I was inspired by Dennis Goedegebuure to do an internal linking experiment. He said: “Strong sites can rank based on internal linking! Move PageRank around until you have optimized it the way you want it.” He demonstrated how he used internal linking strategies on Ebay.com to direct traffic where he wanted it to go.
Conversion and Traffic
Any large eCommerce, lead generation or other business related website has several pages with high conversion rates and several more pages that don’t convert at all. For some reason or another your readers come to a select few pages on your site, read the content, and decide to purchase whatever it is you are selling. Unfortunately, those high ROI pages don’t always generate high volumes of traffic, like you would prefer.
There is a way to harness the power of those low ROI pages and redirect that power, via PageRank (explained below), into your higher converting pages using an internal linking strategy.
The two images below demonstrate two different pages I used for my internal linking experiment and the resulting traffic:
After building some internal links to each page it took a few days before I saw traffic increases to the linked pages.
My Internal Linking Strategy:
- Identify one of your highest converting pages. You may or may not be able to identify which pages convert better than other depending on your companies tracking capabilities. This process will be different for everyone.
- Identify 5 pages with high search rankings and traffic but low conversion rates, blog posts fit this profile nicely. Usually a page with high rankings in the search engines also has a high PageRank.
- Identify the keyword(s) that your high ROI page ranks for.
- Link your 5 low ROI pages to your 1 highly converting page using the keyword(s) you identified in step 3 as the anchor text.
PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.
Free information deserves a share!
Hi Russell,
Cool you did this test and is working out for you!
Just make sure you interlink the pages in a relevant manner for your visitors.
Don’t break the theme of your category through irrelevant linking, as you might see a small traffic increase, but can see traffic take a nose dive as soon as the irrelevant links are fully digested by the engines.
Keep up the good work, and always be testing! What works for one, might not work for you!
DG
Thanks Dennis! With the ever increasing attention to quality by Google I also believe that anything we do on our sites needs to have a user benefit. Other wise a penalty will eventually discount a lot of your hard work.