If you've been writing blog posts for a while and someone just told you to "do an internal linking check," you probably nodded and then quietly panicked. What does that even mean? Click every link on your site?
I get why it sounds intimidating. SEO advice online loves to talk about internal linking in vague, high-level terms — "build a strong link architecture," "distribute link equity strategically" — without ever explaining what that actually looks like on a Tuesday afternoon when you're staring at your own blog.
Good news: it's simpler than it sounds, and you don't need to be an SEO expert to do a useful first pass. This guide walks you through internal linking from scratch — what it is, what to actually look at, and how to run your first audit without any expensive tools.
By the end, you'll have a simple checklist you can run through in an afternoon, even on a site with a hundred or more posts.
Internal linking basics, quickly
An internal link is just a link from one page on your site to another page on your site. That's it. When your "How to Bake Bread" post links to your "Best Flour Brands" post, that's an internal link.
Why does this matter for SEO? Three reasons, and I'll keep this short because you probably want to get to the actual checking part.
First, internal links help visitors find more of your content. Someone reading one post clicks through to another, spends more time on your site, and maybe subscribes or buys something. That's the most obvious reason and the one that matters most day-to-day.
Second, internal links help Google understand your site's structure. Search engines crawl by following links. If a page has zero internal links pointing to it, Google might struggle to find it at all, or might assume it's unimportant since nothing else on your site bothers to reference it.
Third, internal links pass authority between pages. If you have one page that ranks really well and gets a lot of external links from other websites, linking from that page to a newer page you want to rank helps the newer page borrow some of that authority. This is the closest thing to a free ranking boost you'll find in SEO.
Okay. Now let's get into what you're actually checking for.
What to check: anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable words in a link — not the URL, the actual text someone clicks on. "Click here" is anchor text. So is "our guide to sourdough starters."
Here's what to look for in your audit: is your anchor text descriptive, or is it generic?
Generic anchor text like "click here," "read more," or "this article" tells a reader almost nothing about what's on the other side of that link. It also tells Google almost nothing about what the linked page is about. Descriptive anchor text like "our full guide to sourdough starters" does double duty — it sets reader expectations and gives Google a hint about the destination page's topic.
You don't need every single link to be a perfectly optimized keyword match. That actually looks unnatural if you overdo it. But if you scroll through a post and notice five "click here" links in a row, that's worth fixing.
A quick gut check: if you copied just the anchor text out of context — no surrounding sentence, no page it's on — would you have any idea what page it links to? If not, it's too generic.
What to check: link count per page
How many internal links should a single page have? There's no magic number, but there are two failure modes worth watching for.
Too few. If your post is 2,000 words long and has zero internal links, that's a missed opportunity. You wrote all that content and never once pointed a reader toward something else relevant on your site. Even one or two well-placed links helps.
Too many. On the other end, if a page has 40 internal links crammed into it, each individual link carries less weight, and the page starts to feel more like a link directory than an article. Readers also get overwhelmed with options and are less likely to click any single one.
A reasonable range for most blog posts is somewhere between 3 and 8 internal links, depending on length and how much related content you actually have. Don't force it to hit a number — link naturally where it's genuinely useful, and let the count fall where it falls.
What to check: depth (how many clicks from the homepage)
Depth refers to how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to any given page on your site. A page one click away from the homepage is depth 1. A page you can only reach by clicking through three layers of category pages is depth 3 or deeper.
Why this matters: pages buried deep in your site structure get crawled less often and are harder for readers to stumble across. If your best, most important content lives four clicks deep, you're burying your own best work.
Checking this by hand is tedious but doable on a small site. Start from your homepage and count how many clicks it takes to reach each of your important pages. If your top posts, your pricing page, or your best lead magnet all live more than two or three clicks deep, you have a structural problem worth fixing — usually by adding links to those pages from higher up in your navigation or from other frequently-visited pages.
What to check: contextual relevance
This is the one beginners skip most often, and it matters the most.
Contextual relevance just means: does this link make sense here? If you're writing about baking bread and you link out to your "Best Coffee Makers" post because you want more clicks on it, that's not a contextual link. It's a link, technically, but it doesn't help the reader and it doesn't help Google understand your site's topical structure.
