Internal Links Audit

Why Are Internal Links Important?

When evaluating websites for SERPs, Google places a higher value on pages with more internal links. 

The number of internal links to a page is a powerful ranking factor that affects:

• Page authority: Like external links, internal links also pass SEO juice that helps Google discern your high-authority pages. The number of links to a page signals its relative importance to all pages on your domain and affects its “authority.” 
• Crawling: Do your pages take months to move up the SERPs? Internal links alert search engines to your pages faster, allowing them to get discovered and crawled sooner. 
• Site architecture and user experience: An organized site architecture improves the user experience, allowing users to quickly find important pages.

Most importantly, adhering to an internal linking strategy is a relatively quick task that can significantly impact your organic SEO rankings.

How Do You Audit Internal Links?

Before linking between pages, you need to understand your starting point with an internal link audit.

When conducting your audit, document these criteria:

1. Crawl Depth

How many clicks does it take a user to find the page?

A page’s distance from the homepage (the most authoritative page in a site hierarchy) affects its SEO value, according to Google’s John Mueller. Search engines see buried content as lower authority.

Use tools like SEMrush or Screaming Frog to measure crawl depth to your pages, and export the data. 

Filter pages by their crawl depth, and flag important pages with high crawl depth (further from the homepage) to address. In general, you should aim for 3 clicks or fewer. 

2. Internal Links

How many internal links does each page receive?

Use the same tools in step one to discover the number of internal links to each page.

Look for pages with too few (or too many) internal links to correct. Keep a close eye on:

• Orphan pages: In general, you want to avoid orphan pages (those with zero internal links) and limit internal links to 100. 
• Unimportant pages with a large amount of links: Why do links to unimportant pages matter? Remember: Your internal links alert search engines to your most important pages. When pointing more pages to low-value or irrelevant pages, search engines will pay more attention to these pages than those you actually care about. Make it as easy as possible for search engines to determine your most important pages. 
• Low-quality or irrelevant links: As you evaluate internal links, take note of links that don’t relate to the topic of the page they appear on. Links should add context to the page’s content and allow readers to drill deeper into a related topic. 

3. Internal Links Issues

Links that return an error weaken the user experience and can affect your SEO standing.

When auditing your internal links, look for the following link issues to address: 

• Broken links (4xx error)
• Internal links to redirected pages (3xx)