How To Add Internal And External Links That Get Clicks And Conversions
A new article on Search Engine Journal reports that internal and external links play an important role in SEO. Find out why they matter and how you can use them to enrich customer experience.
Internal and external links have a significant role to play in guiding website visitors to the answers they seek about your products and services. Each link should lead your audience to the next relevant piece of content they need to continue their information gathering and/or customer journey.
Where, When, And How Should Links Be Added?
When you're looking at adding links to new or existing website content, put yourself in the shoes of a member of your audience. Think about how they will want to engage with it and where a link might help. If you have not already, take a step back to map out your typical customer journey. Do not be afraid to incorporate clear calls to action (CTAs). These are helpful for those customers who are ready to click through to the next logical step in their journey and/or those who are not ready and may require additional information.
Today, most customer journeys are not linear. It's important to provide options depending on where your customers find themselves in their search for answers, products, or services, and you do that with links. Are there topical keywords and/or concepts within your new or existing piece of content that require elaboration or raise questions? Do you have additional content to answer those questions (in blog posts or FAQs, for example) or do you know where the answer lies? Can you conduct some research to find it?
By linking to content that provides relevant answers to these questions via the actual keywords (a.k.a., anchor text), you provide the search engines with an important signal to help tie the questions and answers together. Your most prominent links and calls to action can naturally be tied to a button or image, such as a banner, and placed strategically to better catch the attention of your website visitors. Visual UX analytics tools like click heatmaps can and should be used to monitor how visitors are engaging with your content and which links they are (or are not) clicking on.
Further, tools like a Path Analysis Report in Google Analytics 4 can be used to determine the paths taken by website visitors from page to page and any on-page actions taken. Data from tools such as these can help to inform and optimize your ongoing internal and external linking strategy. Having identified where and when to add links, there are a couple of items to consider when linking.
Internal and external links have a significant role to play in guiding website visitors to the answers they seek about your products and services. Each link should lead your audience to the next relevant piece of content they need to continue their information gathering and/or customer journey.
Where, When, And How Should Links Be Added?
When you're looking at adding links to new or existing website content, put yourself in the shoes of a member of your audience. Think about how they will want to engage with it and where a link might help. If you have not already, take a step back to map out your typical customer journey. Do not be afraid to incorporate clear calls to action (CTAs). These are helpful for those customers who are ready to click through to the next logical step in their journey and/or those who are not ready and may require additional information.
Today, most customer journeys are not linear. It's important to provide options depending on where your customers find themselves in their search for answers, products, or services, and you do that with links. Are there topical keywords and/or concepts within your new or existing piece of content that require elaboration or raise questions? Do you have additional content to answer those questions (in blog posts or FAQs, for example) or do you know where the answer lies? Can you conduct some research to find it?
By linking to content that provides relevant answers to these questions via the actual keywords (a.k.a., anchor text), you provide the search engines with an important signal to help tie the questions and answers together. Your most prominent links and calls to action can naturally be tied to a button or image, such as a banner, and placed strategically to better catch the attention of your website visitors. Visual UX analytics tools like click heatmaps can and should be used to monitor how visitors are engaging with your content and which links they are (or are not) clicking on.
Further, tools like a Path Analysis Report in Google Analytics 4 can be used to determine the paths taken by website visitors from page to page and any on-page actions taken. Data from tools such as these can help to inform and optimize your ongoing internal and external linking strategy. Having identified where and when to add links, there are a couple of items to consider when linking.
- When linking externally, you may want to have the link to the external web page/content open in a new window or tab.
- Follow Or Nofollow: As a website owner, you have the option of designating your links as Follow or Nofollow by tagging the link with a <rel="no follow"> attribute. Using Nofollow tells search engines that support it not to assign any value to the link in relation to the page it has been included on. It literally means that you do not want Google to follow that link and crawl the corresponding page.
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