Isn’t it strange that your website gets a little traction and your competitor gets better sales despite the same efforts? Well, maybe on the surface level, the efforts look the same, but one of the factors that most e-commerce store owners overlook is “Internal Linking.”
A smart interlinking strategy can be your strength to shape how users navigate through your website, find the products, and make purchases. It also helps search engines understand your website better and rank your pages.
The e-commerce marketing services team at Wytlabs treats internal linking as a core part of our service, connecting product pages, blog content, and category collections. Still not sure how the whole thing works? Let’s explore how a well-planned internal linking strategy improves user experience, boosts search engine visibility, and increases product discoverability!
“Inter” means between or among.
“Linking” means connecting things.
Interlinking refers to links made between pages on the same website. If you have an e-commerce store, interlinking refers to creating links from your homepage, blog, or other pages to the product page.
Interlinking helps users and search engines easily understand a website, its products, their related products, etc. How? If you are a customer visiting an e-commerce website, internal links let you move around the site easily and find what you want. If you are Google or any other search engine, internal links provide a clear relationship between your pages and define the most important website pages.
For instance, linking from a “Gifts for Her” category page to a grouping of specific earrings, sling bags, or stylish accessories creates a clear, appealing pathway for visitors to explore your product line. In the same way, your linking provides easier crawling for Google so that your pages are more easily indexed as part of your website.
At Wytllabs, we take it one step further. If you have a blog post, “How to Choose the Perfect Gift for Her,” we directly link it to “best-selling scrunchies” and “travel accessories.” With this post, you can share advice on choosing a gift for a girl and let your reader explore other items without the trouble of searching for them again!
Internal linking provides straightforward navigation through your website, making it easier for visitors to find what they want. This, in turn, gives your products a better chance of being seen.
We understand that interlinking may seem like a simple task, but it significantly impacts building credibility, trust, and relevance. Here are some common reasons why experts at Wytlabs profess interlinking so much.
Suppose you enter a mall with no navigation. You are all lost and have no idea where to buy your things. Internal links are the navigation boards in your online store, guiding visitors from one page to the next, making it less likely for them to get lost or leave quickly.
Online shoppers are more likely to continue browsing if they can easily explore related products or categories. Your store is super easy to navigate!
Experts offering e-commerce SEO services would add interlinks to similar products to encourage buyers to continue browsing.
For example, when visitors look at a winter jacket, we link to other colors, styles, or matching scarves and gloves. This keeps visitors on the site longer and often leads to discovering something they like.
A site that is easy to navigate offers a better customer experience and increases the chance of conversion.
Internal links not only help your users but also improve your Google rankings. Linking your pages together helps spread the “SEO value” to many pages, especially from high-traffic pages to new or less-visited ones.
Our experts link your product pages to your popular blog posts.
For example, if you worked on a blog post called “Top 10 Essentials for a Weekend Hike,” we would link it to items such as backpacks and water bottles. This is to inform the search engines that these product pages are essential and help rank these pages even higher in search results.
The better your site performs on Google SEO, the more people will find your site, the more visitors will see your products, and the greater your chances of making sales.
One of the benefits of internal linking in SEO is that it helps build trust with visitors and search engines. Our experts link strong pages to weak ones to help the entire site gain momentum and lend more reliability to the content.
The marketing experts ensure links to new or seasonal products are created from your most popular pages, such as recent blog articles or main product categories.
For instance, if you are releasing new eco-friendly yoga mats, we will link from pages titled “Fitness Essentials” or “Sustainable Gear.” This way, those new pieces of content have a better opportunity to be seen and trusted.
Quality internal linking can strengthen your entire site portfolio, even allowing traffic to the less frequently viewed pages.
Internal links help search engines like Google discover your website and help them understand its structure. Without internal links, search engines may miss pages. By building solid internal linking, your e-commerce marketing services team connects every product, category, and blog page to ensure search engines can access all parts of your site and index them accordingly.
