You’ve just created a brilliant blog post. It positions your brand as a thought leader in your industry, helps your customers solve a problem, and leads to a relevant call-to-action. The title is attention-grabbing and clear. There’s not a single typo. But you forgot something. You didn’t interlink this brilliant blog post to any of your other articles.
It’s a digital island on your website, isolated from the mainland of all the other content your visitors could’ve explored. It’s a one-hit wonder, and no one will know that the rest of your album is great, too.
Remembering to always interlink your webpages seems like a minor detail, but neglecting this step is actually a big mistake. It can significantly impact the success of your content marketing efforts. But it’s a mistake a lot of marketers make.
Here are four reasons you should make sure every piece of content you create includes relevant links to several others.
1. Increase the Lifespan of Your Content
When marketers think of their audience, they often picture someone who’s been following their brand for a long time. These people have seen every piece of content, and they remember what you’ve talked about before. But that’s not how most readers experience your blog, newsletter, and other content channels. In fact, most of your audience probably misses more content than they see.
Every time you link to an old post in a relevant way, it introduces that old content to new readers. And even if someone has seen the content before, they may want a refresher when you mention the topic again. It’s up to them if they want to click that link to get more context or not.
If you don’t link to your other content and it’s not bringing in traffic on its own, over time, these old posts turn your website into a ghost town, littering your domain with URLs that get zero visitors. Linking to those posts in ways that encourage people to explore them helps you get more out of the work you’ve already done, because viewers will continue trickling in over time.
2. Keep Visitors on Your Website for Longer
Generally speaking, the more pages someone visits on your site, the longer they’re going to be there. And that gives you more time to help them get acquainted with your brand, introduce them to your products or services, make a meaningful impression, and hopefully convert them.
When you mention a topic you’ve previously addressed, linking to that content provides a natural offramp for someone to keep learning about the things that interest them—with you as their guide.
3. Showcase Your Expertise
The more topics you demonstrate thought leadership about or clearly explain, the more you position your brand as an industry expert. As people read your content, they discover that your website is a rich resource they can trust when they want to know about concepts that overlap with what you do.
You can also show your readers the breadth of understanding you have about their problems, goals, and aspirations. If you’re marketing to church leaders, for example, you want them to feel confident that you understand their jobs or roles well enough to support them. Having a resource you can link to as you mention their challenges or objectives helps reinforce that your brand understands their world.
4. Create More Pathways Through Your Funnel
Ideally, every piece of content should have a job to do. It should lead people deeper into your content ecosystem, driving them to an email list, a lead magnet, a free trial, or even a conversation with sales.
Most brands aspire to have some sort of sales funnel, where content gradually drives your audience to take more valuable actions. But people don’t have to take a linear path through your funnel. When you interlink your content, you give people more opportunities to explore your top of funnel (ToFu), middle of funnel (MoFu), and bottom of funnel (BoFu) pages, thereby creating more natural pathways to your most valuable actions.
Interlink Your Content
You don’t have to shoehorn links into every blog post or email. And if there’s a call-to-action you really want people to take, you probably don’t want your page to be littered with other links. But any time your content overlaps in relevant ways, that’s a natural opportunity to give your readers more—all while increasing the value of your other content.