Introduction
Internal links are essential for discoverability and ranking. They help users and bots navigate your website’s pages, discover new ones, and understand its structure and hierarchy. They also signal the importance and value of pages to search engines. Creating an intelligent linking structure across enterprise websites is challenging. With SmartLink, Botify combines SEO expertise with extensive data to help enterprise websites optimize their internal linking to drive traffic and revenue.
SmartLink evaluates robot and user behavior against an analysis of your site’s structure to develop an optimized, intelligent linking strategy that maximizes chances for bots to discover all your content and for your key pages to drive traffic. The output is new links you can implement on your web pages through Botify or on your own. This primarily benefits enterprise websites with large catalogs and limited engineering resources.
🚀 SmartLink provides the following benefits through its high-value internal links:
Optimize pages to boost SEO metrics and drive revenue & website visits.
Discover opportunities to bring new traffic.
Give control to align with changing seasons and trends.
Improve your crawl budget catalog discovery.
Who is SmartLink For?
SmartLink is primarily for e-commerce websites, especially those with linking structures insufficient to drive organic traffic for the following page types:
Product Detail Pages (PDPs): Increase the visibility of your PDPs to search engines. SmartLink ensures PDPs are easily accessible from the home page within a few clicks while optimizing a group of PDPs to rank well for a broad range of keywords.
Product Listing Pages (PLPs): SmartLink provides the same increased visibility for PLPs as PDPs and emphasizes PLPs with high potential to boost their average position.
Requirements
In addition to providing Botify your configuration preferences, SmartLink requires the following data sources to be integrated with your Botify project:
Google Search Console: Keyword sampling must be >90% of impressions and
>97% of clicks, as shown in the RealKeywords Keywords Sampling section. Because of this requirement, we strongly recommend having the GSC Bulk Data Export Integration.CDN or web server logs: SmartLink requires at least 90 days of log data integrated with your Botify project.
Visits and revenue: SmartLink requires complete page view data and associated revenue from all channels, including your thirty-party analytics (Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Piano Analytics).
How it Works
Botify takes a holistic approach to understanding every aspect of your website. By leveraging user behavior data, server logs, and SEO performance data with your custom parameters for building links, SmartLink uses data science and automation to generate link recommendations.
The process of generating and implementing links with SmartLink includes the following steps:
Botify Analyzes Your Website
Our analysis starts with ingesting data from your web server log and third-party analytics. We then run a full crawl to build an internal link graph, collect performance metrics, and identify similar pages. We combine the crawl data with our bot and user behavior analysis to generate link recommendations. Read about all data collected in Botify crawls.
Defining Your Preferences
You can tailor the following parameters and assess SmartLink’s impact before implementing it on a large scale:
Use Botify filters to identify the categories or templates that precisely define the scope of URLs to optimize, ensuring your efforts are focused on your most strategic pages. The scope can be URLs or specific keywords to prioritize.
Define priorities for URLs to boost, aligning them with seasonal trends and market dynamics.
Set constraints between the source and destination, including country, language, and product category.
Control the number of links and how they appear within your pages.
Identify your preferred frequency for link updates.
Generating Links
SmartLink identifies source and destination URLs based on your defined preferences and data from crawls, logs, Google Search Console, and third-party analytics.
Validating Results
Once SmartLink has identified the linking opportunities, Botify provides:
A list of URLs and their anchors for your review.
An analysis to help you understand the effects of incorporating these links into your website structure, showing the projected evolution of key SEO metrics.
Deploying Links
Once validated, you can implement the link recommendations on your website using one of two methods:
Add a Botify JavaScript tag to your site to add the links seamlessly. If you use SpeedWorkers, the links will be shown to bots through SpeedWorkers directly and the JavaScript tag will show them to users.
Add the links independently using an exported file with the recommended links.
Measuring Results
Easily track your organic traffic evolution with Botify's post-launch reports of sitewide metrics. We update links according to the frequency that aligns with your evolving strategies and marketing campaigns.
While it will take a few days to weeks for search engine bots to crawl and index the updated internal links, you can use the following reports in Botify to evaluate the immediate impact after launching SmartLink:
Optimization success rate (if deployed through PageWorkers)
% of destinations that are indexable (should be at or close to 100%)
Updating Links
There are two methods for updating the links generated by SmartLink:
Refresh: Using the original preferences defined, this option regenerates links to add new URLs, remove some (e.g., 404s), and rebalance links based on updated KPIs.
Update: This method generates new links after changing preferences or adding another linking optimization (e.g., the original configuration was to boost PLPs, and you now want to add links to PDPs).
👉 While a solid linking strategy is essential to your site’s health, improving internal linking will not solve all your SEO issues. You may need to resolve other factors impacting your site’s SEO first, such as a crawl budget issue (e.g., Google is crawling randomly your website).
FAQs
Can I see the recommended links before implementing them?
Can I see the recommended links before implementing them?
Yes, you are in total control of all recommended links. We’ll provide you with a pre-launch report demonstrating the potential impact if links were to be implemented.
What if I want to create links from source to destination only in the same language?
What if I want to create links from source to destination only in the same language?
We define constraints to configure specific fields requiring the same value for source and destination.
How does SmartLink determine anchor text?
How does SmartLink determine anchor text?
Anchor text relies on dimensions extracted during the crawl (e.g., product name, H1 tag).
Our CMS handles internal linking. How is SmartLink better?
Our CMS handles internal linking. How is SmartLink better?
SmartLink generates the right links for your business based on your preferences, the extensive site data we have collected in your Botify project, and our machine-learning-backed methodology.