Internal linking: the cheapest ranking boost you are not using

Most small business sites spend money on content and almost none on connecting it. That is backwards. Internal links cost nothing but a few minutes of editing, and they are one of the few signals you fully control.

What Google actually says it does with them

This is not a theory. Google's own Search Central documentation states it directly: "Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl." A page with no internal links pointing to it, an orphan page, is harder for Google to find at all, independent of how good the content is.

Orphan pages are more common than owners think

Ahrefs' own guidance on the problem is blunt: pages that receive zero internal links from anywhere else on the site are, in its words, pages "Google struggles to discover, crawl, and index." On a typical small business site this is usually old blog posts, seasonal landing pages, or service pages added after the main navigation was built and never linked from anywhere else.

Why it matters more now, not less

Ahrefs' December 2025 analysis of 300,000 keywords found AI Overviews cut click-through to the top organic result by 58%. When fewer visitors land on any given page from search, the ones who do arrive are more valuable, and internal links are how you turn one visit into two or three instead of a bounce.

A 30-minute fix

• List your 10 highest-value pages (service pages, your best guides, the contact or quote page).
• For each blog post or secondary page, add one to three links to those pages using descriptive anchor text, not "click here."
• Check your newest 5 pages have at least one incoming link from an older, already-indexed page.
• Revisit this quarterly as you publish; it decays as fast as you add unlinked pages.

Quick answers

How many internal links should a page have?

There is no fixed number. The practical rule is that every page you care about should be reachable from at least one other page on your site through a real, descriptive link, not just the main navigation.

Does anchor text matter for internal links?

Yes. Descriptive anchor text gives both visitors and Google's indexing systems context about the linked page's topic, which generic text like "click here" does not provide.

A free scan at RankMerlin flags pages on your site with weak or missing internal links, alongside the rest of your SEO and AI visibility score, no account needed.