External links that point to your website from other sources have a huge impact from an SEO perspective. But, your internal links require attention as well. Internal links map the way for a website visitor and search engines when they want to assess your content. However, these links play a significant role altogether. They help your site to acquire top ranks on search, and they enhance the user experience on your site.
Many benefits come with internal links. They tell search engines that your site is an authority and they help you to get keyword.com referrals. As such, you need to prioritize on auditing your internal links regularly. Although you might not benefit instantly from such an audit, it’s important to know the reasons why it’s crucial to carry out an internal link audit.
1. Audits Show Page Significance to Search Engines
Website owners will create lots of content, but the value is only rational if it's indexed by search engines. If your content/site isn’t accessible to search engines, it has no impact on your SERP rank. If you inspect and fix your internal link structure, it becomes easy for the crawlers to access your website. When you audit your internal links, it's important to ask what you want to offer visitors on your site, your desired SERP rank, and your most significant content on your webpages.
After answering these questions, you need to present search engines with the information you’d want to see ranked. Other elements help with site navigation, but internal linking helps you to streamline your site’s performance.
Even if you’ve been managing SEO for the longest time, there is no guarantee that your site is foolproof. Broken links can occur at any time. The more you post and update content, the higher the chances that broken links will appear. Websites with more content tend to have more links. If you’re oblivious to this fact, broken links can show up without your knowledge. To turn it around, consider auditing the original pages and update corresponding links. You can boost internal link errors by ensuring all Urls are spelled correctly. If not, they can hurt your user experience and increase the bounce rates.
After generating content over a significant period, the number of articles on your site increases significantly. It’s not uncommon to keep linking the same pages over and over. This can mean you’re overlooking some killer content with the potential to drive traffic. When you audit your internal links, you’re likely to identify pages that are better suited for internal linking over others. This ensures that you don’t overload some pages with links and you focus on the important pages that draw visitors to your site. Some pages have little or no value that can be passed on to another page and you can ignore them.
Alternatively, you can opt to refresh such pages or you can get rid of them. Equally, you should pay the same attention to weak pages the same way you do with high impact pages the weak pages can help you identify the mistakes and how to modify or fix them for a better outcome.
It's important to improve the quality of your content, but it’s equally important to improve your existing links. You need to forget the quantity and focus on the value of your hyperlinks. Auditing the internal links lets you synchronize the right content between the pages while presenting the best information to your visitors. Internal links help you to identify popularly and disliked pages to find a balance.
Turning your leads into conversion is a critical process for your e-commerce venture. With proper internal linking, you can convert your leads into sales. Proper linking helps in streamlining the path towards the sales funnel. If you’re keen about your internal links, you can easily interlink high impact content to boost brand awareness. With proper internal linking, you can channel your audience to a specific call to action.