Magento Guide: How to Start Internal Linking for SEO

Boasting unparalleled flexibility, it offers a wide range of tools that encompass every single facet of an e-commerce business — from online marketing to business intelligence.

To make full use of the platform, your e-commerce brand needs a team with specific technical skills. This includes PHP development, UX design, graphic design, and copywriting.

When it comes to SEO, there are certain aspects that you simply can’t hope to tackle alone, particularly link building campaigns and influencer outreach. Owners, however, should manage to take care of core on-page optimisations, such as:

Performance Optimization

Your website’s loading speed is a key ranking factor for both mobile and desktop search.

Loading speed can be improved with a couple of plug-and-play solutions, like using a CDN or enabling browser caching. For a complete list of optimisations for your Magento site, run a thorough website analysis with PageSpeed Insights.

Content Development

Just like with every other area of online marketing, content is king in Magento SEO.

You need to provide your target audience with high-quality, useful content to improve on-page ranking factors, such as traffic, dwell time, and keyword optimisation.

Unless you have an in-house content team, you probably plan to outsource your content development efforts. Still, your overall content strategy requires your direct involvement, especially with cookie-cutter pages like the “About Us” page, the homepage, and the “Contact Us” page.

Internal linking for SEO

Thirdly, internal linking for SEO is something that requires some research, but it is doable by a one-man team.  

This post aims to shed some light on the practice of internal linking for those without prior SEO experience. But before we get to the nitty-gritty of the subject, a little introduction is in order.

What is Internal Linking for SEO?

To understand internal linking, it’s important to know how search engines like Google discover and index web content into their database.

Put simply, search engines send out crawlers that travel through links. They typically start from popular online directories and domain URLs that were manually submitted to them by webmasters.

That’s why link building is the bread and butter of modern SEO. The more high-quality links you acquire from authoritative sources, the better your website will rank for your target keywords.

Internal linking is the process of creating links between your content to help crawlers discover more of your site.

Wikipedia is a good example of a website studded with internal links.

It may sound easy, but establishing an effective internal link map for your website requires meticulous planning.

By default, every e-commerce website already has an internal link structure built around the navigation links already present. It should look something like this:

You may notice that product and blog pages are typically segmented into categories to help users find what they’re looking for.

This is a basic example of the “silo” structure — the most common internal link structure used in websites. It works by creating a static category or silo pages that link out to all content underneath them.

However, internal linking for SEO requires a more elaborate scheme that also contextually links content together. Doing so will provide users and search engine crawlers a more streamlined journey through your website.

For example, take a look at the internal link map below:

Here, you can see the “News” page links to a blog post, the “FAQ” page links to the “About Us” page, and the “Blog” page links to both the “Products” and the “Contact Us” page.

All the product pages under the same category also link to each other, which only makes sense since you want potential customers to view other products they may be interested in.

Of course, the internal link map above is just an example of what an optimised link structure could look like. There are dozens of other connections you can make as long as both pages are contextually relevant.

Internal Linking with Magento

Now that you know the fundamentals of internal linking, it’s time for the actual steps on how to do it in Magento.

1. Link blog posts to product and category pages

Creating links from blog posts to product and category pages is a great way to capitalise on the engagement of readers. It will also improve the indexability of linked products if you run SEO and promotion activities for your blogs posts, such as link building, PPC advertising, and social media marketing.  

To create blog posts on your Magento website, you need to install an extension like Awesome Blog and Better Blog by Mageplaza.

These will allow you to quickly create blog posts and categories as well as integrate a fully functional comments section.

The good news is, the extensions will use an editor that appears similar to the built-in content editor on Magento. This effectively eliminates the learning curve of creating new blog posts on the platform.

Suppose your store sells special chocolate chips. You can write a blog post about “how to bake cookies” to establish your product’s relevance.

To add an internal link after you create the blog post, highlight the anchor text you want to use and click the “Insert/Edit Link” button.

On the Insert/Edit Link window, paste the link to the “Link URL” field and click “Insert.” You can also set the link to open a new window to avoid disrupting the browsing experience of your users.

To see if the process completed successfully, take a look at your anchor text. It should now have the clickable, blue format.  

2. Link related products

As an e-commerce store owner, you can augment the user experience of your visitors by showing them related products.

Magento lets you do this via the product description editor. To access this, go to the “Products” from the “Catalog” tab, select the product, and expand the “Content” section.

From there, simply follow the instructions in the previous step to attach the link you need.

You can also use an extension that allows you to display a “related products” section to dynamically insert internal links. Automatic Related Products for Magento 2, for example, makes the process easy with the visual configuration interface.

Despite taking only a few minutes to create, the final output should still look impressive.

3. Add links to product category pages

Lastly, adding links to category pages require the same steps as the ones outlined above. You also have the option to insert links via widgets by clicking the “Insert Widget” button.

Under the “Widget Type” drop-down menu, you can select whether to link to other pages, content blocks, product categories, and specific product pages.

Conclusion

In a way, internal linking for SEO and UX optimisation follow similar principles.

Both should improve site navigation and allow distribution of traffic across relevant content. It’s only a matter of determining how certain information can be pieced together contextually.

The guide above should have all the steps you need to build a solid internal link structure for your Magento site. If you have questions, suggestions, or opinions, feel free to leave a reply below!