What internal links actually do
Internal links do three jobs at once, and most advice only covers the first two.
They help a person reach the page that answers their question. They show search engines how your pages relate to each other, which is how a crawler works out that a town page belongs under a county and that both belong to a service. And they distribute authority: a page that has earned links from elsewhere passes some of that value along every internal link it carries.
On a local site the second job is the one that pays. A business with services, towns, counties, case studies and guides has a structure that is obvious to the person who built it and completely invisible from outside unless the linking spells it out.
The structure a local site wants
Most local sites have four kinds of page. Each has a natural role in the link graph, and problems almost always come from a page type that is missing one side of it.
| Should link out to | Should receive links from | Usual failure | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage | Main services, main locations, strongest proof | Everywhere — it will be fine | Hoarding links instead of passing them on |
| Service pages | Related services, the locations that offer them, supporting guides | Homepage, location pages, guides on the topic | Linked from the menu and nowhere else |
| Location pages | Services offered there, the parent county, the nearest other location | Parent county, relevant services, relevant case studies | Orphaned except for a footer block |
| Guides | The services and locations they discuss, plus sibling guides | Other guides, and services where the topic is relevant | Dead ends — no outbound links at all |
Two properties are worth aiming for. Every page reachable within about three clicks of the homepage, and no page sitting on a single inbound link. Both are easy to check and both correlate with how thoroughly a site gets crawled.
A real example: this site had none
Worth being concrete, because this is a common failure and it is invisible until you look for it.
When we audited geoseo.co.uk in September 2026, all 35 guides carried the full navigation menu, a sidebar and a footer. Every one of them had a healthy-looking link count. But the number of links inside the prose — in a sentence, where a reader might actually follow one — was zero. Across every guide on the site.
Each one was a dead end. A reader finishing an article about AI Overviews had no route to the related article about ChatGPT, and a crawler had no signal that the two were related beyond both appearing in a menu that also appeared on 170 other pages.
Fixing it meant adding two to five contextual links per page, chosen where the text naturally raised a related question. That is a couple of hours of work on a site this size, and it is the single most common thing missing from sites built out of templates.
Links in prose beat links in blocks
A footer stuffed with fifty town links is a recognisable pattern and does very little. A link inside a sentence does considerably more, for three reasons: it carries context from the surrounding words, it sits where a reader is already interested, and it is not repeated identically on every page of the site.
That last point matters more than people expect. A link that appears in the same position on 170 pages is largely discounted — it tells a crawler nothing about any particular page. A link that appears once, in relevant text, is a genuine signal.
Anchor text, without overthinking it
The anchor is the clearest statement you make about what the target page is. Describe the destination, vary the wording naturally, and stop there.
| Example | Why | |
|---|---|---|
| Good | “how to build service-area pages without doorway risk” | Describes the destination, reads naturally in a sentence |
| Also fine | “the same problem applies to county pages” | Descriptive without repeating the target keyword |
| Weak | “click here”, “read more”, “this page” | Tells a crawler nothing about the target |
| Risky | the exact target keyword, repeated identically every time | Reads as engineered, and over-optimised internal anchors are a known pattern |
Two to five contextual links per page is plenty for a typical local page. There is no bonus for more, and a page dense with links reads like an index rather than an answer.
How to audit your own internal linking
A crawl of your own site surfaces all of this in minutes. What to look for, in order of how much it matters:
- Orphan pages. Reachable only through the sitemap or the navigation. These get crawled less and understood less. Any page worth keeping deserves at least one contextual link from a related page.
- Click depth. How many clicks from the homepage to each page. Anything beyond three or four on a small site suggests the structure is wrong rather than the linking.
- Pages competing for the same term. If two pages target one search, links between them split the signal. That is usually a sign to consolidate — see town pages versus county pages for how to decide.
- Links pointing at redirects. They work, but they waste a hop and show up in audits as notices. Point at the final URL — this is a routine casualty of any site migration or content prune.
- Broken internal links after a rename, prune or restructure.
- Everything pointing at the homepage. A common pattern that concentrates authority on the one page that needs it least.
Most of these are five-minute fixes once you can see them. The hard part is looking.
Internal linking and AI search
One reason this matters more than it used to: internal links are part of how a language model works out what your business does and where.
When an AI system reads a page about forklift hire in Southampton and finds contextual links to a forklift hire service page and a Hampshire coverage page, it has corroboration for a relationship. When the only links are a navigation menu identical across the site, it has a list of URLs and no relationships at all. Entity clarity is largely built from exactly this kind of structural signal, alongside consistent business data and schema.
The practical version: link the way you would explain the business to someone. Schema states your facts; internal links show how they connect.
What not to do
- Do not add a links block to solve it. A widget listing every location on every page recreates the footer problem with extra steps.
- Do not link every page to every other page. Relevance is the signal; a complete graph carries none.
- Do not build pages just to link to. That is how doorway pages happen.
- Do not use nofollow on internal links to steer authority. That has not worked the way people imagine for over a decade, and it mostly just wastes the link.