4 E-Commerce Internal Linking Tips To Improve SEO

Internal linking has always been, and will continue to be an important part of SEO. It can be a confusing topic for many businesses, especially those with an e-commerce website that sells thousands of products. Internal linking helps your users navigate your website and quickly locate products, so it is important that you include helpful links whenever possible.

While links will always be the main focus for SEO, on-page optimization has become extremely important as the focus on quality websites continues to increase. If you need a refresher about proper site optimization take a look at our definitive on-page optimization guide. Instead of just blindly building internal links, you need to develop a strategy that will help your website thrive in SEO terms, but also produce more sales. Use these internal linking tips to help improve your SEO.

1. Link to products and categories from relevant blog content

If you are running a large e-commerce website your blog strategy should include writing about the products your website sells. Since most category pages and some product pages lack a lot of content, your blog gives you an opportunity to create content that you can then rank in the organic search results.

When you create a blog post about a specific category or product make sure that you link out to that particular page on your website. Not only will this help your visitors navigate to the pages where they can locate the products your blog posts discuss, but you will also pass additional link juice to those pages, strengthening their authority. As your blog posts attract new links that will be passed on to the pages you are interlinking to.

2. Interlink relevant blog content

Interlinking blog content is a common practice for most websites, and as your blog grows, the more relevant blog posts you will have to interlink. This is one of those business SEO tips that helps to improve your website in several ways. It helps your users navigate your website and discover more content. This engages them for a longer period of time, keeping them on your website and lowering your bounce rate.

The more time your readers stay on your website, the higher the likelihood that they make a purchase, or return to make a purchase. It all starts with high quality content, and by interlinking you give your readers the chance to interact with additional content. This builds trust and helps to establish a business and consumer relationship.

3. Interlink category pages and products

Most e-commerce websites have category pages, and this presents a great opportunity to link directly to each individual product directly from the category. Typically when interlinking within your blog posts you want to avoid heavy keyword anchors, but linking from your category pages is a different ball game.

If your category page is “cell phone cases” and one of your products is an iPhone 6 case, then “iPhone 6 case” is perfectly fine anchor text to use. Traditionally, in a blog post that would be considered a spammy anchor text.

4. Interlink products to other products

Larger e-commerce website will also have plenty of opportunity to interlink within products as well. This can be helpful to visitors, especially for products with several models and styles to chose from. Linking to other products makes it easier for the visitor to find what he or she is looking for instead of trying to find it on their own.

Linking to additional styles, models, or even colors of a product can benefit both the overall SEO as well as the user experience. Remember, interlinking should be done to help improve your SEO but it also serves a purpose when it comes to use experience.

Link building has been a touchy subject, as businesses want to make sure they avoid a Google penalty, but internal linking is a completely different animal. You aren’t creating internal links to game your rankings, and you can’t spam your website within your own website. When it comes to e-commerce websites a lot of times category pages and even some product pages are going to have limited content, so you need to be able to push your visitors to those pages. Internal linking allows you to use descriptive anchor text and direct your traffic to specific pages. Use non-spammy anchor text when you link, and avoid keyword heavy anchors and you will be fine.

4 E-Commerce Internal Linking Tips To Improve SEO