The Internal Linking Strategy Most Shopify Stores Are Ignoring

Internal linking is the closest thing to free SEO that exists, and almost nobody uses it properly. No budget, no technical skills required, no algorithm risk, just links from one page on your store to another, done with intention.

Here's the thing: every internal link you add passes authority, signals relevance, and helps Google understand how your site fits together. Yet most Shopify stores I've looked at have basically zero strategic internal linking beyond whatever's sitting in the main nav.

I've seen stores with hundreds of product pages, dozens of collections, and a stack of blog posts, and the only thing connecting any of it is the navigation menu. It's the equivalent of a library where every book has a shelf spot but nothing points to anything else. Google can technically find the pages, sure, but it has no way of knowing how they relate to each other or which ones actually matter.

Internal links do three jobs at once: they tell Google which pages are most important (more links in means more priority), which pages are related to each other (linked pages read as topically connected), and how to move through your site efficiently (good crawl paths mean better discovery and indexing).

Why internal links move the needle on rankings

Every page on your site carries a certain amount of "link equity," authority built up from backlinks, age, and engagement. When that page links out to another page on your site, it hands off a slice of that authority.

Your homepage usually holds the most authority, because it collects the most backlinks. Pages linked directly from the homepage get the biggest share of that passed-down authority. Pages sitting four or five clicks deep? They get almost nothing.

This is exactly why site architecture matters so much for SEO. If your best product or collection pages are buried under several layers of navigation, they simply aren't receiving enough authority to compete.

Internal linking is the fix. It creates direct routes from your high-authority pages straight to the pages you actually want to rank. A blog post that's picked up a few external backlinks, linking to a product page, passes that authority straight through. A homepage link to a seasonal collection does the same thing for that collection.

Start with an audit, not new links

Before you add anything, you need to know what's already there. Here's how I approach an internal linking audit:

Step 1: Crawl the site. A crawler tool does this for you (something like Screaming Frog works well for smaller catalogs; a paid site audit tool makes more sense once you're dealing with hundreds of URLs). Crawl the whole store.

Step 2: Check inlinks per page. This number tells you how many internal links point to each page. Sort from lowest to highest to spot orphaned or under-linked pages fast.

Step 3: Check crawl depth. How many clicks from the homepage does it take to reach each page? Anything past three clicks is at risk of being deprioritized.

Step 4: Find your authority hubs. Usually this is the homepage, your main collections, and whatever's in the nav, these are naturally your most-linked pages.

Step 5: Compare against your priorities. Are the pages you actually want to rank, best sellers, key collections, also among your most-linked pages? If not, that gap is exactly what you need to close.

Five ways to link, and where each one belongs

Product page to product page

Cross-linking related products inside the product description is the most natural form of internal linking, because it's genuinely useful to the shopper too.

Say you're on a moisturizer's product page, within the description you might write: "pairs well with our brightening serum, applied underneath." Simple, useful, and it does three things at once: it helps customers find complementary products (which nudges up average order value), it passes authority between pages, and it builds topical relevance signals for Google.

To do this on Shopify: open the product description in the rich text editor, highlight the phrase you want to link, hit the link icon, and drop in the internal URL. Keep the anchor text descriptive, it should tell the reader (and Google) what's on the other end.

A good target: every product page links to two or three related products from within the description copy.

Blog post to product page

This is probably the highest-leverage type of internal link you can build, because blog content tends to earn backlinks over time, and that borrowed authority flows straight through to whatever product pages you link from it.

If you're writing a post on building a morning skincare routine, link directly to the products you're talking about: "start with a gentle cleanser suited to sensitive skin" rather than a bare product name.

Anchor text matters here more than anywhere else. Skip "click here" or "this product," link the actual descriptive phrase someone might search for, because that's what Google uses to understand the destination page.

Target: two to five links from every blog post to relevant product or collection pages.

Blog post to blog post

Linking related posts to each other builds topical clusters, which is one of the clearest signals of expertise you can send Google.

If you've written about email marketing ROI, and you've also got a comparison post on email platforms, link them: "if you're still deciding which platform fits, here's a full comparison." It keeps people reading longer (good for engagement metrics) and knits your content into something that reads as authoritative on the topic as a whole.

Target: two or three links between related posts.

Collection page to blog post

Collection pages tend to be thin, just thumbnails and titles, not much actual text. Adding a short intro with links out to relevant educational content fixes both the thin-content problem and gives shoppers somewhere to go if they're not ready to buy yet.

On a serums collection page, for example, a 100-200 word intro might read: "not sure which serum fits your skin type? Here's our full breakdown by concern." That's genuine content on an otherwise sparse page, and it builds a bridge between commercial and informational pages.

Product page to collection page

Link products back to their parent collection with anchor text that actually describes the category, something like "see the rest of our clean skincare collection" rather than a bare "shop now." This reinforces the relationship in Google's eyes and helps it understand how your catalog is organized.

Getting anchor text right

Anchor text is what tells Google what's waiting on the other side of a link, so it's worth getting deliberate about.

Also don't over-optimize. If every single blog post links the exact same keyword phrase to the same product page, it starts to look manipulative rather than natural. Vary it, sometimes it's the full descriptive phrase, sometimes it's shorter, sometimes it's just "this product."

A simple test: read the sentence without the link formatting. Does the linked phrase still read naturally as part of the sentence? If yes, you're doing it right.

Making it a habit, not a project

Internal linking isn't something you do once and move on from, it needs to become part of how you publish. Here's roughly how I'd schedule it:

Every time you publish a new blog post, add two or three links to relevant product or collection pages, plus two or three links to related posts, before it goes live.

Every time you add a new product, go back to two or three related blog posts and drop in a contextual link to the new page, and cross-link it from a few related products too.

Once a month, spend half an hour reviewing your top five posts by traffic, check whether they still point to your current priority products, and update anything that's gone stale.

Once a quarter, run a full crawl audit. Flag any page with fewer than three internal links pointing to it, and go fix that by linking to it from relevant pages elsewhere on the site.

Working around Shopify's quirks

Shopify makes this easy in some ways and clunky in others, so it's worth knowing the limitations going in.

Collection pages ship thin by default, most themes support adding a description section, so use it. A couple hundred words with a few internal links does a lot of work there.

Product descriptions end up being your main real estate for contextual linking, since most themes don't include a sidebar or related-content widget.

Navigation counts too. Your main nav, footer, and any sidebar links are all internal links, and whatever sits in the main nav automatically gets linked from every single page on the site. That's powerful, so be intentional about what actually earns a spot there.

The blog editor itself is fairly basic. For anything more elaborate, link boxes, a "related posts" section, you're looking at adding some template code rather than relying on the default editor.

How to know it's working

A few things worth tracking once you've started building this out:

Crawl stats in Google Search Console (under Settings → Crawl Stats) show how many pages Google is crawling per day, this should trend upward as your internal linking improves.

The Index report in Search Console will show whether previously orphaned, un-indexed pages start getting picked up once they're linked from somewhere.

Keyword rankings for the pages you've targeted are worth watching too, though give it time, three to six months is realistic before the full effect shows up, since Google processes these changes gradually.

And if you re-run your crawl audit after doing this work, pages that used to be four or five clicks deep should now be reachable in two or three.