Internal Linking for SEO: A Simple Guide

If ScoutRival’s SEO Score flagged “Add more internal links,” it means one or more of your pages don’t link to enough other pages on your site. It’s one of the most underrated SEO wins — it costs nothing, takes minutes, and quietly lifts your whole site. This guide shows you how to do it on every major platform, no coding required.

What is internal linking?

Internal linking is the practice of connecting the pages of your own website to each other with hyperlinks. When your “About” page links to your “Services” page, or a blog post links to a related guide, that’s an internal link. (A link to another website is an external or outbound link — different thing.)

Think of your website like a city, and internal links like the roads between neighbourhoods. A brilliant page with no roads leading to it is a house with no street address — technically it exists, but nobody, including Google, can easily get there. Internal links are the roads that let visitors and search-engine crawlers travel from page to page, and the busier the roads leading to a page, the more important that page looks.

In one sentence: an internal link is a hyperlink from one page on your site to another page on the same site, used to help visitors and search engines navigate and understand your content.

Why internal linking matters for your SEO

Internal links do three powerful things at once, which is why they punch so far above their weight:

• They help search engines discover your pages. Crawlers follow links. A page that nothing links to (an “orphan page”) can go undiscovered for a long time. Internal links create clear paths so every page gets crawled and indexed.
• They pass ranking value (“link equity”). When a strong page links to a weaker one, it shares some of its authority. Linking your best pages to the pages you want to rank helps those targets climb.
• They show relationships and topical depth. Linking related pages together tells search engines “these belong to the same topic,” which builds topical authority and helps the right page rank for the right query.

There’s a user benefit too: readers who follow a helpful internal link stay on your site longer and view more pages, which sends positive engagement signals.

ScoutRival’s SEO Score checks how many internal links each page has. Pages with fewer than about 3 get flagged, because thin internal linking makes a page harder to crawl and rank. This is a graded check, so every relevant link you add moves the score in the right direction.

How to check if you have this problem

A quick manual check takes under a minute:

1. Open one of your important pages — say, a key blog post or a service page.
2. Scan the body text and footer for links pointing to other pages on your own site. Count them. Fewer than three contextual internal links? That page is under-linked.
3. Now ask the reverse question: “How would a visitor get to this page from my homepage?” If the answer is “only by typing the URL,” it’s an orphan and needs links pointing to it.

For a site-wide view, run a free ScoutRival SEO Score. It reports which pages have too few internal links, so you can prioritise the ones that matter most — usually your money pages and cornerstone content.

How to add internal links — step by step

The mechanics are the same everywhere: select some words in your content, and turn them into a link to another page on your site. What changes per platform is where the link button lives. Before the steps, three quick rules that apply to every platform:

• Anchor text matters. Highlight words that describe the destination — “our SEO audit checklist,” not “click here.” Descriptive anchor text tells search engines what the linked page is about.
• Link where it’s genuinely helpful. Add links inside relevant sentences, not in a random list at the bottom. Natural, in-context links carry the most weight.
• Aim for at least 3 relevant internal links out of each substantial page, and make sure your most important pages have several links pointing to them.

WordPress

1. Open the page or post in the editor and highlight the words you want to turn into a link.
2. Click the link icon (a chain) in the toolbar, or press Ctrl/Cmd + K.
3. Start typing the title of the page you want to link to — WordPress searches your existing content — then select it and press Enter. It inserts the correct internal URL automatically.
4. Repeat for a few relevant destinations. If you use Yoast or Rank Math, their internal-linking suggestions panel will recommend related pages as you write.

Wix

1. In the Wix Editor, add or select a Text element and highlight the words to link.
2. Click the link icon in the text toolbar.
3. Choose “Page” as the link type, pick the destination page from your site’s list, and click Done.
4. Publish to make the links live. For menus and buttons, use the element’s own Link setting to point to internal pages.

Squarespace

1. Open the page and click into a Text block, then highlight the words you want to link.
2. In the pop-up toolbar, click the link icon.
3. In the link panel, search for and select one of your existing pages (Squarespace lists them), rather than pasting a full URL — this keeps the link correct even if the URL changes.
4. Click away to save, then repeat for other relevant pages. Buttons and navigation links use the same page-picker.

Webflow

1. In the Designer, double-click a text element to edit it and select the words you want to link.
2. Click the link icon in the inline text toolbar (or add a Link Block / Text Link element).
3. In the settings, set the link to “Page” and choose the internal page from the dropdown. For CMS content, link to the appropriate Collection page.
4. Publish your site so the links go live.

Shopify

1. Edit a page, blog post, or product description and open the rich text editor.
2. Highlight the words to link, then click the link icon in the toolbar.
3. Paste or type the path to the internal page (for example /collections/summer-sale or /pages/about), and set it to open in the same tab. Save.
4. For navigation, use Online Store → Navigation to add internal pages, collections and products to your menus.

Any other website (custom or unlisted CMS)

If you hand-code your site or use a builder not listed above, add links directly in your content:

1. In the page’s body content, wrap the descriptive words in an anchor tag pointing to the relevant internal URL, for example a link whose text reads “our internal linking guide” and whose destination is /blog/internal-linking-for-seo/.
2. Add contextual links to at least three related pages, and add links back to important pages from your navigation, footer, or shared “related posts” component.
3. Use root-relative URLs (starting with /) so links keep working if you change domains. Save and redeploy.

How to confirm it’s fixed

1. Reload the page and click each new link to make sure it lands on the right page (no typos, no 404s).
2. Check that your anchor text is descriptive — a quick read-through should tell you where each link goes without clicking.
3. Re-run your ScoutRival SEO audit. The “Add more internal links” flag on the fixed pages should clear, and your on-page pillar score should improve as your pages gain the links they were missing.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Using “click here” or “read more” as anchor text. It wastes the strongest SEO signal a link carries. Describe the destination in the clickable words instead.
• Linking everything to everything. Too many links dilute their value and overwhelm readers. Link where it’s genuinely relevant, not for the sake of a number.
• Ignoring orphan pages. Adding outbound links from a page is only half the job — make sure important pages have links pointing to them as well.
• Leaving all links in the footer. Contextual links inside your content carry far more weight than a wall of footer links. Do both, but prioritise in-content links.
• Breaking links when you change URLs. If you rename a page, update or redirect the links that pointed to it, or use your platform’s page-picker so links stay correct automatically.

The bottom line

Internal linking is free, fast, and one of the highest-leverage SEO tasks you can do without writing a single new page. Give every important page at least three relevant internal links, use anchor text that describes the destination, and make sure nothing on your site is an orphan. Do that, and you help search engines find, understand, and rank more of your content.

Want to know exactly which pages are under-linked? Run a free SEO Score with ScoutRival and get a prioritised, plain-English to-do list for your whole site. Next, learn the flip side — do outbound links help SEO and how to add them right.