If you run a trade or service based business and you have been trying to do your own SEO, chances are you have been focused on the usual stuff. Getting Google reviews, adding keywords to your pages, maybe writing a few blog articles. All good things.
But there is one technique that almost nobody in the trades talks about, and it is one of the most impactful things you can do for your rankings without spending a single dollar.
It is called internal linking, and in this guide I am going to show you exactly what it is, why it matters, and walk you through the process I use for my own clients.
What Is Internal Linking?
An internal link is simply a clickable link on one page of your website that takes someone to another page on the same website.
That is it. Nothing technical, nothing complicated.
When you are reading a blog article about “how to know if your switchboard needs an upgrade” and there is a link that says “switchboard upgrade service” that takes you to the relevant service page, that is an internal link. When a location page links to your main services page, that is an internal link. When one blog post links to another related article, that is also an internal link.
The reason this matters so much comes down to how Google works.
How Google Uses Internal Links
Google crawls your website by following links. If a page on your site has no internal links pointing to it, Google can struggle to even find it in the first place. But beyond discovery, internal links also tell Google which pages on your site are the most important.
Think of it like votes. Every internal link pointing to a page is a vote of confidence for that page. The more pages linking to it, the more Google treats it as significant and worth ranking.
So if you have got ten blog articles and none of them link to your main service pages, Google has no real signal that those service pages matter. You are leaving ranking potential sitting on the table.
And the best part? This is completely within your control and genuinely easy to do.
Why Most Trade Business Websites Have an Internal Linking Problem
Most small trade and service business websites are set up the same way. There is a homepage, a handful of service pages, maybe some location pages, and a blog section with a few articles.
The problem is that these pages usually exist in isolation. The blog articles do not link to the service pages. The location pages do not link to the blog articles. Everything just sits there on its own, not reinforcing anything else on the site.
From an SEO perspective, this means your homepage might have decent authority because it gets some backlinks, but that authority is not flowing anywhere useful. Your service pages, the ones that actually drive phone calls and enquiries, are getting almost no internal link support.
Fixing this is one of the highest return SEO tasks you can do.
The Right Way to Think About Internal Linking
When I work through internal linking for a client, I am thinking about three types of pages and how they should connect to each other.
Blog and resource articles are your awareness pages. Someone searches “how much do security screens cost” and lands on your article. They are not ready to buy yet, they are just doing their research. If that article does not link through to your service pages, they read it and leave. Gone.
Service and product pages are your money pages. This is where someone decides whether to contact you. These pages need to be receiving links from your blog content and your location pages so Google understands they are the most important pages on your site.
Location pages sit in between. They target suburb and city level searches and they should be linking to your service pages and occasionally to relevant blog articles.
Every page on your site should be contributing to the authority of your most important service pages. When it is not, it is a wasted opportunity.
How to Track Your Internal Links
Before you start adding links, you need to understand what links already exist. You need a baseline.
I use a simple Google Sheet to record all internal links for my clients. Every tab in the sheet has five columns.
Target Page is the page being linked TO. The destination. The page receiving the link.
Referring Page is the page that contains the link. Where the link actually lives on your site.
Anchor Text is the exact clickable text used for the link. This is important for SEO because it tells Google what the destination page is about. More on this shortly.
Date Added is when the link was added. I leave this blank for existing links and fill it in as I add new ones. This is really useful for troubleshooting later.
Notes is for anything worth flagging, like “this page needs more links pointing to it to rank for this keyword.”
One important thing to note before we go further. When we talk about internal links here, we are only concerned with contextual links. These are links that sit within the actual body content of a specific page.
We are not tracking nav links or footer links. Those appear on every single page of your site automatically, so they carry very little individual relevance signal. What we care about are the links intentionally placed within the content of a specific page, pointing to another relevant page.
How to Get Your Starting Baseline With Screaming Frog and Claude
If you have a small site, you can go through your pages manually and record the links you find.
If your site has more than a handful of pages, there is a much faster way. You can use a free tool called Screaming Frog to download all your internal links at once, then use Claude AI to sort and organise everything into your spreadsheet format automatically.
Step 1: Crawl Your Site With Screaming Frog
Download Screaming Frog from screamingfrog.co.uk. The free version handles up to 500 pages which covers the vast majority of trade business websites.
Open it up, enter your website URL and hit Start. It will crawl your entire site in a minute or two.
Step 2: Export the Inlinks Data
Once the crawl is done, go to the Internal HTML view in the top panel. Press Cmd+A on Mac or Ctrl+A on Windows to select all pages. Then click the Inlinks tab at the bottom of the screen and hit Export. Save it as an xlsx file.
This file contains every internal link on your website, including where it comes from, where it goes, what the anchor text is, and the link path which tells us exactly where on the page the link sits.
Step 3: Use Claude to Sort and Organise the Data
Upload the xlsx file to Claude at claude.ai and paste in the prompt below. I will also link to it in the description of this article so you can copy it directly.
The prompt tells Claude to strip out all the nav and footer links, remove canonical tags and self-referential links, and output only the contextual body links organised into a clean table ready to paste into your Google Sheet. It also gives you a summary at the end showing how many links each service page is receiving, so you can immediately see which pages are well supported and which ones need more work.
