

Sources

• What are hyperlinks? MDN Web Docs
• Internal Linking for SEO: Types, Strategies & Tools, Search Engine Land
• Internal links: ultimate guide and strategies, Semrush
• The Importance and Impact of Internal Linking for SEO, SearchPilot
• SEO link best practices for Google, Google Search Central
• Internal Links for SEO: An Actionable Guide, Ahrefs
• Internal Linking: Best Practices for Website Visibility, Washington State University

Recommended

• How Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) works for small businesses
• Blogging for Business Growth
• Content strategy for small businesses: how to create content your audience will actually engage with

Related reading: WordPress maintenance plans for small businesses · Best small business CRM for UK firms