We include this in every programme and it is the one service on our list that you could run yourself in a fortnight. That is not modesty — it is the reason it is worth writing about. Almost every SaaS site we audit is sitting on accumulated authority that never reaches the pages the whole programme exists to move.
The problem in one paragraph
Links arrive somewhere. In most SaaS companies they arrive at blog posts, because blog posts are what people cite. The pages that generate revenue — category pages, solution pages, comparison pages — receive almost none directly, because nobody voluntarily links to a page designed to sell them something.
Internal links are how authority travels from the first group to the second. If the path is missing, weak or interrupted, you have paid to accumulate something that stays where it landed.
Where it goes wrong
The orphaned commercial page
A category page linked only from the main navigation. It receives whatever the homepage passes and nothing else. Meanwhile forty blog posts on adjacent topics link to each other and to nothing commercial.
The blog silo
Blog posts link to blog posts. Product pages link to product pages. The two sections of the site barely touch, usually because they were built by different teams at different times.
The dilution problem
A page with 180 outbound internal links passes very little through any one of them. Mega-menus, sprawling footers and "related posts" widgets that surface twelve items all contribute to this.
The deep page nobody can reach
Template galleries and integration directories where individual items sit four or five clicks from the homepage with no other route in. These are frequently the highest-converting pages on a PLG site and structurally the least reachable.
Anchor text that says nothing
"Click here", "learn more", "read this". Internal anchor text is one of the few relevance signals you fully control, and most sites waste it entirely.
The two-hour version of this audit
Export two lists and compare them.
List A: your top thirty pages by referring domains.
List B: your top thirty pages by revenue, signups or demo requests.
In most SaaS companies the overlap is under a third. Every page in A that does not link to a relevant page in B is authority sitting still, and each of those is a five-minute fix.
The audit, properly
Step 1 — Map where authority actually is
Crawl the site. Pull referring domains per URL. Sort descending. This is your authority inventory, and it is usually more concentrated than people expect: often five to ten pages hold the majority of it.
Step 2 — Identify the destination pages
Which pages need to rank. Be strict — this is a list of ten to twenty URLs, not a hundred. Category pages, key solution pages, the two or three comparison pages that matter, and in a PLG company the free tools and template hubs.
Step 3 — Map the paths that exist
For each destination page, count internal links pointing at it and note where they come from. Most crawlers will produce this directly.
| Internal links to a commercial page | Read as |
|---|---|
| 1–3 (navigation only) | Orphaned — the common finding |
| 4–10 | Thin |
| 10–30 from relevant content | Healthy |
| 50+ mostly from templates | Volume without meaning |
Step 4 — Find the missing edges
Cross-reference the authority inventory against the destination list. Every high-authority page that could contextually link to a destination page and does not is a missing edge.
"Contextually" is doing real work in that sentence. The link must make sense to a reader — an internal link inserted only for authority flow reads exactly like one and is worth less than one placed properly.
Step 5 — Fix anchor text on the way
While editing, replace generic anchors with descriptive ones. Internal anchors do not carry the over-optimisation risk external ones do, so being specific is straightforward — though "click here" repeated across a site is still a wasted signal rather than a dangerous one.
What good architecture looks like
Three principles, in order of importance.
Authority flows toward money. Every substantial content page should have at least one contextual route to a commercial page. Not a banner — a sentence.
Related content clusters. Pages on the same topic link to each other, with the most commercially important page in the cluster receiving the most internal links.
Nothing important is more than three clicks from the homepage. If a high-converting template page sits five clicks deep, add a hub page. This is frequently the single highest-return change available on a PLG site.
Typical results
Internal linking work produces smaller effects than acquisition and produces them faster, because no third party is involved and the pages are already crawled.
What we generally see: movement within two to six weeks on pages that were genuinely orphaned, and very little on pages that were already well-linked. The variance is high and depends almost entirely on how bad the starting position was.
The largest single improvement we have seen from this work came from adding fourteen contextual links to a category page that had been reachable only from the navigation for three years. No acquisition, no budget — someone simply looked.
It is worth being honest about the ceiling, though. Internal linking redistributes authority; it does not create any. A site with nineteen referring domains and perfect architecture still has nineteen referring domains. This work makes acquisition worth more — it does not replace it.
Doing it continuously
An audit is a one-off; the habit is what compounds.
- Every new content page links to at least one commercial page, contextually, before it publishes.
- Every acquired external link triggers a check: does the page it landed on route authority onward?
- Quarterly orphan sweep. New pages get published and forgotten; this catches them.
- Before any migration, export every internally linked URL and map redirects. Self-inflicted breakage during migrations destroys more accumulated authority than editorial removal does.
Why we include it
Partly because it makes everything else in a programme work harder — acquiring a link to a page that routes nothing onward wastes most of what was bought.
And partly because it is the honest first recommendation. When a company arrives asking for link building and the audit shows an orphaned category page, the correct advice is to spend two weeks fixing that before spending anything on acquisition. It is a smaller invoice and it is the right sequence.