Internal linking is one of the quickest SEO wins available, and one of the most overlooked. It doesn’t need a developer, new content or a big budget, yet on most of the sites we audit, it’s barely been touched.
This guide covers why internal links matter, the mistakes we see most often, and how to build a proper internal linking strategy. It also shows how to use ChatGPT to speed up the job of finding where links should go.
What Is Internal Linking?
An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on the same site. Your navigation menu, footer and “related articles” sections are all internal links, but the ones that carry the most weight are contextual links: links placed naturally within the body of your content.
Why Internal Links Matter for SEO
1. They Help Google Find Your Pages
Google discovers pages by following links. Pages with few or no internal links pointing to them can be missed or treated as unimportant. Older blog posts, deep product pages and service pages that were never cross-linked are the usual casualties.
2. They Pass Authority Between Pages
Authority flows through links. When other websites link to your homepage, internal links pass some of that authority on to your service pages, case studies and articles. Without them, it tends to sit on the homepage, unused. Google’s John Mueller has described internal linking as “super critical for SEO success”.
3. They Tell Google What Your Pages Are About
The words you link from, known as anchor text, signal what the destination page covers. Linking to a page with “SEO services for manufacturers” tells Google far more than “click here”. Consistent, descriptive internal links also help build topical authority across related content.
Common Internal Linking Mistakes
These are the issues we find most often when auditing websites:
- Orphaned pages: pages with no internal links pointing to them, common on sites that have grown over time without a plan.
- Generic anchor text: “click here” and “read more” tell search engines nothing about the page being linked to.
- Linking everything back to the homepage: your homepage already has plenty of authority. Use it as a launchpad to deeper pages instead.
- Strong pages that don’t share their authority: pages with lots of traffic or backlinks that never link to the pages you most want to rank.
- Broken internal links: links pointing to deleted or moved pages, often left behind after a redesign or migration.
How to Build an Internal Linking Strategy
Start With a Site Architecture Review
Map out how your content is organised and identify three groups of pages: the ones that matter most commercially, the ones with the most authority, and the ones that are under-linked. A crawling tool like Screaming Frog can list every page by how many internal links point to it, so the least-linked pages are a natural place to start.
Build Topic Clusters
Create a main pillar page for each core topic, linking out to more detailed supporting articles, which link back to the pillar and to each other. This connected structure shows search engines that you cover a subject in depth. Our guide to topical authority explains this in more detail.
Use Your Best Pages as Launchers
Find the pages with the most organic traffic or external links, and add contextual links from them to the pages you want to rank. It’s one of the fastest ways to give a priority page a boost, with no new content or backlinks needed.
Fix Orphaned Pages
Crawl your site and filter for pages with no or very few internal links. If a page still serves a purpose, add two or three contextual links to it from relevant pages. If it doesn’t, merge it into a stronger page or remove it and redirect the URL.
Review Your Anchor Text
Replace generic anchors with descriptive phrases. Pick one main phrase for each important destination page and use it consistently, while keeping the wording natural.
How to Use ChatGPT to Add Internal Links
Finding the right places for links is the slow part, especially on large websites with hundreds of pages. ChatGPT can do a lot of that legwork for individual blog posts and articles. It’s not a replacement for a proper audit, but it’s a useful time-saver.
Step 1: Give ChatGPT Your List of URLs
Paste in your XML sitemap, or a list of the pages you want to link to, and ask ChatGPT to turn it into a clean list.
Example prompt: “Here is my website’s sitemap. Extract the page URLs and give them to me as a list.”
Step 2: Give It the Final Version of Your Copy
Paste in the content you want to add links to. Make sure it’s the finished version, as editing the copy in the same conversation increases the chance of ChatGPT inventing links. Do any rewriting in a separate chat first.
Example prompt: “Using only the URLs from the list above, add internal links to this copy where the text is genuinely relevant to the page being linked to. Use descriptive anchor text and don’t add more than one link per paragraph.”
Step 3: Check Every Link
ChatGPT can still invent URLs, pick links that don’t really fit, or use pages from your sitemap that are broken or redirected. Click through and check every link before publishing, and remove any that don’t add value for the reader.
Example prompt: “Remove the link to [URL] and don’t include it anywhere in the copy.”
The same approach works for other jobs too, such as checking content against your tone of voice or drafting meta descriptions with a set character limit. As with any AI output, treat it as a first draft that needs a human edit, not something to publish as it is.
Internal Linking and AI Search
AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity look at your website as a whole, not just individual pages. A well-connected site where related content links together looks more authoritative on a topic, which makes it more likely to be cited. Our guide to optimising for AI search covers this further.
Tools to Audit Your Internal Links
- Screaming Frog: a full internal link audit, including anchor text, orphaned pages, redirect chains and broken links. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs.
- Google Search Console: the Links report shows which pages have the most internal links. Less detailed, but good for a quick check.
- Ahrefs or Majestic: page-level authority metrics to help you find your strongest pages to link from.
- SE Ranking: its Site Audit flags orphaned pages, broken internal links and pages with too few links.
Stop Leaving Authority on the Table
Internal linking is one of the few SEO improvements that needs nothing more than time and a clear plan. Almost every site we audit has gaps: priority pages that are hard to find, strong pages that don’t pass on their authority, and anchor text that tells Google nothing.
If you’d like to know how well your site is linked together, our free SEO audit will show you where the gaps are and what to fix first.
Jump into another related resource
Whether you’re after expert-written blogs, downloadable guides, or time-saving checklists, our Resource Hub gives you practical tools to make your marketing more effective.
