Take the time to build, analyze, and refine your internal link structure. This step-by-step guide transformed my internal linking process into a data-driven strategy with the power of vector embeddings. The effort will pay off in improved rankings, better user experience, and ultimately, more organic traffic. It also improves SEO performance by ensuring your most valuable pages are connected in a way that search engines and your users understand.
After running this process on a client’s site, I was surprised. I thought we’d done a great job at internal linking, but there were hundreds of opportunities we’d missed. And I don’t just mean that the keyword we want to link from appears on the page. I mean opportunities to link pages that search engines would see as highly relevant to each other. In doing so, I was able to disambiguate closely related concepts and fix a few unnoticed keyword cannibalization issues as well.