Of all the things one can do to improve a website's SEO, internal linking is, without doubt, the most underrated. It costs nothing. It requires no developer. It does not depend on convincing strangers to link to you, or on writing fresh content, or on installing plugins. It simply requires that you connect the pages you already have to one another, in the right way, with the right words.
And yet — let us be honest — most small business websites have almost no internal linking strategy at all. The homepage links to the main service pages and to "Contact." The service pages link only to "Contact" and back to the homepage. The blog posts (if there are any) sit in isolation, orphaned, unlinked from anything except the blog index. It is as if each page of the site is a separate island, with no bridges between them.
This is a tragedy, in SEO terms. Because internal links are how Google understands which pages on your site matter most, how authority flows from popular pages to less popular ones, and how your topical expertise on a subject is communicated as a coherent whole rather than a scattered collection of fragments. Fix your internal linking, and you can move pages from position 30 to position 8 in a matter of weeks — without writing a single new word.
Let us look at how.
Why internal links matter so much
When Google crawls your website, it follows links. Every link is a vote, a signal, a pathway. The more internal links pointing to a particular page — and the more those links use descriptive, keyword-relevant anchor text — the more Google understands that this page is important and that it is about that particular topic.
Three things flow through internal links:
- PageRank (authority) — your homepage is usually the most authoritative page on your site, because it has the most external links pointing to it. Internal links pass a fraction of that authority to other pages. Pages with many internal links from authoritative pages rank higher.
- Topical relevance — if ten different blog posts about plumbing all link to your "Emergency Plumbing Services" page using anchor text like "emergency plumber" and "24/7 plumbing repair," Google forms a strong association between that page and those terms.
- Crawl discovery — pages that are not linked from anywhere on your site may never be discovered or indexed by Google at all. Internal links are how Google finds new content.
This last point is important. We have audited sites with 200 published blog posts, of which only 40 were indexed by Google. Why? Because the other 160 were "orphan" pages — pages with no internal links pointing to them, accessible only via the sitemap or search. Google looked at them, saw nothing pointing to them, and concluded they could not be very important.
The hub-and-spoke model
The most effective internal linking structure for a small business website is what is called the "hub-and-spoke" model. It works like this:
- For each major topic your business addresses, you create a hub page — a comprehensive, authoritative page on that topic. This is your "Plumbing Services" page, for example.
- Around the hub, you create multiple spoke pages — more specific, narrower pages that cover sub-topics. These could be: "Emergency Plumbing Repair," "Drain Cleaning," "Water Heater Installation," "Pipe Leak Detection."
- Each spoke page links back to the hub page using descriptive anchor text.
- The hub page links out to every spoke page, ideally with brief descriptions.
- Spoke pages can link to other related spoke pages where it makes sense.
The result is a tightly interconnected cluster of pages that, taken together, signal to Google: "This site has deep expertise in plumbing." Each spoke page benefits from the authority of the hub, and the hub benefits from the topical signals of every spoke pointing to it.
This is fundamentally different from the typical small business setup, where every page links only to the homepage and the contact page, and pages within the same topic do not link to each other at all.
Anchor text: the part most people get wrong
The "anchor text" of a link is the visible, clickable words that the link is wrapped around. It is, naturally, one of the strongest signals Google uses to understand what a page is about. And yet most small business sites use anchor text like:
- "Click here"
- "Read more"
- "Learn more"
- "This page"
These tell Google absolutely nothing about the destination. They are wasted signals.
Good anchor text is descriptive, specific, and keyword-relevant — but natural. Some examples:
- Bad: "For more on this, click here."
- Good: "For more on this, read our guide to emergency plumbing repair."
- Bad: "Learn more."
- Good: "Learn how drain cleaning works in older homes."
- Bad: "We also offer this service."
- Good: "We also offer water heater installation in Portland."
Important nuance: do not use exactly the same anchor text every single time. If every link to your "Emergency Plumbing" page uses the words "emergency plumber Portland," Google may interpret this as manipulative. Vary it naturally. "Emergency plumbing repair," "24/7 plumbing service," "after-hours plumber," "urgent plumbing help" — all of these work, all of them feel natural, and together they create a richer topical signal than any single phrase repeated mechanically.
