You built the service pages. You wrote the content. But some of those pages still barely show up in Google.
Internal links could be part of the problem. If you run a Utah plumbing company with pages for drain cleaning, water heaters, and emergency repairs, your approach to search engine optimization in Utah needs to account for how those pages connect. Google needs clear paths between them to understand what matters.
Adding a link is easy. Knowing where to add it is harder. Which pages need more links? Which ones should connect? Which pages are buried too deep?
Internal linking can get surprisingly technical. Here are the mistakes we see most often and how experienced SEO professionals address them.
Pages With No Links Pointing to Them
Many small business owners don’t think much about internal links. You add a new service, product, or location page and assume Google will find it.
But that page can easily get buried. If the rest of your website barely links to it, Google may have a harder time finding the page and figuring out how it fits with the rest of your site.
The tricky part is knowing which pages need attention and where the links should come from. A Utah bakery might have pages for wedding cakes, catering, custom orders, and several locations. Adding links between all of them isn’t the answer. Each link needs to make sense for the page and the customer reading it.
That’s where the expertise of an SEO professional comes in. They can find important pages that are getting overlooked and decide where links will actually help. Done right, your best pages become easier for Google to understand and easier for customers to find.
Adding Too Many Links to One Page
Remember when you went through your website and started linking every service you could mention? Plumbing linked to drain cleaning. Drain cleaning linked to sewer repair. Then you added a few blog posts and location pages for good measure.
It feels productive. More links must be better for SEO, right? Not really.
Put too many links on one page, and you stop giving Google a clear idea of what matters. The page gets harder for customers to read, too. They came to learn about one service, and now you’re sending them in ten different directions.
A good SEO professional knows when to leave a link out. If it helps someone understand the topic or reach a useful next page, great. If it’s there because you found another place to squeeze in a link, it probably doesn’t need to be there.
Using Vague Anchor Text
The words you use for a link tell Google something about the page on the other side. Vagueness gives Google less to work with.
You see the same phrases everywhere:
- “Click here”
- “Read more”
- “Learn more”
None tells you where you’re going. “Emergency plumbing services” does. So does “commercial cleaning services.” People know what they’re clicking, and Google gets a clue about the page.
The fix sounds simple until you’re looking at hundreds of links across a website. Some need better wording. Others don’t belong where they are.
Professionals offering on page SEO services know what to look for and what to leave alone. They clean up weak anchor text without stuffing keywords into every link.
Burying Important Links at the Bottom of the Page
Where you put an internal link can matter, too. A link buried at the bottom of a long page is easy for customers to miss.
This happens a lot on service websites. The important links get pushed into the footer or dropped into a “related services” box after everything else. Meanwhile, the customer is reading about that exact service halfway up the page.
Good internal linking puts useful links where they make sense in the conversation. If someone is reading about furnace repair and you have a page explaining furnace replacement, that connection may belong right there in the copy.
SEO professionals look at placement as part of the page, not as something to tack on later. The link needs to make sense where it appears and lead somewhere worth visiting.
Broken and Outdated Links
Getting the words right is only half the job. The link has to work.
This stuff gets missed. A service gets removed. A URL changes. Six months later, an old blog post is still sending customers to a page that no longer exists. They click. Dead end.
Fixing one broken link takes a minute. Finding every broken link across a site that’s been running for five or ten years? Different story.
That’s why SEO providers run regular site audits. They can find broken and outdated links across the site and update or remove them before they create more dead ends for customers and Google.
Linking to Pages That Do Not Fit
A link can work fine and still have no business being there.
Internal links should connect pages that make sense together. If you’re reading about kitchen remodeling and a link takes you to tax software, it feels random. Google also has a harder time making sense of that connection.
The obvious mismatches are easy to spot. The harder ones are links between pages that seem related but don’t help Google understand which services or topics your site should be known for. Once you have dozens of pages, those calls aren’t always clear.
SEO providers know how to sort that out. They look at what each page covers and how the pages fit together before deciding where a link belongs. That’s a lot different from linking two pages because they happen to mention the same keyword.
Building an Internal Linking Strategy That Works
Fixing a link here and there only gets you so far. The real problems are often spread across the site.
One service page may barely get mentioned anywhere else. An old blog post could still send customers to a page you deleted two years ago. Both are easy to miss when you’re looking at pages one at a time.
Now multiply that across a site with years of blog posts, service pages, and location pages. Going through all of it by hand takes time. Deciding what should link where takes SEO knowledge.
That’s the work SEO professionals handle for businesses. They go through the site, find where internal links are hurting your SEO, and fix the links that need attention. You keep running the business.