Having a clean and consistent internal structure for search engines and your buyers to trust you is crucial. Every category links to products with a link back to its parent category. A single blog post can link to several collections or products, meaning we are creating a larger set of internal links that are easy for users and search bots to follow.
Properly linking your internal pages reduces the risk of orphaned pages. Because orphaned pages don’t have internal links, search engines can easily overlook them. An effective internal linking strategy can help you help Google find, crawl, and ultimately rank more of your content organically!
You cannot simply stick to interlinking on your blogs if you want to make genuine efforts. You must try different links to build authority in the market. Common types of internal links for an e-commerce website are:
Navigation links are the menu, sidebars, and header-type links that help visitors navigate your website smoothly!
These links help the customers find their way around your website. In the case of an e-commerce store, these links will typically point to product categories, collections, or sales.
Instead of setting up loads of pages and categories, you can set up a mega menu that links directly to some of the best-selling categories, such as “Outdoor Gear,” “Fitness Essentials,” and “New Arrivals.” This feature allows shoppers to navigate to products they are interested in quickly. A good navigation structure is quite simple and keeps the user bounce rate under control. With easy navigation and clear interlinking, it becomes easier for visitors to browse through their favorite things and pick what they like.
These links are the tiny navigation path at the top of your device, defining where you are on the website and how you got there.
It looks like Home > Shoes > Running Shoes > Lightweight Runners.
Links and breadcrumbs allow shoppers to navigate backward if necessary and help them understand how they arrived at the destination or product. You can trust the Shopify SEO services to create links and navigational routes for your digital store.
These links eliminate guesswork when moving from a product page to a category or subcategory, enhancing the user’s shopping journey.
The other key component is that links and breadcrumbs are superb for search engine optimization (SEO) and help outline and define your site’s hierarchy to search engines.
As the name suggests, contextual links are inserted within text, generally in a blog post, product description, or guide. These links feel natural and give users a helpful next step with a link to follow.
For example, you have a detailed range of tents, sleeping bags, and backpacks, and you also include contextual links for the camping products mentioned in your blog post, “How to Pack for a Camping Trip.” The blog post not only gives users helpful tips, but in under a minute, they can click through to buy any of the products mentioned in the blog post.
Contextual links help visitors guide themselves naturally and avoid a tough sales approach. It will keep visitors on your website longer than average, which increases engagement and conversion rates.
Isn’t it fun when you are picking your favorite items on Amazon, and it gives suggestions under the sections titled “You May Also Like” or “Customers Who Bought This Also Bought”? This feature helps you pick more useful products easily. These suggestions display similar, complementary, or trending products based on other customers’ purchases.
For example, looking at a yoga mat, you might also see links to yoga blocks, water bottles, or stretch bands. Cross-linking can encourage people to purchase more items and increase the average order value.
The associated product links also allow shoppers to find additional products they may have forgotten about, which provides more options without requiring them to access a search feature.
When your blog posts are valuable, readers are more likely to trust your product recommendations. This is why blog-to-product links have so much power; they can convert content into conversions.
Suppose your content marketing team comes up with posts like “Best Backpacks for Weekend Getaways” and links them to your best-selling bags in the content. This way, readers can learn and shop at the same time.
The blog-to-product link helps channel users from tips or stories directly to relevant products, bringing traffic back to our product pages and giving our blogs actual business value instead of just traffic.
You cannot stuff your content with interlinks. It works only if you use the proper practices to interlink the content and guide your audience and search engines.
Before adding hyperlinks, step back and ensure your site has a logical structure. Think of it like a store layout; you want everything to be easy to find. You want to break your products into categories and subcategories so users and search engines can effectively navigate your site. If you avail yourself of Shopify services, you can let go of this stress, thanks to the built-in features of the Shopify platform.
Our developers like to use a simple sitemap like Home → Outdoor Gear → Tents → 2-Person Tents. That way, every product is in the right spot, links between related pages are promoted, and browsing is improved.
Do not treat all pages the same!
