Introducing SmartLink: Automated Internal Linking for Improved Discoverability & Rankings

Internal linking is a critical strategy for improving your website’s visibility and performance in both traditional and AI search. But for large, complex websites, like those in e-commerce, optimizing your linking structure at scale can seem like an insurmountable challenge. 

Your brand’s strategy can’t be focused on simply creating links — it has to be about placing the right links in the right places, and linking mindfully to make it easier for both consumers and bots to find your priority pages faster. As we move closer to a future where AI agents navigate to and through your site to make purchases on behalf of consumers, conversions will only become more dependent on optimizing your site for bots as well as people.

Let’s break down why internal linking is so important and how an automated and better optimized approach leads to improved results for your large website in both the SERPs and AI search.

The problem: Improper internal linking means lost traffic & conversion opportunities

Search engine and AI bots only have so much time they can spend crawling your website, and they rely heavily on internal linking to guide that crawling. 

Without an optimized linking structure, bots can have difficulty understanding how pages relate to each other and waste their limited crawl budget on low-value pages, which can lead to incomplete crawls. Improperly linked pages might not be discovered at all and thus not indexed, or they might not be ranked as highly as they deserve. This means missed opportunities for increased traffic and conversions.

Internal linking at scale becomes a significant challenge for websites that contain hundreds of thousands of pages. Product and category pages often hold the highest commercial intent, but if they aren’t prioritized in the structure of your website, they’ll be hidden from search engines or underperform in terms of visibility. Managing and prioritizing product detail pages (PDPs) and category pages at scale can be overwhelming, and the application and maintenance of linking structures can take significant resources. 

As a result, many enterprise-level websites have internal linking strategies that do more harm than good. 

What optimized internal linking structures can do for your brand

A well-thought-out internal linking strategy can drive higher rankings and boost visibility in both traditional and AI search by making sure bots, agents, and consumers can easily find and navigate your highest-value pages:

1. Better crawlability and use of crawl budget: Search engines like Google and Bing rely on internal links to discover pages. If your internal linking is well-structured to point to priority pages, crawlers will have an easier time finding and indexing your most important content.
   
   
2. AI bot optimization: While search engine bots have extensive crawl capabilities, they aren’t the only crawlers navigating your website: there are several kinds of AI bots that you should consider too. AI bots that gather information to train large language models (LLMs) have more limited crawling capabilities, so if your brand cares about optimizing for LLMs and AI models, a well-structured internal linking strategy is a good place to start.
   
   Additionally, AI bots that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to answer questions better in real-time have limited bandwidth to explore your site. They need to find the best answers quickly to give consumers the ideal AI answer experience. If you want your products and most up-to-date content to show up in AI search, you’ll benefit from a clear internal linking structure.
   
   
3. Improved page indexation and discoverability: When your most important pages are more likely to be crawled and indexed, they’ll have a higher chance of being ranked well in search engine results, encouraging more clicks and conversions. Some AI platforms use crawler bots to build their own search indexes, and they also rely on results from Google and Bing. Better internal linking benefits you everywhere consumers search.
   
   
4. Improved authority for linked pages: Any pages that a highly trustworthy or authoritative page links to receive higher authority by association. The more qualitative or authoritative links that point to a specific page, the better that page will rank, and the more visible it will be to consumers.

The solution: Improving internal linking through automation

URLs are often generated automatically when a page is created, but a CMS is not designed to address the complexity of internal linking at scale, and can’t automatically link those URLs strategically to other related pages. Many times, there won’t be a single responsible party for managing this problem, which leads to a lack of monitoring that will certainly impact results.

Thus, small websites rely on manual internal linking, but for large-scale e-commerce websites, that method is simply impractical. Some specialized linking solutions are available, but they tend to focus primarily on UX aspects rather than providing comprehensive SEO recommendations and scalable solutions. Some tools might help with implementing changes, but they often lack the necessary data to make the best decisions on which links should be prioritized.

Implementing automatic internal linking strategies with SmartLink

Internal linking doesn’t have to be a complicated, manual task. That’s why we developed SmartLink, part of Botify Activation, which uses data science algorithms to automatically optimize your internal linking structure based on a 360-degree view of your website, saving you time and effort while ensuring your site is set up for better visibility while keeping you in control.

SmartLink combines a variety of your website’s first-party data, including server logs, Google Search Console (GSC) data, user analytics, and our full website crawls, to build a complete picture of how your site is structured: 

• Step 1: Ingest your first-party data into Botify and launch a Botify site crawl.
• Step 2: You can specify preferences for the number of links per page, the source and destination pages of the links, and other brand-specific guidelines, like linking between country-specific domains. 
• Step 3: SmartLink analyzes all this website and preference data and recommends the right set of internal links for your brand, highlighting areas of your site that need more attention (and which areas don’t). This makes it easy for your team to focus on solving problems quickly and efficiently. 
• Step 4: You can easily deploy the recommendations on your own by generating a CSV file, or immediately and automatically through PageWorkers.

Unlike many other solutions, which only consider UX, SmartLink is designed with both search engines and consumers in mind:

1. Comprehensive data: While other solutions might rely on basic UX or user behavior data, SmartLink pulls from multiple sources within Botify Analytics: bot behavior logs, user analytics, Google Search Console data, and detailed website crawls. This gives SmartLink the most comprehensive view of your website, allowing it to make the most effective linking recommendations for your brand’s needs. 
2. Tailored recommendations: Instead of just applying a generic link-building approach, SmartLink provides recommendations based on your website's unique needs. It factors in business rules, like how many links to place per page or where to send traffic (e.g. to product pages or category pages). These tailored recommendations ensure that your internal links support both website health and user experience.
3. Scalable and easy to deploy: SmartLink works within your existing system. You can deploy the recommended links using a simple JavaScript tag or receive a CSV to implement them manually. No need for additional products.
4. Real-time optimization: SmartLink doesn’t stop after initial implementation. Botify’s continuous website monitoring provides real-time recommendations and updates, and you can evolve your internal links with SmartLink as your business needs shift. This means your internal linking strategy can evolve as your site grows and changes.

Take control of your internal linking with SmartLink

Large websites don’t have to make do with messy internal linking structures that don’t highlight your priority pages well enough to rank. Automation can help you achieve better discoverability for consumers, agents, and bots, in turn leading to increased visibility on the SERPs. 

With SmartLink’s data-driven internal linking solution, you can create a scaled linking structure leveraging your own data, making it easier for search engines to understand and rank your most important pages.

If you’re ready to make your website more discoverable and improve your rankings, book a demo today to see if SmartLink is the solution that can get you there.