How to Use Internal Links to Rank Higher in Google

Internal linking is arguably the most underrated SEO strategy. You don't have to ask anyone to link to you, it's completely free with a 100% success rate, and internal links can actually help you rank higher in Google. So today, I'm going to show you how to use internal links to rank higher in Google.

If you're new to SEO, internal links are simply links from one page to another on the same website. And they're important for three main reasons. First, they help search engines like Google discover new pages so they can be added to their index. Second, internal links help pass PageRank around your site, effectively "powering" other pages. And if you're unfamiliar with PageRank, it's a mathematical formula that tries to determine the "value of a page." And Google themselves have said that after 18 years, they still use PageRank to rank pages. And third, internal links help search engines to better understand what a page is about. And they do this by looking at anchor texts and the text that surrounds the link. So with these three things in mind - crawlability, authority, and relevance - let's go through a few ways you can boost your rankings with internal links. The first way is to create a logical hierarchy in your site structure. Think of site structure as a mindmap. At the top, you'd have your homepage. Then you'd probably have main topics that branch out from your homepage like your services page, your blog, and About page. Then from these main topics, you'd probably have even more branches to other pages. Structure helps search engines to understand the relationship between these pages, where branches are created using internal links. Now, this mindmap is pretty basic and doesn't really give that much information to search engines. So let's build onto this example using an internal linking strategy called content hubs.

Content hubs are interlinked collections of content about a similar topic.

Basically, you create multiple pages on a topic and its subtopics, then interlink between the pages. So if we zoom into the link building guide, you might add more pages, like one about broken link building, resource page link building, guest posting, and blogger outreach. And to create relationships between these posts, you could link to these posts from your link building guide and also link from your posts to your link building guide. Not only does this help to create relevance between pages, but as each of these pages get backlinks, PageRank will flow to and from each page within the hub, helping all of your pages rank higher in Google. We have a full video on how to create and use content hubs, so I'll link that up in the description.Now, content hubs aren't for everyone.