Internal linking: the free SEO work most local businesses skip

What internal linking actually does

An internal link is a link from one page on your website to another page on the same website. Simple enough. But what's happening under the hood matters for SEO: every link you make is a vote of relevance. When your homepage links to your "Plumbing Services in Nanaimo" page, you're telling Google that the Nanaimo page is important enough to surface from your most prominent page.

Google's crawlers follow internal links to discover and index pages. If a page on your site has no internal links pointing to it, Google may never find it — or may deprioritise it as low-importance. Pages that receive more internal links from important pages tend to rank better, all else being equal.

For local businesses on Vancouver Island, internal linking is especially useful for connecting service pages to location pages, and connecting blog or article content back to the commercial pages you actually want to rank.

The basic structure: hub and spoke

The most practical internal linking model for a small business site is the hub-and-spoke structure. Your homepage is the hub — it links to your main service pages. Each service page links to related location pages. Your blog posts link back to the relevant service pages. Everything connects logically.

Here's a concrete example for a Victoria-based landscaping company:

• Homepage links to: Services, Service Areas, Contact, Blog
• Services page links to: individual service pages (lawn care, garden design, tree work)
• Lawn Care page links to: Victoria lawn care, Saanich lawn care, Langford lawn care location pages
• Blog post "Best Plants for BC Coastal Gardens" links to: Garden Design service page
• All location pages link back to: main Services page and Contact page

This creates a clean, logical web of connections. Nothing is stranded. Every page can be reached within a few clicks from the homepage.

Anchor text: be descriptive, not generic

Anchor text is the clickable words that make up a link. "Click here" and "read more" are wasted anchor text — they tell Google nothing about the page being linked to. Descriptive anchor text like "our plumbing services in Cowichan Valley" or "how to respond to Google reviews" signals the topic of the destination page and strengthens its relevance for those terms.

You don't need to cram keywords into every link. Just be descriptive and natural. Aim to use anchor text that honestly describes what the reader will find when they click.

How many internal links per page?

There's no hard rule. A reasonable guideline for most small business pages: 3-6 contextual internal links per page (links that appear naturally within the body content), plus navigation and footer links. More than that on a short page can feel spammy. Fewer than that on a long page might mean you're missing useful connection opportunities.

Blog posts and longer articles can naturally support more links — they have more content to link from. A 1,500-word article might reasonably include 6-10 internal links if the content genuinely calls for them.

Linking your location pages — a common gap

One of the most common internal linking gaps I see on Vancouver Island business sites: location pages with no links pointing to them except maybe a link buried in a footer list. These pages struggle to rank because Google doesn't see them as high-priority.

Fix this by:

• Adding a "Service Areas" section or page that links to all location pages
• Linking to location pages from relevant blog posts ("We serve customers across the Cowichan Valley — see our Mill Bay and Cobble Hill pages for local details")
• Adding a "nearby areas" section at the bottom of each location page that links to adjacent location pages

If you've built solid location pages following the advice in the location pages article, making sure those pages are properly linked is the next step to getting them to rank.

Don't link to the same page too many times on one page

If you link to your Contact page five times in the same article, Google only counts the first link's anchor text. The rest are largely ignored for SEO purposes. Link to important pages once or twice per article — thoughtfully, where it's most relevant to the reader — rather than repeatedly.

A quick audit you can do yourself

Open each important page on your site (homepage, main service pages, top location pages). Count how many internal links point to that page. You can do this by searching Google for site:yourdomain.ca "page-name" or by using a free tool like Screaming Frog's free tier, which crawls up to 500 URLs. Pages with few internal links pointing to them need attention.

Internal linking audits take a few hours and cost nothing. The improvement in how well Google crawls and understands your site can be meaningful, especially for newer sites still building authority.