You’re ready to add an internal linking strategy to your automotive website’s SEO strategy. This is a smart decision and one that will improve the traffic flow on your website. By having an internal linking strategy you can improve the overall SEO performance by spreading the SEO juice from the strong pages to the less influential pages. It also helps visitors navigate the website and find what they need.
Follow this guide and create an internal linking strategy for your automotive website.
Link Content-Heavy Pages
The most valuable internal links are the ones that connect one article to another. This helps direct website visitors deeper into your website. Internal linking helps potential customers to move through the marketing funnel. This encourages them to trust you more and are more likely to purchase from you. Focus on adding links to your long form content. These pages are rich in information and are more likely to have outside links pointing to them. You can then spread the positive SEO juice throughout the pages.
Don’t worry about linking to your website’s contact, about, homepage, and other main structural pages of the website. If you already have a strong website structure, then you don’t need an internal linking strategy for them. Visitors should be able to easily find these pages as a part of your menu.
Create Text Links Using Anchor Text
Don’t just throw links randomly into your articles. The most effective links use descriptive anchor text for the link. What is descriptive text you ask? It’s another way of saying keywords. Here is an example of using descriptive text for your anchor text that’s relevant to the page it links to:
Grow Your Automotive Blog Faster
This anchor text is descriptive and tells you what you can expect when you click the link. This gives you two benefits. The first is that it makes your websites visitors happier by making it simple for them to navigate your website. The second benefit is with Google’s algorithm. The algorithm has gotten smarter, and can see that the anchor text relates to the target webpage.
Avoid These Anchor Text Mistakes
Don’t try to create an exact match between the anchor text and the target link. An exact match is when the anchor text is the exact keyword that is targeted on the webpage. If you do this a lot, it looks unnatural to the search engines. Your SEO performance will get dinged for this. If the website you want to link to is optimized for the keyword “car repair in Tampa”, then you don’t want your anchor text to be this phrase. Instead, you could use “how to find car repair” or “the importance of local car repair” or even “vehicle mechanics in Tampa”.
Never use a phrase like “click here” or something similar. This is a waste of time because it provides no benefit. It also creates a missed opportunity.
Do not create long links. Your anchor text should be up to six words. Linking an entire paragraph looks terrible and makes your website look spammy. Ideal anchor texts are at least two words and should be a short phrase. This makes the link large enough to be noticeable without being so large that it detracts from the user experience.
Add an Appropriate Number of Links
Not adding enough links to your articles means you are missing out on SEO opportunities. Add too many links to your article, and it looks like spam. Too many links throughout your article makes it hard to read and the links untrustworthy. The recommended amount is about five. However. If you don’t have enough content, then you may not be able to add five internal links to each article. The links you choose need to be relevant, so don’t try to get to five by linking to unrelated content.
These internal links to old content also help with your website’s freshness value. Google factors in how old content is when determining rankings. Linking brand new content to older content helps to spread the freshness factor to the older content. Every time a reader follows the link to the older content they refresh the older page by signaling to Google that the information is still fresh and relevant.
For example, you have an article about a new headlight design that’s coming out. This article will age and become stale over time as newer products come out. You could link to this page in future articles about headlights to help keep it fresh.
Update Your Links
Combine your linking strategy with your content refresh strategy. In the last section I mentioned having a page about a new headlight design. You could refresh this content by talking about the headlights ongoing performance. Perhaps there are common repairs or maintenance issues that you can add to the article. You could talk about ways to refresh the look of your aging headlights. Or about possible products that are a newer replacement.
While you are updating the content, you can also update the links. This creates new links and pathways for the crawlers to navigate. You may also have created content since writing this older article that would make for good internal links.
Don’t Be Lazy
While you can add other articles at the end of your article, this shouldn’t be your only effort. This is the lazy approach. Instead, look for places where the content overlaps. These are logical informational connection points that are perfect for adding a link. Perhaps you have an article that goes further in depth on a particular topic that you’re briefly mentioning in this article. Let’s continue with our headlight article. You could link to a variety of other articles with related topics.
These articles all speak to readers who are in different stages of the marketing funnel. This maximizes the likelihood that someone will click on the links while reading. Each of these links targets a different keyword but has a topic that is relevant to the article at hand.
Dofollow vs. Nofollow For Your Law Blog
Only use dofollow links when internally linking. These are the ones that will have an impact on your SEO. Nofollow links do not affect your SEO, which is the exact opposite of what you want. The Google crawlers won’t even follow drawl nofollow links.
Avoid These Linking Strategy Mistakes
Google has a limit of 150 links per page. so ultimately, do not have more than 150 links on a single page. This includes the links in the header, footer, sidebar, and menu. When you factor these into your on page links, you can easily get up there in links.
Don’t try to stuff links into your articles. This is just as bad as keyword stuffing. Don’t put links in the headers. This is a signal that your website is spam and will have a negative impact on your SEO efforts.
Create Content For Your Internal Linking Strategy
Before you can start linking to content, you need to have the content to link to. This means having a bank of articles in your website’s blog. Don’t try to cheat the system by buying a bulk of content from a blog mill. The content you link to needs to be high quality and informative.
Let’s chat and create a content plan for your internal linking strategy.