Internal Linking Case Study

Gained an additional 139,000 visits per month!

Client

Niche site in the outdoor space.

Plan

The website had a decent mix of affiliate and informational content and was in the process of expanding its categories to include more topics.

One of the biggest problems here was that multiple owners and strategies over time had caused it to not be cohesive and organized. The first steps were clear:

• Remove or combine duplicate topics
• Add internal linking to and from relevant pages to create clusters of content
• Identify pillar articles for each topic
• Be sure to use varied keyword rich anchor text for internal links

With these changes in place Google would be able to better “understand” our topics and the relation of the articles between each other. We also would be sure to put our most valuable articles into focus as the “pillar” piece of content for a topic cluster.

Execution

While simple in theory, thousands of pages needed addressed. Spreadsheets were used to organize the work and a lot of time was taken to get the plan done right.

To identify what keywords to target with the anchor text I examined what was already ranking well or close to ranking well via Ahrefs.

It took about 2 months to fully execute the plan.

Results

In month 3 the traffic took a clear jump. We started at 252,756 visits in month 1 and ended month 3 with 391,904 visits – a 139,148 visit increase!

This laid the foundation and structure for future content to be put into in order thrive and drive even more traffic growth.