Internal linking strategy audit
What this page covers
Internal linking strategy audit
Review your internal linking strategy to find weak paths, orphan or near-orphan pages, and gaps between hubs, Q&A content, and conversion pages.
Use the audit to move from one-off linking decisions to a maintainable hub-and-leaf pattern that makes key topic and offer relationships easier to follow.
In brief
- Identify product, industry, location, or offer pages that may receive too little internal authority from the rest of the site.
- Spot orphan or near-orphan pages where limited visibility, traffic, or engagement may point to weak discoverability.
- Strengthen paths from informational hubs and Q&A pages to core conversion actions with a pattern that can scale as content grows.
What to do
A useful internal linking strategy audit starts with the site structure: hubs, leaf pages, and the paths between them. Radar benchmark data frames this as an architecture question by showing page counts, hub counts, leaf counts, leaf-to-hub ratios, and scores.
For large sites, the audit should focus on where relationships are missing or weak. One professional services benchmark shows pnc.com with 5,299 pages, 21 hubs, 5,277 leaf pages, and an 86/A score. A SaaS and platform benchmark shows splunk.com with 10,093 pages, 102 hubs, 9,990 leaf pages, and a 100/A score.
The practical output is a cleaner internal linking pattern: stronger connections from hubs to key leaf pages, clearer routes from informational content to conversion pages, and a structure that can be maintained as new content is added.
What to keep in mind
This audit is most useful when a site already has enough content for internal links to matter, such as hubs, Q&A pages, product pages, industry pages, location pages, or other conversion-focused pages.
The work should stay grounded in observable issues: weak internal links, orphan or near-orphan pages, missing paths between hubs and conversion pages, and internal linking rules that are hard to maintain.
For AI-powered search, the concern is not only whether a page exists. The site also needs to make relationships between key topics and offers visible through clear internal paths.