How Ahrefs Internal Link Opportunities Improve Website SEO?

‣ Internal links are a crucial part of the website’s SEO success.
‣ Internal linking helps users to navigate through the websites easily and search engines to understand the relevance of the page.
‣ Ahrefs’ internal linking opportunities help in simplifying the process of finding relevant internal links. So, it builds the connection between multiple pages from the same domain.

With SEO constantly evolving in the digital landscape, a variety of factors affect keyword rankings. And, internal linking is one of them.

Even though they are often ignored, these internal linking opportunities help search engines to better understand the webpages and the content.

So, they can shape the distribution of authority while guiding the users through the web content. Moreover, John Mueller, a senior analyst at Google, claimed in the Techmagnate report—

“Internal linking is super critical for SEO. It’s one of the biggest things you can do on a website to guide Google and visitors to the pages you think are important.”

But this linking process can be quite time-consuming and complex. This makes it difficult to implement a proper internal linking SEO strategy.

That’s where Ahrefs’ internal link opportunities come into play.

This built-in feature in Ahrefs Site Audit helps automate the internal linking suggestions for web pages. That is, making it easier to implement the strategy effectively.

So, in this blog, I am going to delve into the internal linking process, its relevance, and its best practices.

Stay tuned!

What Is An Internal Link?

First things first, an internal link basically refers to the embedded HTML code in a specific keyword of the content. So, when the reader clicks on the keyword, they get redirected to the linked page in a jiffy.

Moreover, the internal links help in building relevance for different web pages. That is, it connects related content pages of the website through the links.

So, both users and search engines can understand how the content pages relate to each other. Making it easier to navigate through the website content.

Why Are Internal Links Important For Website SEO?

In addition to this, internal link opportunities provide massive benefits for the brand’s website SEO—

1. Improving User Navigation

Firstly, internal links help with building a connection between different pages. So, users can easily navigate through related content without getting lost on the website.

⁍ Leading Readers To Relevant Information

Moreover, internal linking opportunities direct the readers to relevant information about the brand’s services. So, they can find content that aligns with their search intent.

⁍ Driving Organic Traffic And Reducing Bounce Rate

In addition to this, when a user clicks on the internal links, it drives organic traffic to your website. Also, the easy navigation reduces the bounce rate. So, brands gain more audience engagement.

⁍ Improving SERP Rankings

Moreover, with the reduced bounce rate, the webpage ranking dynamically improves. So, when the users stay and engage with the web content, the bounce rate decreases. Making the site rank higher on the SERPs.

⁍ Helping With Indexing And Crawling

Finally, along with the users, internal links help Google crawlers to understand the related content pages that are already indexed. So, it simplifies the indexing and crawling process and boosts the SERP rankings.

Challenges Of Finding Internal Linking Opportunities Manually

Even though internal linking opportunities provide countless SEO benefits, handling them manually can be challenging. So, some of the key challenges include—

• Browsing through thousands of webpages.
• Finding contextual relevance between two pages.
• Equally distributing the link authority across different pages.
• Maintaining the site structure with internal linking for important pages.
• Encountering technical errors like broken links or stuffed internal links.

What Are Ahrefs’ Internal Link Opportunities?

Generally, Ahrefs offers a built-in feature to find internal link opportunities for websites. According to Ahrefs, the Site Audit tool finds internal linking opportunities—

“The tool looks for instances where a page on your site mentions a keyword or phrase that another page is targeting. If the mention doesn’t already link to the targeted page, it’s flagged as an opportunity.”

So, within its Site Audit tool, businesses can find internal linking opportunities in three ways—

1. Internal Link Opportunities By Page

The first method helps in finding internal links for a target page.

That is, to drive traffic to a specific page, change the search mode to “Target Page” and add the URL in the search box of the Ahrefs report page.

So, Ahrefs will give you a list of all the relevant and related content pages from your website that you can internally link to the target page.

2. Link Opportunities By Keyword

The second method mainly focuses on finding internal linking opportunities based on keywords.

That is, you can select the Advanced Filters and create a new rule with Keywords, set the condition to Contains, and mention the specific keyword.

So, Ahrefs will filter out a list of all the pages containing that keyword in their web content.

For example, if you want to find internal links for the webpage “what are the inbound Links URL”, it will find pages that mention the keyword “inbound links”.

3. Link Opportunities By Authority

Finally, Ahrefs also helps with finding link opportunities by page rating. So, you can click on the PR of the source page.

This way, you can view the internal backlinks of the page across a 100-point scale.

So, you can link the pages with high PR to your new content to drive maximum SEO benefits for your website.

How To Maximize Internal Linking With Ahrefs?

Ahrefs’ internal link opportunities help find the right links for the right pages, reducing impractical effort and simplifying the time-consuming process.

As John Reinesch mentions in his YouTube video—

“Internal link audits used to take us a lot of time and manual work, but since using Ahrefs’ Internal Link Opportunity report, we are able to instantly find some of our lowest-effort internal link opportunities.”

So, if you want to fully utilize the link opportunities of Ahrefs, here are a few advanced ways to try—

• Segmenting the webpages based on their high-value URLs.
• Using the Content Explorer to find all the topical mentions of keywords.
• Checking the organic keywords report and linking the contextually relevant ones.
• Creating topic clusters with Ahrefs’ automated suggestions.

Comparing Ahrefs With Other Internal Linking Tools

Apart from Ahrefs, there are several other SEO tools that help find internal linking opportunities. So, here is a breakdown of their differences—

Common Mistakes To Avoid For Internal Linking

Some of the common mistakes to avoid while using internal links in SEO are—

• Overusing internal links in a web page can make it look spammy.
• Stuffing the anchor text with keywords can adversely affect the website’s SEO.
• Adding irrelevant internal links that have no contextual relation to the content.
• Using broken links or redirect chains can frustrate the user and affect your traffic.

Tips To Use Ahrefs Internal Link Opportunities

Given that Ahrefs’ internal link opportunities help in finding the relevant links, it is widely adopted by most businesses and brands. But simply using it won’t get the maximum results.

So, here are some things to keep in mind while finding internal link opportunities using the features of Ahrefs—

• Firstly, understanding the user-search intent can help in creating content that directly addresses their queries.
• Moreover, prioritizing value over content jargon can improve the SEO performance of the websites. So, by creating valuable and informative content, businesses can make their pages rank on SERPs.
• In addition to this, it is better to avoid overusing the internal links in the web page. This way, search engines won’t see the website as spammy.

Now, with this complete guide in hand, you can improve your website SEO with proper internal linking. So, what’s the wait for? Go ahead and use Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool to unlock your higher ranking potential.

FAQs

Here are some of the common questions on Ahrefs’ internal link opportunities that you can check.