ultimate guide to internal linking in ecommerce

It is an important aspect of any website. But it is even more crucial for ecommerce websites.

Interlinking improves the user experience and navigation for your website visitors. It can also improve search engine optimization (SEO) for your website.

This article will cover the best practices for linking internal pages to ecommerce websites. These opportunities can be illustrated by a few of my favourite examples of ecommerce SEO that has been done well, such as the portfolio of Williams Sonoma brands. Disclaimer: These sites are not affiliated with me and I have never worked for them. )

Let’s first explain why these strategies are important.

What is internal linking?

Internal linking is the linking of one page to another on the same domain. A user will be taken to another page of your website if they click on an internal link. These links may be words, phrases or images.

Internal linking is essential because it allows people to find the information they need on your website, and also helps them navigate from one page of your site to another.

This helps search engines to understand your website’s structure and hierarchy, which makes it easier for them to locate you in search results.

What is internal linking?

Internal linking is different from external linking.

External linking refers to the placement of links on your website which take users to other websites. This helps them to find the relevant information from other sources.

Both types of linking are important, but they serve different purposes.

What is the importance of internal linking for ecommerce websites

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of all websites, including ecommerce.

There are many other reasons, but these are the main reasons I think of when designing an ecommerce site with thousands or even millions of pages.

• Many ecommerce websites have many pages. These pages include product pages and category pages. These pages can be navigated using internal linking to help users find the information they need.
• Ecommerce websites are often surrounded by a lot more competition, which could mean that there may be many vendors selling the same or very similar products. The website’s SEO can be improved by internal linking, which makes it more visible in search engine results.
• Search engines can discover and crawl every page on ecommerce websites through internal linking. This helps improve their discoverability. This can increase traffic to the site and bring in more customers.
• Internal linking can highlight sales and new products as well as customer reviews on ecommerce sites. These items can be highlighted and encouraged to be taken advantage of.

It improves website visibility and rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). Additionally, it improves user experience by allowing visitors easy navigation.

Before we move on to the general best practices, which are discussed in the above items, it is important to distinguish between navigational and in-content inter linking.

What is the difference between in-content and navigation internal linking?

In-content internal linking refers to links within a page’s content (typically a post on a blog), while navigational internal linking refers to links within your website’s navigation menu.

You might link to a page on sneakers if you write a blog post about mens shoes. This would allow users to find more information about the content of the page.

Navigation internal linking, on the other hand, allows people to find the main pages of your website and navigate through your website more easily.

Now that you have an understanding of what we mean, here are 9 best practices to link pages internally on ecommerce websites. These can be broken down into navigational or in-content.

Navigation internal linking best practices

Let’s begin with the basics of an ecommerce website.

1. Sitewide navigation menu

For a strong internal linking strategy, organization and use of your primary navigation are key factors.

A page that is linked from the sitewide navigation essentially means it is linked to from all pages on the site. This can signal Google that the page has importance. It is important to not overload your menu.

The main navigation across the Williams Sonoma portfolio is an excellent example of effective internal linking strategy. To illustrate, I will use the West Elm Kids section as an example.

1 & 2 – Category/Sub-Category Links:West Elm provides links to important category pages in the sitewide menu. This improves these pages’ internal authority. Google can use the sub-category links to gain a better understanding about the site’s organization and the semantic relationships among them.

3: Focusing on the user experience. Having experienced this myself, I know that design paralysis can be a major obstacle to furniture purchases. The Design Resources section at West Elm allows search engines to access all products in the category (All Kids & Baby Collections), and also provides answers to common obstacles to purchasing (inspiration or in stock). ).

Ross Hudgens summarizes some of the other benefits of including this content better than I could.

Integrating content into navigation categories can lead to significantly better outcomes. People don’t want to go to “Resources” and “Blog”. This will cause them to ignore dropdowns such as this.

They are motivated to find solutions to a problem. If it is embedded in each category, they will be more inclined to read about it.

This will drive customers down the funnel, especially for products that have a long sales cycle. You can link to the hub category in the nav for the section discussing that content.

If it doesn’t exist, that’s a sign your content hub could benefit from better architecture to address the real problems people face.

This is how you can see the strong connection between internal linking and engagement benefits.

4: Internally link to support business priority: The most important thing about this example is that the internal link does not just say “Sale” (Up to 40% Discount Furniture) aligned to the category.

You’ll notice that each sub-menu’s sale reference aligns with the primary category. Deep linking is a great tool, even in the sale section.

5: Internal link to support secondary KPIs In an age when first-party information collection is a priority, West Elm offers a clear CTA that drives users to their design center to make an appointment.

Although I can’t confirm this, I expect that the data collected will be used to fuel marketing efforts.

If someone chooses to use these services, I expect the average order size to be higher (I know it was for myself), which is why they are able to offer these design services free of charge.

6: Portfolio-wide internal linking strategy. I have worked on many ecommerce websites that were part portfolio companies. The usual approach is to add footer links to portfolio domains, and then call it a day.

This is the first time that I’ve seen such a concentrated effort to use an internal linking structure in order to elevate all domains within a portfolio. Important to remember is that the cross-domain link is still relevant (e.g. West Elm Kids Furniture – Pottery Barn Baby & Kids Furniture).

Bravo to the person who sold this enterprise SEO strategy!

2. Sitewide secondary navigation menu

Williams Sonoma’s website portfolio uses a mixture of global navigation menus. The screenshot below shows the two I will be focusing on.

We see at the top a list with links to external ecommerce sites. This is also done well by Gap.

Mark & Graham uses a row below the logo that contains “quick links”. These links are used to support seasonal promotions and sales and deep links to category pages that might not otherwise have a place in the fixed navigation menu. (e.g. Occasions and Interests).