Good internal linking clusters related content together. If you write consistently about baking, your baking posts should link to each other frequently, because they're genuinely useful to the same reader at the same moment. This also happens to be exactly what search engines look for when trying to figure out what topics you're an authority on.
When you're checking your links, ask yourself: would a reader interested in this paragraph actually want to click this link right now? If the honest answer is no, that link probably shouldn't be there, no matter how much you want traffic on the destination page.
The beginner-friendly manual method
Here's how to run your first check without paying for anything.
Step 1: List your most important pages. Pull up your analytics and identify your ten to twenty most-visited posts, plus any key pages like your homepage, pricing page, or main service pages. These are the pages you care most about getting right.
Step 2: Use Google's site search operator. Go to Google and search site:yourdomain.com "exact phrase from your target page's title". This shows you which of your own pages Google has indexed that mention that phrase, giving you a rough sense of what content already exists around a topic and where you might be missing links between related posts.
Step 3: Open each of your top pages and read through them. For each one, ask: does this page link out to other relevant content on my site? Are there paragraphs where I mention a concept I've already written a full post about, but never linked to it? Those are your quick wins — add the link.
Step 4: Use your CMS's built-in search. Most content management systems, including WordPress, let you search your own posts. If you're writing a new post about "sourdough starters" and you know you've covered "flour types" before, search your dashboard for "flour" and see what comes up. Link to it.
Step 5: Check Google Search Console's Links report. Under the Links section, Search Console shows you "Internal links" — a count of how many internal links point to each page on your site. Sort this list from lowest to highest. Anything with zero or one internal link pointing to it is a candidate for more attention, especially if it's a page you actually want to rank.
This manual process takes an afternoon for a site with fifty to a hundred posts. It won't be perfect, but it will catch the most obvious gaps and give you a real feel for your site's linking structure before you ever touch a paid tool.
When to graduate to automated tools
The manual method works, but it has a ceiling. Once your site crosses a few hundred pages, or once you're publishing multiple times a week, keeping track of link counts and depth by hand becomes impossible. You'll lose track of what links where, and you'll stop doing the check altogether because it's too tedious.
That's your signal to move to an automated internal linking checker. These tools crawl your whole site the way a search engine would, and instead of you manually counting links on each page, they generate a report showing link counts, depth, orphan pages (pages with zero internal links pointing to them), and broken links, all in one pass.
Some tools go a step further and actively suggest where to add internal links as you write, based on your existing content. If you're on WordPress, this is worth looking into once manual checking starts eating more than an hour or two of your time each month — a tool like RankHive, for instance, can flag orphan pages and suggest relevant internal links automatically as part of your regular publishing workflow, rather than making you run a separate audit every time.
A good rule of thumb: if checking your internal links by hand takes longer than actually writing your next post, it's time to automate it.
Free tools worth knowing about
Before you spend money on anything, here's a quick rundown of the free tools that cover most of what a beginner needs.
Google Search Console is the one tool I'd tell any beginner to set up before anything else, and it's free. Beyond the internal links report mentioned above, it also shows you which pages get indexed, which get flagged as errors, and which queries actually bring people to each page. If you're only going to learn one tool, learn this one.
Your CMS's search bar sounds too obvious to mention, but almost nobody uses it for this purpose. Before you write a new post, search your own dashboard for the topic you're covering. You'll often find you've touched on it before in a different post, which is your cue to link the two together.
A browser's "find on page" function (usually Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) is useful when you're reviewing a single long post and want to quickly count how many links it has, or check whether a specific phrase already has a link attached to it.
Spreadsheets aren't glamorous, but building a simple spreadsheet with your post titles, URLs, and topics lets you eyeball clusters of related content and spot where links are missing, especially if you're a visual thinker. List your posts by category, and it becomes obvious pretty fast which categories are well-linked and which ones are a handful of disconnected posts with nothing tying them together.
None of these cost anything, and together they cover about 80% of what a paid tool would automate for you. The remaining 20% — continuous monitoring, automatic suggestions, and handling this at scale across hundreds of pages — is what you pay for later, once manual tracking becomes the bottleneck.
Common beginner mistakes
A few patterns show up again and again when people start paying attention to internal linking for the first time.
