Internal linking presents many challenges to enterprise sites.
With hundreds of thousands of pages and deep levels of categorization, determining where to link, what anchor text to use, and how to deploy, track, and measure their impact is overwhelming at best.
But the benefits of smart internal linking at scale are undeniable, and we've worked with many clients to achieve amazing results.
In this collection of case studies from our clients, we showcase the power of internal linking for enterprise brands and demonstrate how it can significantly impact a site's visibility, authority, and overall success.
Recommended Reading: The Ultimate Guide to Internal Link Analysis
A large retail ecommerce brand wanted to update and correct their internal links across their site, not only to create a better user experience, but they believed this was the key to driving more traffic.
With tens of thousands of site pages however, this proved to be a painstaking task for their team to take on alone.
The SEO team used Link Optimizer, seoClarity's AI-Powered internal linking technology to optimize their internal links across their large site.
Link Optimizer is the first and only front-to-end internal linking solution, allowing brands to quickly and intelligently:
Within just three weeks of the project being complete, the site saw a 9.5k weekly increase in organic traffic equating to a 150K increase annually to those pages with new internal links.
A retail enterprise merged two categories on their site: Collectibles and Home Décor into a single category: “Collectibles and Décor.” They also updated the anchor text in the top navigation from “Collectibles” to “Collectibles and Décor."
Before this merger of categories, the brand ranked well for the term “collectibles” (ranking on the 2nd page). After the merger of these two pages, however, they noticed a significant decline in ranking for the term “collectibles,” dropping to the 7th page in the search results.
To improve the ranking for the term collectibles, the retail brand used the seoClarity platform to seamlessly:
Within a few days after making these changes, the brand saw a significant improvement in its rankings, bringing the term "collectibles" back to the 2nd page of search results.
This ecommerce brand had a site architecture with multiple levels of categories and subcategories. Unfortunately, deep subcategory pages existed several clicks from the home page. As a result, the organic traffic to these products began to decline.
They hypothesized that increasing links from their level one pages to their deeper pages would also increase their internal PageRank and improve relevancy signals, resulting in improved ranking and traffic.
As a test, four categories were chosen with similar metrics, determining traffic potential for each of the products on their level three and four pages. The categories were split into a control group and a test group, each containing two categories. Links were algorithmically determined and added to the pages of the test categories.
The test resulted in a 24% increase to organic traffic for the level two and three categories. The level four category pages also experienced a boost in traffic, which is expected to increase even more over time.
A retail enterprise expanded product categories as new products required further differentiation within the site structure for items like dresses, shoes, and accessories.
As the website expanded to include more brand names, the site navigation grew and began to feature more trendy brands, resulting in less exposure for many of the past breadwinners.
To offset the resulting decrease in traffic, the company wanted to test if internal linking would help rebuild exposure for the previously successful products in search engines. Their hypothesis stated that increasing internal linking to previous commodity-like items would allow them to retake the top spots in organic search.
Using seoClarity's site crawler, they identified all existing internal links to each product and category.
Then, using internal analytics, they identified products that once had consistently high sales. From this, they determined that these top products had extremely low link counts in relation to the new “featured” products that were often more niche.
Together, the brand and seoClarity used the data to create a link plan that increased the internal link counts in a distributed fashion to these former top-selling items.
Given the timing of an upcoming holiday season, the company reviewed the plan and requested a full rollout without an initial test.
As it turned out, their hypothesis was correct. The average ranking for these products improved into top spots and traffic increased by 23%, making them top sellers once again.
A large marketplace client has 3 levels of site hierarchy: State, City, and Listing.
While they were ranking well for individual listings, their city-level category pages were ranking poorly. The challenge was finding internal linking opportunities for different cities.
Since semantic analysis would not work in this case, seoClarity built a model that automatically identified and linked the nearest cities to a particular city page based on their distances.
These links were instantly implemented and showed users a list of nearby city locations. For example, visitors of the Chicago page would also see a block that displayed nearby cities close to Chicago as internal links.
This automated link deployment helped improve the crawling of the city-level pages and the client saw a 100% jump in the count of city-level keywords for which they were discovered.
This retail company expanded their category pages when they noticed that visitors were searching their website for certain products that didn't have a category association.
Based on the products searched on the site, seoClarity helped the team identify the search page that was driving traffic. They created a category, then added the category page in the top navigation along with the few relevant category pages for internal linking.
Once the new category page was created, Google replaced the search page within a few weeks with this new category page, creating an opportunity to expand their product line.
Effective internal linking opens the door to a variety of ranking opportunities and site optimizations to enhance overall performance (not to mention it's completely under your control, unlike external link building).
And yet, so many enterprises miss out on this huge SEO opportunity because they think internal linking at scale is too complicated and too time-consuming!
With ClarityAutomate™ Link Optimizer, now integrated with the capabilities of ChatGPT through Sia, the first-ever AI-powered SEO assistant, internal linking at scale is a snap.
Link Optimizer automatically analyzes, creates, publishes, and tracks the performance of deep internal links to increase discoverability and expand ranking opportunities.
This approach leverages semantic analysis with site performance and bot crawl data and has the potential to outperform manual efforts of internal linking.
And, unlike other automatic linking tools, Link Optimizer ensures SEOs are always in control and our unique algorithm is trained to keep recommendations fresh.
Feeling confident enough to automatically deploy internal links at scale? Sign-up for a demo of ClarityAutomate™ Link Optimizer and see how your ranking opportunities unfold.