Optimise Your SaaS Website: 5 Internal Linking Best Practices

Internal linking is an integral part of SEO, and it’s a great way to improve the ranking and overall performance of your SaaS website.

Connecting pages throughout your site with strategic internal linking creates a logical structure that engages visitors and signals expertise to search engines. It creates a better user journey, and gives search engines a clear roadmap of your site, boosting your rankings and visibility.

Understanding internal linking and using it effectively improves user retention and conversion rates. However, marketers often miss out on internal linking, with around 82% of internal linking opportunities being missed, despite its potential to improve user retention and conversion rates.

Here are 5 ways to strengthen your internal linking strategy.

1. Create a Logical Site Structure

A logical site structure is important for both user experience and SEO as it helps provide a clear pathway for navigation.
Internal links achieve this by:

• Informing user navigation: Internal links connect pillar articles to sub-topics within their niche, allowing users to delve into a specific topic, or improve their understanding of the broader concept.
• Aiding search engines and SEO: Search engines look at internal links to help understand a site’s hierarchy and how its content is related. The more clearly it’s laid out, the better they can crawl and index your site, improving your overall ranking and SEO.
• Enhancing user engagement: Using internal links signposts similar content to the reader, giving them somewhere to visit next, therefore increasing time spent on your site.

How to Design Your Site Structure Using Internal Links

A well-designed site structure follows logical pathways to the topics or “pillars” in your industry, with everything effectively linked.

You can use internal links to aid your site structure design by:

1. Adopting a hierarchal structure. Use market research and keyword research to identify the main or ‘pillar’ topics or products in your industry. Under each category, divide your content into sub-categories that expand on a specific niche. This is often referred to as a pyramid structure.

2. When adding content, ensure the main categories link through to the sub-categories where relevant. Internal linking within menus helps user navigation, while relevant links within the content strengthen their authority and relationship to the main categories.

Example: SaaS Business, Customer Thermometer

With its simplest structure, the SaaS survey site Customer Thermometer provides an example of the effectiveness of internal linking for SEO.

The homepage has a clear list of header categories: Features, Customers, Pricing, Industries, Resources, and Integrations.

The Industries category, for example, then breaks down into a complete list of the business types Customer Thermometer is targeting.

So, if a marketing manager for higher education was using the site, they could follow a clear route: Homepage > Industries > Education > Demo.

As your site develops, don’t forget to think of new pages contextually and consider what content they support.

Generating an XML Sitemap

The bigger your site, the more need you have for an XML sitemap. An XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemap is a file that lists the URLs of a website’s pages in a structured format. It allows search engines to crawl and index your pages more efficiently. If your site is small, you can use a free XML sitemap generator.

Using Breadcrumbs in Your Site Structure

Breadcrumbs are the internal link pathways you often see at the top of informative content or shop pages.

They allow users to easily navigate back to previously visited pages and further emphasise the natural hierarchy of your site to search engines.

This helps to keep linking and structure consistent and effective, for clear navigation through your site.

2. Use Descriptive Anchor Text

The text you choose to hyperlink is an important part of the internal linking process. Descriptive anchor text informs both the user and search engines of what to expect when clicking on a link, improving SEO and user navigation.

How to Choose Anchor Text for Internal Links

Ideally, a user should be able to look at anchor text and accurately predict the content and type of page they’re clicking to access.

Therefore it’s important to ensure that your B2B SaaS anchor text covers 2-5 words, contains keywords and is informative.

Examples of Anchor Text for SaaS Sites

When writing a CTA (call to action) it’s a good idea to avoid generic phrases like “read more” or “click here”, as it doesn’t signify to the search engine the purpose of the link. Instead, use CTAs that communicate that clicking through will help customers find pertinent information quickly.

For example:

• On a pricing page: Instead of simply writing something like “Click here for pricing”, more effective anchor text could read “Compare SaaS subscription plans” or “SaaS pricing options”
• For product features: To link to a page on product features choose a text such as “Cloud capabilities” rather than “learn more”
• For case studies: Text like “2x Organic Leads in 12 Months” is more effective than “Read our case study”.

Always ensure your anchor text flows seamlessly with the surrounding text and is used in the correct context.

Taking these steps creates a user-friendly experience and lays out signals on your site structure and expertise for search engines, which will improve your site’s ranking.

3. Prioritise High-Value Pages

High-value pages drive the most traffic and conversion on your site. They’re crucial for boosting visibility as well as your overall site ranking.

Directing internal links to and from these pages helps provide a web of content that all links together, furthering your authority and expertise.

In SaaS, these pages are usually product pages, key features pages, pricing, case studies, high-value blog articles, how-to guides and landing pages.

How to Identify Your High-Value SaaS Pages

Using analytics dashboards and metrics, you should be able to see which of your pages are driving the most traffic and align most closely with your B2B SaaS marketing strategy.