A before-and-after example
Let us make this concrete. Consider a small dental practice in Boston. Before any internal linking work, their site looks like this:
Before:
- Homepage → links to "Services," "About," "Contact"
- Services page → lists "Cleanings," "Whitening," "Implants," "Veneers" with no links, just descriptions
- "About" page → links to "Contact"
- Three blog posts → linked only from the blog index, with no links to or from the service pages
This is a typical setup, and it leaves enormous SEO value on the table.
After:
- Homepage → links to four hub pages: "Cosmetic Dentistry," "General Dentistry," "Dental Implants," "Emergency Dental Care," each with descriptive anchor text
- "Cosmetic Dentistry" hub → links to spoke pages "Teeth Whitening Boston," "Porcelain Veneers Boston," "Smile Makeovers Boston," and to relevant blog posts like "How Long Does Teeth Whitening Last?"
- "Teeth Whitening Boston" spoke page → links back to "Cosmetic Dentistry" hub, sideways to "Porcelain Veneers Boston" (where it makes sense in context), and to two relevant blog posts
- Each blog post → links back to its relevant hub page and to other related blog posts
The result is that every important commercial page on the site receives 8-15 internal links from related content, instead of 0-2 links. Within roughly six weeks, the practice saw their main commercial pages move from page 3 of Google to the bottom of page 1 — without writing a single new piece of content.
A practical, do-it-this-week internal linking audit
Here is a precise, step-by-step process you can run on your own site this week:
Step 1: List your money pages. Write down the 5-10 pages on your site that, if they ranked well, would directly produce revenue. These are your hub pages.
Step 2: For each hub page, count incoming internal links. Use the free Search Console "Links" report (Search Console → Links → Internal links). Sort by descending and find which pages have the most. The pages you wrote down in Step 1 should be near the top. If they are not, you have a problem.
Step 3: Write down which related content already exists. For each hub, list every blog post or supporting page that touches the same topic. Even loosely.
Step 4: Add 3-5 contextual internal links to each hub. Open each piece of related content, find a natural place in the body where you can mention the hub topic, and add a link with descriptive anchor text. Not at the bottom in a "related posts" widget — inside the actual prose, where the reader is most likely to engage.
Step 5: Add reverse links from the hub to spokes. On each hub page, add a section near the bottom titled something like "Learn more about [topic]" with links to the relevant spoke pages and blog posts.
Step 6: Update your main navigation. Make sure the hub pages are accessible from the main navigation, not buried three levels deep.
Step 7: Wait 4-6 weeks and check Search Console. Track average position for the queries your hub pages target. You should see measurable improvement.
Common internal linking mistakes
Mistake 1: Linking from low-quality pages. A link from a thin, useless page passes very little authority. Make sure your linking pages are themselves substantive.
Mistake 2: Over-optimizing anchor text. As mentioned above, do not use the exact same keyword anchor text every single time. Vary it naturally.
Mistake 3: Linking to the same page from the same article more than necessary. One or two links from a single article is plenty. Five links to the same destination from one piece looks manipulative and wastes signal.
Mistake 4: Forgetting orphan pages. Run your sitemap through any free crawler and look for pages with zero internal links. These are invisible to most of Google's authority flow. Either link to them or, if they are not worth linking to, consider whether they should exist at all.
Mistake 5: Putting all your internal links in the footer. Footer links are de-emphasized by Google. Contextual, in-body links matter much more.
The compounding effect
One of the most beautiful things about internal linking is that the effects compound. As your hub pages rise in rankings, they attract more external links and more authority. That authority then flows to your spoke pages, lifting them. The spoke pages attract their own links, which flow back to the hub. The whole structure rises together.
This is why sites that have invested in internal linking for years tend to dominate their niches in ways that seem disproportionate to their actual size or budget. They are not bigger. They are not richer. They are simply better-connected, internally, than their competitors.
Want to know which of your pages are orphaned?
Run a free SEO check at licheo.com/seo-standings and we will analyze your internal linking structure — which pages are orphaned, which hub pages need more links, which anchor text is wasted, and where the highest-impact connections can be made. The fixes are usually free and surprisingly fast.