Focus your linking on the most critical pages, like best-selling, seasonal, and converting products. These are the pages that you want more eyes on. We help you offer limited-edition products or trending collections by linking to them from your homepage, blog posts, and banner sections.
For example, a blog about “Top Winter Gear” might include links to featured jackets and boots.
The more internal links to these important pages, the better the chance they will be seen, clicked, and ranked.
Your homepage, blog posts, FAQs, and top-performing pages usually have more traffic and add value in SEO. Have fun with it! You can link from those higher-authority pages to your newer or lower-ranking product pages. Our team executes this strategy by linking from our FAQ and how-to article to specific product collections.
For example, a question like “What is the best equipment for beginners?” could lead to our curated “Starter Kits” page. This adds value to the user and distributes authority throughout the site.
The words you choose when placing links matter. When linking, experts working with Wytlabs use anchor text that helps users understand what they can expect by clicking. Instead of default phrases like “click here” or “read more,” use anchor text to tell the user where the link will take them.
For example, instead of saying “See more,” BrandName uses anchor text like “Explore lightweight travel backpacks” or “Shop waterproof hiking boots.” This informative anchor text contains relevant keywords and improves the user experience and SEO value.
Use internal linking, but not in a forced way. Linking to related products and/or content keeps users on the site longer, which is a good thing. Ultimately, it’s all about providing value with every link. When we write blogs, we connect to relevant product pages.
For example, a post about building a home gym will include links to dumbbells, yoga mats, and resistance bands. The links make sense and provide readers with practical next steps.
Try not to use only one type of link. Mix things up! Your menus have links to navigation, contextual links in your content, and links in your footer or sidebars. Using different types of links makes your site easy to navigate and explore.
We use a combination of navigational menus, blog links, and “related products” sections to keep the site dynamic, user-friendly, and search engine friendly without bombarding people with too many links at once.
Using the exact link text for different pages can confuse engines and negatively impact your rankings. This phenomenon is known as keyword cannibalization.
To avoid this, our team uses different but descriptive anchor texts for similar products. Rather than linking the products “foldable chairs” and “compact camping seats” with the exact words, we use the products’ product names, which are easy for search engines to understand and SEO-friendly.
To pass any SEO value to a page, internal links must be do-follow links. A do-follow link tells search engines to consider it a vote.
Our backlink-building team creates dofollow links by default. These include product pages, category pages, and essential blogs. Doing so allows these pages to acquire more exposure in search results over time.
Not everyone scrolls down a page, so putting important internal links near the top is helpful. Pushing these links higher up increases their visibility and clicks.
Most e-commerce stores show their “Top Picks” and featured collections in the first two scrolls of the homepage and category pages. This technique captures visitors’ interest quickly and encourages them to navigate the site more rapidly.
Your homepage often has the most power and traffic, so do not squander it. Our digital marketing team links from your homepage, which is a smart way to link to these essential categories, new items, or limited-time offers.
We create banners and clickable sections on the homepage so we can direct visitors to important pages.
Traffic flows, and pages get changed, moved, or deleted!
Our team performs a comprehensive internal link audit every quarter. We check for broken links, update old link anchor text, and ensure we link to all new items from at least a few key pages. This process keeps our site fresh, usable, and search engine optimized.
When you start to look at internal linking, it might seem insignificant, but the reality is that it affects your e-commerce performance tremendously. Internal links allow your e-commerce customers to find what they are looking for, stay engaged, and allow search engines to understand your website better. When you can accomplish all of these things, you end up with more traffic, better online visibility, and ultimately, more sales.
A well-thought-out internal linking strategy balances technical construction and the user experience.
Want to optimize your internal links to give your products maximum visibility? Connect with experts at Wytlabs to understand how a simple process can make a significant difference!
Michele Klawitter is a ghostwriter, health advocate, former real estate agent, Paso Fino horse enthusiast, and professional thriver. For over five years, she’s been writing SEO content both humans and search engines love. She knows what it’s like to need real answers, not just optimized fluff.
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