Internal Linking Audit for Revenue Pages

Your service page ranks 11th for your most important keyword, while a blog post from 2021 sits in position 3. The post brings traffic, the service page brings revenue, and there isn't a single link between them. That is where an internal linking audit pays off: internal links are the one SEO lever you fully control, with no budget, no backlink outreach and no new content.

Optimising internal linking means making sure every important page is linked from other pages on your site with descriptive anchor text, above all from pages that already have visibility. According to its own documentation, Google uses links to discover new pages and to judge their relevance. An audit with Search Console and a crawler shows you in about an hour which revenue pages are under-linked and which links to add first.

Why internal links matter for rankings

Google describes the role of links very directly in its link best practices: links are a signal for determining the relevance of pages and for finding new pages to crawl. The SEO Starter Guide adds that Google primarily finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled. For established websites with a blog, service pages and categories, that translates into three jobs.

Crawling: a page with no internal links pointing to it is hard for Google to find. The link best practices explicitly recommend that every page you care about is linked from at least one other page on your site. On the technical side, Google can generally only crawl links that are an <a> element with an href attribute. Buttons with a JavaScript click handler and no real href don't count.

Context: anchor text tells Google what the target page is about. The SEO Starter Guide says link text tells users and Google something about the page you are linking to. The link best practices get more specific: good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant both to the page it sits on and to the page it points to. At the same time, Google warns against stuffing anchor text with keywords, since keyword stuffing violates its spam policies.

Prioritisation: how you link shows which pages matter to you. The Starter Guide recommends a logical site organisation because it helps search engines and users understand how your pages relate to each other. If your blog has 40 articles that only link to the homepage and the contact form, your structure sends a weak signal for the service pages that actually make you money.

What about AI search?

Google sets no special rules for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Its page "AI features and your website" states that there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations needed to appear there. Among the foundational SEO practices that Google says still apply, the page explicitly lists making content easy to find through internal links. So internal linking is no substitute for a dedicated GEO and AEO strategy, but it is a prerequisite for one. What else counts for being recommended by AI assistants is covered in our article on GEO and AEO for AI recommendations.

What's new is that you can now measure the effect: according to Search Console Help, the "Generative AI performance" report has been rolled out to all websites worldwide since August 31, 2026. It shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, date and device.

The internal linking audit in four time blocks

You need access to Google Search Console, a crawler and a spreadsheet. The audit is deliberately capped at about 60 minutes. The goal isn't a perfect link architecture but a prioritised list of the 10 to 20 links you add this week.

Minutes 0–10: define your money pages

First, decide which pages generate revenue. For a B2B service firm, that means service pages and the contact page; for SaaS, feature, solution and pricing pages; for a shop, the categories with the best margin. Put these pages in column A of your sheet. More than 10 to 15 money pages is too many for a first pass.

Next to them go your traffic pages: blog posts, guides, glossary entries. These are the sources you will later link from to your money pages.

Minutes 10–25: analyse Search Console

In Search Console, open the Links report and go to the table of top internally linked pages. According to Search Console Help, it shows which pages receive the most links from within your site. Clicking a URL shows which pages link to it. Check: where do your money pages sit in this list? If your privacy policy has more internal links than your most important service page, that is your first finding.

Keep the report's limits in mind. Google notes that it isn't a complete list of all links but a sample. Tables are capped at 1,000 rows, pages are grouped by canonical URL, and the report doesn't show whether a link is nofollow. That's enough for direction; for exact numbers you need the crawler.

Then switch to the Performance report. Choose the Pages view, enable impressions and average position, and sort by impressions. Flag every page with high impressions at an average position of 8 to 20. These are your candidates on the edge of page one: Google already considers them relevant, just not relevant enough. One reading note: according to Search Console Help, property-level data counts your site's topmost position, while page-level data is averaged. So always look at position per page.

Minutes 25–45: analyse the crawl

Run a crawler in parallel with the Search Console block. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a widely used tool for this. According to its internal linking audit tutorial, three views are key:

Crawl depth: the "Crawl Depth" column in the "Internal" or "Links" tab shows how many clicks a page sits from the homepage. The "Links" tab also offers a "Pages with high crawl depth" filter. Redirects count as an extra step.
Inlinks: the "Unique Inlinks" column shows how many different internal pages link to a URL. Sort ascending and compare against your money page list.
Anchor text: the "Non-Descriptive Anchor Text In Internal Outlinks" filter finds links with anchors like "here" or "learn more".

To find orphan pages, meaning pages with no internal links, the crawler needs extra data sources. Screaming Frog describes connecting XML sitemaps, Google Analytics and Search Console for this. After crawl analysis, the pages appear under the "Orphan URLs" filter or in the "Orphan Pages" report. According to the vendor, crawling the whole site and using these integrations requires a licence.

