Using Internal Linking to Get More Visibility to (and Leads From) Your Content Strategy
Building a successful content strategy that brings in traffic, helps your audience, and proves your expertise is a lot of work. Successful content strategies can take years of effort and continuous refinement – but it’s key to building an inbound marketing strategy that gets results.
So, if you’re putting in all the work that a successful content strategy requires, there’s nothing worse than nobody reading the content you’re writing, especially if it’s because they can’t find it or don’t know it exists in the first place.
And while there are a lot of factors that can contribute to your content getting visibility online, one of them is planning an effective internal linking strategy.
An internal linking strategy is where you strategically include links within your content to additional (and relevant) pages, posts, or listings that are also within your website.
But the key to a successful internal link-building strategy is always to put quality over quantity, meaning you shouldn’t just be adding as many internal links as you can. To be successful, the internal links you include should be created with deliberate purpose, and they should work towards providing a next step that’s logical and useful to the person reading it.
★ It’s also important to build an external linking strategy. If you want to learn more about that, have a look at this post called: Why You Need an External Link Building Strategy.
Internal linking is an important part of helping your pages get found, both by your visitors and by search engines alike, and it plays a crucial role in your overall digital strategy by contributing to 2 main components of it:
1. As Part of Your SEO Strategy
Internal linking is a key part of an effective SEO strategy, because internal linking is one component of positioning your content to be found by search engines.
Reason being, if you have content on your website that’s deeply buried, gets very few visits, is difficult to get to in more than a few clicks, and has no internal links to it, search engines will have a hard time finding it – and even if they do find it, because it’s so hidden, they probably aren’t going to think it’s important enough to index in search, much less put anywhere near the top of the search results.
That means that your SEO strategy relies, at least in part, on internal linking to help search engines figure out the structure of your website by looking at which pages are connected and which pages are related, and then using that to determine which pages are important.
While there’s no definitive rules around how many internal links to include, to be effective, all of the content within your website should be no more than 3 clicks away from homepage – any more than that, and search engines will think it’s less important.
And generally speaking, the more internal links you have to your content, the more important it appears to be. For example, a blog post that was written 5 years ago with zero internal links is going to be seen by search engines as much less important than a high-quality, primary topic blog post that has dozens of internal links to it from multiple posts, pages, and listings across your website.
That’s also where pillar pages can be helpful. A pillar page is a long-form piece of content that covers a main topic (your pillar content), while offering a breakdown of supporting content (cluster content) with links to access that content, plus links from the content pages back to the pillar page. If you want to learn more about pillar pages, have a look at this post called: Using Pillar Pages to Make Old Content More Accessible.
Without an internal linking strategy in place, the content you’ve spent time writing is less likely to be found high in search results, simply because search engines won’t think it’s important or won’t be able to find it easily.
★ Want to learn more about building a strong SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Successful SEO Strategy for AI Search Results
- How to Do Keyword Research for Your Real Estate SEO Strategy
- Building a Successful Real Estate Off-Page SEO Strategy
2. As Part of Your Engagement and Conversion Strategy
But internal linking isn’t just for SEO reasons – it also plays a critical role in improving your engagement (and in getting more leads and conversions). For visitors, internal linking helps you build authority and demonstrate your expertise, but most importantly, it helps guide your visitors down a path to conversion.
When it comes to your engagement strategy, internal linking is probably the single most important aspect to focus on. That’s because it serves to improve your overall user experience by helping your audience find related content, and guides them towards conversion.
That means that if you have content related to other content on your website, that further helps someone, it makes sense to link to it, just like this:
★ Want to learn more about building an engagement strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Creating a Returning Visitors Marketing Strategy
- Establishing a Behavioral Marketing Strategy
- Measuring the Success of Your Digital Strategy Through Engagement
In the example above, if there were no internal links to it, anyone reading probably wouldn’t know that the content even exists, but by including internal links, about topics that are related to what they’re reading, there’s a good chance someone will click it to do a deeper dive – and all of that works towards helping someone, but also might inch them towards conversion.
More Strategic Links Means More Chance for Success
Internal links provide more opportunity for your content strategy to be successful by making it more visible, and they’re an important part of making sure that your audience is nudged to the right pages, at the right time, and for the right reasons.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why it’s effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.
