A basic foundational SEO concept is internal linking. Internal links are said to pass authority, help crawlers recognize important content on your site, and most importantly, help your website visitor find what they need or engage with your website even longer.

For years there have been discussions of following best practices for internal linking, speculating that Google does pay attention to how the link is used in context, how you are using the anchor text is used to describe the link, and how many you need.

I think regardless of where you stand, it’s most important to think about how the context of the link, especially if you have a fairly new site with little to no backlinks. In January 2023, Google released explicit guidelines for internal linking best practices. Now, there is explicit confirmation that descriptive anchor text does absolutely matter, and I hope the data here also gives you some confidence that yes, they can even promote better rankings and practices, especially when they’re used contextually.

I’ll use one example of a client who had just launched a new lead generation site. The site had no external backlinks going to it and was in the process of its blogs being built up as a quality resource.

A Preface on The Old Article

An article I had in July 2021 fit perfectly with a point made in the new article posted January 2022 (six months later). I know sometimes articles can begin ranking as late as six months, however this particular article had already begun ranking within 3 months, it just had sporadic visibility in the rankings.

Filtering out the data from social media (where the article had done well on), you can see that looking over the analytics in January 2022, the article was hardly gaining any organic traffic.

I had zero expectations that this would change and only wanted to link it with the new article because the context in the new article made sense.

Comparing Organic Traffic Growth on Both Articles

Surprisingly, the article’s visibility on Google exponentially increased as the new article began to rank and perform well for keywords that the new topic was addressing and were deeper explained by the old topic’s content. In other words, that means the more comprehensive topic the new topic was contextually linked with increased in organic traffic at the same time the old topic did.

Google Search Console Data Comparison on Both Articles

Pulled from Google Search Console, you can see that the old article began ranking more consistently after the new article started to pick up in the rankings.

Organic Traffic Growth on the Old Article (Data Source: Google Analytics)

As you can see, the organic traffic began to grow exponentially in June 2022 well through the rest of the year. Barring an anomaly in August, this trend was similar to the new topic’s traffic growth on Google (and not because they clicked the link from the new article).

Organic Traffic Growth on the New Article (Data Source: Google Analytics)

Above is the Google Analytics data for the new article covering the same time span. Note: the peak in August 2022 has to do with the article going viral on social media. The viral exposure spurred an increased interest in that article that showed in August’s overall organic clicks. It was an anomaly. If the article had not gone viral, it would have very likely had a similar trajectory as the other chart.

Takeaways & Concluding Observations

This is a site that had virtually no backlinks and was struggling to get noticed even for the quality content it did have. Neither of these articles had any backlinks during this time. This data really helped me place more value in internal linking, as I hope it also does for you.

By this, I mean don’t link topics together just to link them together. Make meaningful connections between your content that make sense and bring value to the reader, just as I did here, and Google is more likely to assign value to the topics.