This is a great example of secondary navigation, which adds value for the user (and search engine) beyond Find a Store or Shopping Cart.

3. HTML breadcrumb navigation

HTML breadcrumbs are usually displayed at the top or side of product and category pages. These links include a set of links that indicate the user’s path to the current page.

Implementing breadcrumbs has a few advantages:

They make it easy to navigate to the previous pages and help users find their place on the site.

• Better crawlability Breadcrumb internal linking allows search engines to discover and crawl pages on your site and can reduce orphaned pages. This can increase your website’s visibility in search results.
• Improved user experience Breadcrumb internal linking can make your website easier to use and more user-friendly. This can increase engagement and help you rank higher in search results.
• Higher relevancy: Search engines can understand your site structure by using internal breadcrumb links. This is especially true if you use breadcrumb.

Williams Sonoma’s use of breadcrumbs to create natural links to category pages is a perfect example of this. It was based on my navigational path to the product.

4. HTML sitemap

An HTML sitemap is a page that lists all pages of your website and links to them.

You might, for example, include a sitemap to your website that lists all pages and links to them. Or you could use internal linking, which highlights the most important pages on your site.

A well-structured HTML websitemap can be created and linked to from the footer. This will ensure that all site pages are easily accessible, which is great for both SEO and user accessibility.

It is advantageous to have one page that links to both the primary and secondary pages of the site since search engines crawl sites in a sequence and follow contextual cues.

This is useful for visitors looking for pages on your site and can help search engines find and crawl all pages on your site.

It is important to keep the HTML sitemap updated once it has been created. This will ensure that search engines and users can access any page with minimal navigation.

In-content internal linking best practices

Ecommerce websites are known for their lack of content, especially on sub-category and category pages. Some of these examples could therefore be considered “navigational”.

These implementations, however, are less standard for navigational purposes. They are usually buried at bottom of page (where category pages typically add content).

5. Content for supporting category pages

There are many options for adding support content to category pages. This could be an article in its own right.

As you can see, West Elm has added a few supporting paragraphs to their category pages. These include additional heading tags and content that enhances the user experience.

They include links to product pages and other pages in the category, as well as educational/blog content, where appropriate.

6. Modules for internal linking

Pottery Barn and Mark & Graham use a row of Related searches above the page content (read more about internal links modules).

Pottery Barn Kids uses the same row directly above their footer.

These text links are long-tail keyword-rich links to sub-categories or product detail pages (PDPs) in all cases.

This allows you to create rich anchor text links that link to pages about color, texture, or sizing, as shown in the above example. This is incredibly valuable for long-tail but highly-qualified search terms.

7. Similar products/browsing

Ecommerce SEO 101 calls for a related products widget. This widget can be used to help users find other products that may interest them and it is a foundational tactic for internal link building.

What was once reserved for product details pages has been expanded to category pages. Even the “types” of related products have increased exponentially.

Williams Sonoma, for example, uses the “Related Products ,” standard, while Pottery Barn uses a widget called “Top Picks for you” on their category pages.

This implementation can be found on product detail pages. It typically has multiple rows per page in the carousel, allowing for more internal links per page.

• “People Also Viewed” (Pottery Barn Kids).
• “People Also Bought” by Pottery Barn Kids
• “Also In This Collection” (Pottery Barn).
• “Pairs Well With” West Elm
• “People Also Browsed” West Elm
• “Customers Also Viewed” (Williams Sonoma).
• “Customers also bought” (Williams Sonoma).
• “Related Products” (Williams Sonoma)
• “You may also like” (Rejuvenation).
• Plus!

These links are essential for cross-selling, upselling and flattening website architecture.

8. Product attributes

Product attributes can be used to fill in the gaps where breadcrumbs are not possible.

Both can be combined to make a powerful combination and can refer to any/all attributes that a product may have.

• Size
• Style
• Color
• Brand
• Flavor
• Texture

This type of internal link might be better displayed on another site (refer to REI.com), but I was able find an example on West Elm.

“Learn More” links to the Scout Regalia collaboration page. This could use a better anchor text implementation.

There are more opportunities for collaborations to be found on the collective sites.

9. User-generated content (UGC).

UGC content comes in many forms.

• Reviews.
• Testimonials.
• Questions and answers

Williams Sonoma’s SEO strategy is hard to fault. However, this is an area that could offer significant opportunities.

The Pottery Barn associate responded to a comment that included a naked URL in the above example. The link isn’t clickable.

The Q&A section of the domains generally offers many opportunities to automate internal linking.

What are the best internal linking practices?

You might be wondering “what to do?” and “how to make it happen.”

These best internal linking practices are well covered in a variety of articles, including MOZ, Semrush and, of course Google.

For a deeper explanation, I recommend you look at the links above. These are my five top internal linking best practices. They should be followed in no particular order.

• Link to deep pages.
• Use descriptive anchor text.
• You can link to related pages.
• Link to the canonical URL
• Use different anchor texts for different pages.

How can I add internal linking to my ecommerce website?

This may take some effort and collaboration with your development team in order to effectively implement the strategies.

Internal linking modules are the best implementation option, and they can be the most cost-effective. It is linked above. However, I recommend that you read the article by Holly Miller Anderson to get more information.

Auditing your internal links is another great place to start.

Paul Shapiro describes this as ” internal pageRank“, which is an intelligent way to think about it.

It doesn’t matter what you call it, the results of this exercise will provide valuable insight to help you get started.

Maximizing internal linkage for ecommerce

Any ecommerce website must have internal linking.

You can make sure that your website is simple to use for users and optimized for search engines by following the best practices in this article.

Search Engine Land first published the post Inter linking for ecommerce.