Once you’ve identified these pages – or the pages you want to rank for these goals – look for signifiers of their success, such as:

• Engagement rates
• Conversion rates (sign-ups, purchases, downloads)
• Bounce rates
• Inbound links
• External links

There should be content for each stage of the user journey, and each stage should link to the next seamlessly, offering various pathways to conversion.

How to Incorporate Internal Links Naturally

The best way to incorporate internal links naturally is to include them in the body text, like our example above. This usually works best for informative content, because incorporation should feel organic and natural.

When considering other types of pages, like product or landing pages, you can leverage CTAs at the end of your posts or create content clusters that naturally lead further down the sales funnel.

For example, a B2B SaaS engagement platform may follow a progression of content types as so: blog post > whitepaper > case study > demo.

By prioritising the optimisation of internal links on these high-value pages, you can naturally build a link structure that drives the user toward conversion.

4. Implement Contextual Internal Linking

We’ve already touched upon contextual links, but let’s look at these in more detail now.

Contextual internal linking is done within an article or piece of text and is part of a natural sentence’s flow. They usually offer additional resources or information, or deeper insights into the subject. Most commonly, contextual internal links hyperlink to other articles on the same topic.

For instance, in this blog post by SaaS HR company Ciphr, we can make a fair assumption that the internal link will take us to an article about best practices in data security.

The benefits of contextual linking are two-fold:

Improved SEO: Contextual linking helps establish a content hierarchy and effectively distributes links across all relevant pages. The more internal links point to a specific piece, the more you’re highlighting to search engines that this is a high-value page, improving its overall ranking. Your site pages work together to complement and support each other, building out a picture for search engines, thus raising your visibility.

Enhanced user experience: Users are gently guided through their journey on your site with signposts of where to go next. This increases the likelihood of them staying on your site for longer and can improve their understanding of a topic. Over time, this naturally leads them closer to conversion as they see your business as the “go-to” knowledge base for their industry.

Quick Tips for Contextual Internal Linking

• Link to evergreen content: Evergreen content is content that is always relevant and useful, rather than information on a current topic that only stays part of a conversation for a short period. For example, good evergreen content for psychometric assessment SaaS company,Thomas International would be articles like “Inclusive Hiring – 8 Practices You Should Implement”. This ensures you don’t need to regularly update links once implemented as their content is always timely.
• Quality over quantity: Don’t stuff links into every paragraph. Throughout a piece that’s 1500 words, for example, you wouldn’t want more than 5 contextual internal links, maximum. This forces you to drill down into which content is the most effective and prioritise high-value pieces.
• Add value through relevance: By ensuring the contextual links chosen are natural and flow within the piece, you’re also ensuring what’s chosen is highly relevant. This is important as it signifies to search engines that you have a lot of knowledge on this topic and that you understand the relationship between the two; helping improve SEO.

5. Regularly Audit and Update Your Internal Links

As part of a good SEO strategy, you should be regularly auditing your website as a whole. Part of that should include assessing your internal links strategy and how it can be further optimised.

This is important because links can break, or become outdated and irrelevant, damaging your SEO and leading to a poor user experience.

How to Perform Internal Link Audits

As a general guide, it’s a good idea to run a monthly review of your broken link reports inside your SEO tool. A complete audit should ideally occur at least once a quarter, allowing you to spot new opportunities and capitalise on high-performing pages.

Regular audits ensure that users are directed to the correct and most current resources, helping them find the information they need quickly and effortlessly.

Here’s what to look for and how to conduct a link audit:

• Use SEO tools: Tools like Ahrefs, Google Search Console and Screaming Frog all help identify broken links, orphaned pages, and required redirects. They allow you to view your linking structure as a whole and identify points of optimisation.
• Identify orphaned pages: These are pages with no internal links, which are often potential goldmines that are being overlooked. By adding contextual internal links to and from this content, you enhance its ranking and relevance.
• Review broken links: Broken links either need to be replaced or fixed to avoid a negative impact on your SEO.
• Create redirects: If a URL was getting good traffic but is no longer relevant, you could redirect it to a high-performing, relevant piece to improve SEO.
• Optimise anchor text: Check existing anchor text and update it as needed to ensure it is informative and descriptive, clearly signalling its purpose to users and search engines.
• Update content: Any outdated or irrelevant content should be reviewed and internal links adjusted accordingly to link to the most up-to-date information.

Don’t forget to consider internal links when examining analytics like engagement rates and user behaviour. If there’s an obvious drop-off point in the user journey or a frequent exit page, consider adding internal links that could help guide the user to relevant content and encourage retention.

With regular audits and updates, your internal linking structure will remain consistent and relevant, guiding users through your site to conversion.

Mastering Internal Linking for SaaS Success

Internal linking is a vital component of your SEO strategy. With it, you can improve rankings and visibility, signalling to search engines which topics you’re an authority on. Users can easily navigate your site, improving their overall experience and leading them down a natural path to conversion.

If you need support with your internal linking strategy, an expert eye like Common Ground’s can help. Check out our SEO and SaaS resources page for more information on how to strengthen your site, or get in touch and see what we can do.