Internal Linking:
The Lever on Your Own Site

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Nearly every SEO tactic depends on somebody else. Backlinks require other websites to link to you. Reviews require customers to write them. Rankings require Google to agree. Internal links are the exception: they are entirely inside your own website, they cost nothing, and you can change every one of them this afternoon.

That combination makes internal linking the most underused lever in small business SEO. Last Friday we looked at Search Console, including its Links report. This week is about what to do with what that report tells you: how search engines and visitors travel through your site, which pages are stranded, and how the words you use in links teach Google what your pages are about.

Start With What Google Actually Says

Internal linking attracts a lot of confident advice with invented numbers attached. Google's own link documentation is short, public, and worth taking as the baseline. Three points from it matter most for a small business site.

First, links have to be crawlable. Google generally follows a link only when it is an <a> element with an href attribute. Buttons wired up with JavaScript click handlers, or elements styled to look like links without real markup underneath, usually will not be followed. Second, anchor text should be descriptive, concise, and relevant, because it is how both people and Google make sense of where a link goes. Third, and most usefully for an audit: every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.

Orphan Pages: The Fixable Problem

An orphan page is a page nothing on your site links to. It might be indexed, if Google found it through your sitemap, but it sits structurally isolated: no path leads to it, and it receives no support from the rest of your site.

On small business sites, orphans are usually accidental rather than exotic. A service page built during a redesign and never added to the menu. A landing page from a campaign that ended. A blog post published before anyone thought about linking older posts forward. Each one is content you paid to create, sitting where almost nobody will find it.

The fix is genuinely simple. Decide whether the page deserves to exist. If it does, link to it from somewhere relevant: the service page it belongs beside, a related blog post, or the navigation itself. If it does not, remove it or fold it into a page that does. Orphan pages are a rare category of SEO problem where the diagnosis takes longer than the cure.

Anchor Text: The Words Do the Work

The clickable words of a link are not decoration. They are the label Google reads to understand the destination, and the promise a visitor evaluates before clicking. “Click here” teaches nothing to either audience. Google's guidance is direct about this, and its representatives have been unusually explicit that generic anchors like “here” should be avoided.

Two refinements matter once the basics are in place. Keep anchors reasonably short; a whole sentence wrapped in a link is harder for Google to interpret than a focused phrase. And vary the wording naturally across your site rather than repeating one identical keyword phrase in every single link to a page, which reads as engineered rather than helpful. For image links, alt text serves the same function anchor text does.

Structure: Where the Links Point

Beyond individual links, the shape of your linking tells search engines what your site is organized around. Three structural ideas cover almost everything a small business site needs.

One caution worth stating plainly: none of this justifies stuffing links everywhere. Links that do not genuinely help a reader dilute the ones that do, and Google's own guidance on link volume is a judgment call rather than a target. Place a link where a reader would actually want it and you will rarely be wrong.

The Afternoon Audit

For a site of twenty or thirty pages, which describes most Virginia small businesses, you do not need enterprise crawling software. You need a list of your pages and about two hours.

1. List every page

   Pull your page list from your sitemap, your content management system, or Search Console's Page indexing report. Put them in a spreadsheet or the worksheet above.

2. Mark which pages actually matter

   Service pages, booking and contact pages, and your best content are priorities. A privacy policy is not. This ranking decides where you spend the remaining effort.

3. Count inbound internal links for each priority page

   Search Console's Links report gives you internal link counts directly. For a small site, you can also simply click through your own navigation and content and note what links where. Any priority page showing zero is an orphan and goes to the top of the fix list.

4. Record click depth from the homepage

   For each priority page, count the fewest clicks needed to reach it starting at your homepage. Anything beyond three clicks is a candidate for a more direct link.

5. Read your anchor text out of context

   Go through your links and ask whether the words alone tell you where the link goes. Every “click here” and “read more” is a free improvement waiting to be made.

6. Fix the top ten, then re-check in a month

   Do not try to perfect the whole site at once. Fix orphans first, then depth, then anchors. Search Console will show the crawling and indexing effects over the following weeks.

Next Friday Closes the Arc

Arc D has covered schema markup, Search Console, and now internal linking: three forms of leverage already sitting on your website, unused. Next Friday, July 31, we close the arc by bringing them together into a single practical routine for keeping a small business site technically healthy without hiring an agency. Monday, though, we open Arc 2 with tax preparation versus tax planning.

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