Internal linking — the cheapest SEO win most Sydney sites ignore
Two hours of careful internal-link work will outperform a $500 backlink package. Here's the method, including the mistake we found on our own site.
- Internal links tell Google which of your pages matter and pass ranking authority between them — it's free and most sites do it badly.
- Point links from supporting content to your money pages using descriptive anchor text, not "click here".
- Orphan pages (nothing links to them) and links to dead pages both quietly leak value — audit for them.
- A hub-and-spoke structure (pillar + supporting pages linking both ways) is the highest-leverage pattern for local SEO.
Most small-business SEO advice points outward — get more backlinks, get more reviews, get more traffic. This one points inward, and it's the cheapest win on the board. Internal linking — how the pages on your own site link to each other — is something you fully control, costs nothing but an afternoon, and almost every small-business site does badly.
We'll start with a confession, because it makes the point better than any theory: while writing this, we audited our own site and found eleven internal links pointing at pages that don't exist — including links from our main SEO services page. They'd been quietly sending visitors and Google's crawler to a blank homepage shell for weeks. If it can happen to an SEO agency's site, it's almost certainly happening to yours. So let's fix it.
TL;DR
Internal links do two jobs: they help Google understand which pages are important, and they pass ranking authority ("link equity") between your pages. Point links from your blog posts and supporting pages toward the pages that make you money, use descriptive anchor text, kill links to dead pages, and make sure nothing important is an orphan. Two focused hours here will usually beat a month of chasing external links.
What internal links actually do
When Google crawls your site, it follows links to discover pages and to judge their relative importance. A page that lots of your other pages link to — with relevant anchor text — reads as a page you consider important. That's why your homepage usually ranks easiest: everything links to it.
The opportunity is to deliberately channel that signal toward the pages you actually want to rank — your services and location pages — instead of letting it pool on your homepage and contact page by accident.
The method, step by step
1. Decide which pages are your "money pages"
For most Sydney small businesses, these are the service pages and the suburb/location pages — the ones a ready-to-buy searcher lands on. List them. These are your link destinations.
2. Point supporting content at them
Every blog post you publish should link to at least one or two relevant money pages. Writing about local search? Link to your local SEO guide and your SEO service. The post exists to be useful and to pass a little authority to the page that converts.
3. Use descriptive anchor text
The clickable words matter. "Sydney SEO services" tells Google what the destination is about; "click here" tells it nothing. Don't over-optimise to the point of stuffing the exact same phrase everywhere — vary it naturally — but make the anchor describe the destination.
4. Build hub-and-spoke clusters
The highest-leverage structure for local SEO is a pillar page linked to and from a set of supporting pages. Our Sydney SEO hub links out to every suburb page, and every suburb page links back to it. Google reads that tight web as a coherent, authoritative topic cluster — and the links distribute authority across the whole set.
5. Fix orphans and dead links
Two silent leaks:
- Orphan pages — pages nothing links to. Google may barely crawl them and will rarely rank them. Every important page should have at least a few internal links pointing in.
- Links to dead pages — like the eleven we found on our own site. They waste crawl budget, frustrate users, and pass authority into a void. Crawl your site (Screaming Frog's free tier, or your SEO checklist run) and fix or repoint every internal link that 404s or redirects.
6. Keep it shallow
Important pages should be reachable in a couple of clicks from the homepage. If a money page is buried five clicks deep, it's telling Google it doesn't matter. Surface it in your navigation, footer, or a related-links block.
A two-hour starting plan
If you do nothing else: crawl your site for broken and orphaned pages, add a "related" link block to your top five blog posts pointing at your money pages with good anchor text, and make sure your pillar and supporting pages link both ways. That's the afternoon that beats the $500 backlink package.
Internal links won't replace earning real external links — for that, see how we think about the wider SEO picture. But pound for pound, no other lever is this cheap or this fully in your control.