Internal links are very important to the search performance of a website. For b2b firms whose websites present credentials and an overview of products and services, internal links are of utmost importance for effective selling as well as effective SEO.
Good Internal Links Help Make the Sale
They Can’t Buy It if They Can’t Find It
Here I’m thinking about potential customers who visit the b2b site to check out the firm as part of their decision making process. How do these potential customers behave on the website? First, we can assume they enter the site on the Home page. They most likely take in the Home page as a whole, sizing up whether it’s professionally designed and intelligently written – or an exercise in mediocrity. If the latter, the potential customer is gone. But if the site looks good, the next thing the potential customer will want to see is the nuts and bolts of what the b2b firm has to offer.
This is where internal linking comes in, and why it is so important.
Finding Product and Service pages on a b2b website shouldn’t be a treasure hunt, but that’s how many navigational schemes make it feel. Here are some tips for laying out internal links that will help SEO and improve the user experience. Bottom line – using these techniques will turn more prospects into customers.
Internal Linking Tips and Techniques for B2Bs
- Avoid long drop down menus in top line navigation. Overlong dropdowns, especially with multiple levels, are awkward to click on, and once the visitor clicks through to the new page, he may have trouble remembering what the link was that he clicked on. Clumsy. If you must use these, make sure to test them in all popular browsers, because dropdowns can behave differently from browser to browser.
- Set up universally important product and service page links on the template. For those vital pages that you want potential customers to find no matter what page of the site they are on, make them easy to find by setting up links to them in one place, either in the header or high on the left or right sidebar.
- Set up relatively important product and service page links in another, consistent area of the page. Links to product and service pages that relate to a given web page should be displayed elsewhere, but in a consistent place from page to page. Related products/services links can appear at the top or bottom of the page, or on one of the sidebars. The important thing is to display the links in the same place on any page, so visitors don’t have to hunt for them.
- Use descriptive, keyword optimized anchor text. Keyword analysis and knowing your customers will help you select the terms most often used to describe your products and services. These terms should be your primary search terms and used whenever possible as anchor text for your internal links. Anchor text selection can be obvious: for instance, “Bottling Equipment” is clearly better than “Equipment”. However, anchor text selection can sometimes require serious research: for instance, there could be an enormous difference in popularity between “Bottling Machine” and “Bottling Machines”.
- Use breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are handy navigational tools when product and services have multiple levels. Here is an example of breadcrumb navigation from the Sealed Air Corporation site on a product I did some promotional work on this year. (You can see other good internal linking practices on this page as well.) Point is, without breadcrumbs, managing your way back and forth from one product group to another can become highly frustrating for the visitor, leading them to exit on the very pages you want them to stay on.
- Use a visible sitemap. B2b sites with 20-plus pages really ought to have a visible / accessible sitemap. It’s an excellent navigational tool and an excellent opportunity to create keyword optimized internal links. A couple of my clients regularly get a lot of traffic through the sitemap – and a very low bounce rate.
Over to You
Any other tips for internal linking? What works best on your site?
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content strategy consulting.
Brad,
This is slightly off topic (apologies about this – since I know next to nothing about internal linking, I cannot really add anything about this to what you have already said), but one crucial aspect of site design is that after the customer has decided they want to give your product a try, the process of making actually placing and order and making a purchase must be absolutely crystal clear and simple.
To borrow and example from the B2C world, I recently spent a very, very long time on the site of an Australian ticketing agency trying to work out how to actually order some tickets for the Australian Open tennis tournament. The ticketing agency’s site had lots of glossy information about the tournament and other events, but nowhere was there any place in which users could click and actually purchase a ticket. Talking to family and friends, I found that I was not alone in my frustrations on that site (eventually I did manage to do it, but the process was certainly not explained properly at all).
The concept applies equally in the B2B world – the process for placing orders and making purchases and payment should be crystal clear. No use having the flashiest site if customers can’t work out how to actually order your product or service.
Sorry, I know this is a bit off topic, given that you were talking about the technical aspects of internal links.
Hi Andrew, Your comment is not really off topic at all. One of the key advantages of having intelligent internal links on your site is that it improves the user experience. What you just related is a terrible user experience. Clearly, the nightmare ticket site did not have an adequate system of internal links to guide you to what you wanted. We’ve all been there, and it is frustrating in the extreme. My guess is you were looking for a link to an FAQ page, or an online chat link, or maybe even a Buy Tickets Now link. Maybe you should send the webmaster this post and conversation.
Brad,
I agree with Karen about your new theme. Slick, stylish and fresh yet still beautifully organized and straightforward. Love it!
Wow, Brad! I had to double check to make sure that my browser had not misdirected me, lol! Congrats on the new site design, it’s beautiful! Wow! This is a timely post for me. Lately, I’ve been trying to rid myself of cobbler’s syndrome and am slowly making progress. Internal linking definitely improves the visitor experience and usability of your site particularly on content heavy sites.
Hi Karen, Thanks for noticing! I’ve been trying to simplify, simplify, simplify. One thing I notice – as WP themes evolve, the out-of-the-box internal linking schemes improve. It is really important to have certain elements on that sidebar, but with the wrong theme, it can be problematic getting there. Good luck with your project – it sure is hard to work on your own stuff, isn’t it?
Hey Brad,
I picked this one up recently from Graywolf – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cross-linker/. It’s a neat little Wordpress plugin that builds your internal links for you (against set criteria, of course). May be useful to someone!