Minutes 45–60: build the link plan

Now join the two lists. For each money page in position 8 to 20 or with few inlinks, find three to five topically relevant traffic pages that already rank well. For each pair, note: source page, target page, paragraph in the text, planned anchor text.

Structure it as a hub-and-spoke model: the service or category page is the hub, and the guides on that topic are the spokes. Each spoke links to the hub in the body copy, and the hub links back to the most important spokes. That creates a topic cluster both users and crawlers can follow. For the SEO of an established website, this usually does more than the next new article.

Prioritise by closeness to revenue

Not every missing link matters equally. Sort your link plan by two questions: how close is the target page to revenue, and how close is it to page one? A service page in position 9 with 3,000 monthly impressions beats any blog post in position 15. A shop category with a high margin beats a clearance category.

Worked example (all figures assumed, not benchmarks): A service page gets 3,000 impressions a month at a 1% click-through rate, so 30 clicks. It converts 3% of visitors into enquiries, which is 0.9 enquiries a month. If better internal linking lifts the page onto page one and its click-through rate rises to an assumed 4%, that becomes 120 clicks and 3.6 enquiries. At an assumed value of €1,500 per enquiry (calculated from your own close rate and deal size), monthly enquiry value rises from €1,350 to €5,400. Whether your page makes that jump depends on competition, content and search intent. The calculation only shows why money pages come before traffic pages.

Common mistakes that waste ranking signals

Orphan pages: landing pages from old campaigns, service pages that only lived in the mega menu of a relaunch draft, product pages from feeds. They exist, but nothing links to them. Google recommends linking every important page from at least one other page.

Generic anchors: "click here", "read more", "see offer". In its link best practices, Google suggests reading the anchor text out of context as a test: is it still understandable and specific? If not, replace it with a short description of the target page.

Footer link farms: 60 keyword links to city and service variants in the footer help neither users nor search engines. Google says there is no ideal number of links per page, but if you feel there are too many, there probably are. Combined with keyword-stuffed anchors, you are drifting towards spam policy territory.

Redirect chains: after every relaunch, internal links point to old URLs that redirect two or three times. According to Google, Googlebot generally follows up to ten redirect hops for general web content, and the content of redirecting URLs is ignored. Every chain costs crawl effort and, in Screaming Frog, extra crawl depth. The fix is simple: point internal links straight at the final URL.

Nofollow on internal links: Google's documentation on qualifying outbound links describes nofollow for cases where you don't want to associate your site with the target page or don't want the linked page crawled from your site. For your own pages that Google shouldn't fetch, Google points to the disallow rule in robots.txt. On pages that are supposed to rank, internal nofollow has no place.

How do you measure success afterwards?

Before you change anything, record baseline values for each target page: impressions, clicks, average position, unique inlinks and enquiries per page. Add the links, let Google recrawl the updated pages, and then compare equal periods before and after.

According to Search Console Help, the Performance report lets you compare two date ranges, such as this week against last week or a month against the previous month. Google recommends weekly or monthly granularity to smooth out weekday effects. Use "+ Add filter" to narrow to your target pages with "URLs containing", or with a regular expression for several URLs at once.

The metric that decides it, though, isn't in Search Console but in your analytics and CRM: leads per page. Here's a formula you can add to any report:

Leads per page = organic sessions to the page × the page's conversion rate

If organic sessions rise but leads don't, the problem is no longer the linking, it's the page itself. Then conversion optimisation is the next lever. And to attribute leads to a landing page at all, your tracking has to work reliably under consent.

FAQ

How many internal links should a page have?

Google doesn't give an ideal number. The link best practices state explicitly that there isn't one, but they warn against too many links. Ask whether a link helps the reader at that point. For money pages: five contextual links from relevant articles beat 50 from the footer.

Should I always use the same anchor text for a target page?

No. Google wants descriptive, concise anchor text that fits both source and target page, and it warns against keyword stuffing. Vary the wording to suit the sentence, as long as it stays clear what the target page is about. "SEO support for B2B service firms" and "search optimisation for service pages" both work; "SEO SEO agency SEO" doesn't.

Is the Search Console Links report enough for an audit?

For a first overview, yes; for implementation, no. Google describes the report as a sample with at most 1,000 rows per table and no nofollow information. Crawl depth, orphan pages and anchor text only show up with a crawler.

Sources

Want more of the attention you get to turn into customers? Let’s spend 15 minutes on your setup, free and without a pitch deck. Book your free call

Internal linking audit: how to channel ranking power to your revenue pages