Linking to the homepage too often. Your homepage usually gets plenty of links already, from your navigation menu, footer, and logo. Beginners sometimes default to linking there whenever they're not sure what else to link to. Skip it — link to something more specific and useful instead.
Only linking to old, established posts. It's tempting to always link toward your best-performing content because it feels safe. But new posts need internal links too, arguably more, since they don't have any authority built up yet and rely on internal links to get discovered and crawled in the first place.
Treating internal linking as a one-time task. People do one linking pass when they publish a post and never revisit it. But every new post you publish is a chance to go back and add a link from an older, related post. Skipping this means your older content stays stuck exactly where it was the day you published it.
Over-optimizing anchor text. Once beginners learn that anchor text matters, some overcorrect and stuff exact-match keywords into every single link. This looks unnatural to readers and can look manipulative to search engines if it's excessive. Natural, varied phrasing beats robotic keyword repetition every time.
Ignoring orphan pages. It's easy to publish a page, move on, and forget it exists. If nothing else on your site links to it, you've essentially built a page that's invisible to both readers browsing your site and, eventually, to search engines crawling it.
Not checking after a redesign. Any time you restructure your site, change your navigation, or switch themes, internal links can silently break or shift in ways you don't notice until traffic drops. This is the single most common time for internal linking problems to appear, and the most common time people forget to check.
A simple action plan and checklist
If you want to just get started today, here's the shortest version of everything above.
- Pull your list of top twenty pages by traffic from your analytics.
- Read through each one and add at least one link to another relevant post, if none exists.
- Check Search Console's internal links report and find pages with zero or one internal link. Add links to at least five of them from related content.
- Scan for generic anchor text ("click here," "read more") on your top pages and replace it with descriptive text.
- Count links per page on your five longest posts. If any have zero internal links, that's a gap. If any have more than fifteen, consider trimming.
- Repeat this process monthly, or whenever you notice traffic dropping on a page that used to perform well.
That's a real internal linking check, done with tools you already have access to for free. It won't be as thorough as a full automated crawl, but it will fix the majority of the obvious gaps most sites have, and it'll give you a much better feel for how your content actually connects together.
FAQ
How is an internal linking check different from a backlink audit?
An internal linking check looks at links between pages on your own site. A backlink audit looks at links from other websites pointing to yours. Both matter for SEO, but they're separate tasks with separate tools, and beginners often confuse the two.
Do I need special software to check internal links?
Not to start. Google Search Console, your site's built-in search, and just reading through your top pages will get you most of the way there for free. Dedicated tools become worth it once your site gets too large to check by hand in a reasonable amount of time.
How many internal links should each post have?
There's no fixed number, but somewhere between 3 and 8 links per post is a reasonable range for most blog content. Focus on relevance over hitting a specific count — a post with three genuinely useful links beats one with ten forced ones.
What's an orphan page and why does it matter?
An orphan page is a page on your site that has no internal links pointing to it from anywhere else. It's hard for readers to find by browsing, and it can be hard for search engines to discover and crawl too. Finding and fixing orphan pages is one of the highest-value things a beginner can do in their first internal linking check.
Should I link to the same page from multiple posts?
Yes, if it's genuinely relevant each time. There's no rule against linking to your best cornerstone content from many different posts. Just make sure each link fits naturally in context rather than feeling forced in for the sake of repetition.
How long does a beginner internal linking check take?
For a site with fifty to a hundred posts, expect to spend two to four hours on your first pass. After that, a monthly maintenance check of thirty minutes to an hour, focused just on new content and any pages that have dropped in traffic, is usually enough to stay on top of it.
Does internal linking still matter if I already have a lot of backlinks from other sites?
Yes, and honestly it might matter more. Backlinks bring authority into your site, but internal links are what distribute that authority around once it's there. A site with great backlinks but poor internal linking is like a company with a big budget and no plan for spending it — the resource exists, but it's not going where it would do the most good.
Can too much internal linking ever hurt me?
It's rare, but it's possible if you go to extremes. Cramming dozens of forced, irrelevant links into a page dilutes the value of each one and creates a bad reading experience, which is the real cost — not some kind of penalty. If every link earns its place because it's genuinely useful to the reader, you're very unlikely to overdo it.