The Claude Prompt
Copy the prompt below, fill in your website URL and business description at the top, then upload your Screaming Frog xlsx file to Claude and paste it in.
My website is: [INSERT YOUR WEBSITE URL]
Brief description of my business and what pages I have: [e.g. I am an electrician in Brisbane that also does air conditioning. I have service pages for split system, ducted, commercial air con and switchboard upgrades. I have suburb location pages and a blog.]
I am going to upload an xlsx file exported from Screaming Frog. The file contains the following columns: Type, From, To, Anchor Text, and Link Path. I need you to organise this into a structured internal linking tracker I can copy into Google Sheets.
Step 1 — Filter to contextual links only. Remove all of the following:
- Any row where Type = “HTML Canonical”
- Any row where From = To
- Any nav or header links — identify using the Link Path column. Any XPath pattern appearing on the majority of pages is a nav or header link. Remove these.
- Any footer links — identify using Link Path. Any repetitive footer XPath patterns across most pages. Remove these.
- Any link where Anchor Text is blank and it is clearly a logo or image link repeated across all pages
I only want contextual in-body links — links within the unique content of a specific page, not repeated site-wide in menus or footers.
Step 2 — One tab only: Services / Products
Include as Target Pages: the homepage and any core service or product pages. The homepage should be included because it targets broad commercial keywords just like a service page.
Exclude these page types entirely as Target Pages: about page, contact page, quote or enquiry page, location pages, blog articles, and any utility pages such as privacy policy or terms.
Step 3 — Output as a table with 5 columns:
- Column A — Target Page: the “To” URL, grouped so the URL only appears in the first row of each group, left blank in rows below
- Column B — Referring Page: the “From” URL
- Column C — Anchor Text: the exact anchor text of the link
- Column D — Date Added: leave blank for all existing links
- Column E — Notes: leave blank
Finally, give me a short summary of how many Target Pages were found and how many contextual inlinks each one has so I can see which service pages are well supported and which need more links pointing to them.
Once Claude outputs the table, copy it into the Services tab in your Google Sheet. That is your baseline done.
How to Add Internal Links the Right Way
Now that you know what already exists, it is time to start adding links.
The best places to add internal links are from your blog articles and location pages, pointing to your high priority service pages. You also want to be linking between related service pages where it makes sense.
Getting Your Anchor Text Right
Anchor text is the single biggest thing to get right when adding internal links. It is the clickable text of the link itself, and it is one of the signals Google uses to understand what the destination page is about.
Instead of writing “click here” or “find out more”, you want your anchor text to be descriptive and relevant to the page you are linking to. Something like “ForceField security screens” or “split system air conditioning installation” tells Google exactly what it is going to find on the other end of that link.
If you have not done any keyword research yet, it is worth doing that before you start adding links. Knowing your target keywords means you can write anchor text that actually helps your pages rank.
When choosing between exact match anchor text (the exact keyword you are targeting) and partial match (a variation or phrase that includes the keyword), partial match is usually the safer and more natural choice. Exact match can sometimes look a bit forced in the flow of the content.
Using Claude to Find Internal Linking Opportunities
If you want to speed up the process of finding where to add links, you can feed your keyword research document and your target page URLs into Claude and ask it to scan through your content and identify opportunities.
Claude can read the page, identify spots where a link would fit naturally, and even suggest slight rewrites to the surrounding text to make the anchor text work. This saves a lot of time when you are doing this across a whole site.
Record Everything as You Go
Every time you add a new internal link, record it in your Google Sheet straight away. Target page, referring page, anchor text, and today’s date in the Date Added column.
The date is particularly useful. If you check back in a month and your rankings have not moved or have gone backwards, you know exactly what changes you made and when. It makes troubleshooting much easier.
Making Internal Linking Part of Your Ongoing SEO Process
The real power of this system comes from doing it consistently over time, not just once.
Every time you publish a new blog article or add a new page to your site, take ten minutes to go through these questions before you hit publish.
Which service or product pages does this content relate to? Add links to them within the body of the content.
What existing pages on your site could be linking to this new page? Go back into a couple of them and add a link where it fits naturally.
Does this page have a clear path to a contact or enquiry page by the end of it?
Getting into this habit means your internal link profile improves steadily every time you add new content, without it ever becoming a big time consuming task.
Summary
Internal linking is one of those SEO tasks that takes a bit of setup to get right, but once you have the system in place it becomes a quick and straightforward part of how you manage your site.
Here is the process in short:
- Set up your Google Sheet with the five column structure
- Use Screaming Frog and the Claude prompt above to get your baseline of existing links
- Review your key pages and add contextual links pointing to your most important service pages, using partial match anchor text based on your keyword research
- Record every link you add with the date
- Make it part of your process every time you publish new content
This should only take you a few sessions to get your existing links recorded and the most obvious gaps filled. From there it just becomes a small part of your routine every time something new goes up on the site.
If you want to follow along visually, the video at the top of this page walks through every step. Make sure you subscribe to the channel for more tutorials like this one.