How to decide which ecommerce categories deserve more internal links

Common internal linking advice for ecommerce retailers starts with a simple premise: send more links to important pages. The harder question is deciding what “important” means.

A shoe retailer may have hundreds of category and subcategory pages competing for visibility, while merchandising, search demand, inventory, seasonality, and paid search create competing priorities.

That tension often reflects a deeper problem: site architecture built around priorities that may no longer match the business. Internal linking is an allocation problem. Not every category deserves more support, and not every internal link has equal value.

That fits a broader SEO principle Adam Heitzman wrote about earlier this year: fixing or optimizing everything is rarely the best use of resources. The work with the greatest business impact has to come first.

How do you distribute limited internal authority and attention across your site? Start by defining which categories matter most to the business, then identify where your site architecture fails to reflect those priorities.

Identify categories that qualify for support

Search Engine Land’s internal linking guide provides a starting point. It advises retailers to look at pages with a lot of internal links, identify those buried too deep in the site, and find strong, relevant pages that could help support them.

Site architecture should follow the same ideas: important pages should be easy for visitors and search engines to locate. When a page is buried or few other pages link to it, it’s more likely to be overlooked.

The primary questions are importance and allocation:

• What categories deserve that level of support right now?

Business importance v. site importance

Google tells us that it uses the relationships established by internal links to understand an ecommerce site. These include details such as how many links are necessary to reach a page and how many internal links point to it. This allows Google to infer the page’s importance within the site.

That explanation provides a useful comparison: What does your business consider important versus what does your site demonstrate as important? They’re not often one and the same.

This logic also applies to technical SEO more broadly. Stephanie Wallace addressed this, explaining that priorities should be set according to business impact instead of simply working through whatever a tool or audit says is most urgent.

Let’s return to the shoe retailer. They’ve made “hiking boots” a growth category. Search demand is strong, they have substantial inventory and options, the margins on these items are great, and they’ve allotted marketing funds toward it.

Visit their site, and it takes three clicks from the homepage to reach “hiking boots.” Even worse, there are few links or pieces of editorial content related to “hiking boots,” and the category isn’t well represented outside its lone branch in the site’s navigation.

Look at “sneakers,” though, and there are a lot of links from navigation, editorial content linked to the category, a few seasonal pages, and years of development pointing toward it.

Yesterday’s site importance may have run over today’s business importance. As Carolyn Shelby explained recently, navigation and internal linking problems often accumulate gradually as sites change around them. It’s not uncommon, but it’s a problem that has to be identified and amended.

Not all categories merit promotion

A pre-existing URL doesn’t automatically qualify for a share of internal links. You might’ve also created a large number of internal links through something Google describes as “faceted navigation” by giving visitors a lot of leeway in their searches.

For example, that shoe retailer gives visitors the option to sort by color group, size, brand, material, price, and a variety of other combinations. But Google warns that this slows discovery of more useful content.

Search Engine Land’s ecommerce SEO guide makes the same distinction in practical terms, looking at which category pages and filtered pages deserve search visibility. The takeaway: just because a page exists doesn’t mean it deserves support. Bharath Ravishankar took this idea further, arguing that every URL should earn its place within the site, with enough search distinction, inventory, and structural support to justify it.

Before adding a link, ask whether the category is worthy of promotion:

• Does it matter to the business?
• Is there adequate inventory to support traffic?
• Does it have search opportunity?
• More significantly, is it a stable enough category that your ecommerce site expects it to matter beyond a short promotional period or temporary surge of interest?

If the answer is no, throwing more internal linking support at that URL won’t turn it into a better opportunity. If the answer is yes, move onward.

Is there an internal linking issue?

Let’s look at this through a “show” rather than a “tell” perspective. Your company identifies a category as important. Are you showing it? In other words, does architecture show importance? If a category is high in navigation, has links from relevant pages, and is easy for both shoppers and engines to find, adding links may not be the best move. You’ve already shown it to be important.

Instead, look for your “mismatches” — points where you “tell” the search engines the wrong story. For example, how deep in the site is the category you’ve identified as important? How many useful links point toward it? Are the links from pages that relate to the category?

Evaluating whether your important categories are receiving less support than their role in the business suggests is simple, but telling. It gives you a shortlist of categories to begin working on.

Choose the pages that should supply links

Once you’ve identified an under-supported category, resist the urge to add links all over the place. It may seem like the quickest route, but it may yield nothing. The process must begin with relevance. Take the time to find which pages already have a sensible link or relationship with the category.

Think of “parent” categories. Let’s return to the shoe retailer — their hiking boot category may have come from the broader “boots” category. Many pages within the broader boots category, especially guides and editorial content, make great candidates for supplying support to hiking boots.

Consider links from buying guides, another close category, or any editorial content your site features that becomes a natural lead in that direction. For example, “The Five Best Hikes in…” is a good alignment with the hiking boots category.

Again, don’t create links and add content to the site. You’re looking at the strength of the pages you will link. A page that already exists, is easy to find, and is well connected throughout the site is more useful than a page that is or will remain buried before earning its own relevance.

The final question to ask about linked pages is: Will this link make sense to a visitor?

If someone reading the page would rationally want to continue over to the category linked, you’ve likely found a useful internal link. If the connection will be created only because those responsible for SEO desire another link, keep looking.

Make the smallest useful change

It’s important to keep scale in mind, too. A category newly identified as important doesn’t automatically qualify for a navigational overhaul. Often, the answer is a few links from stronger, relevant pages.

In our shoe example, hiking boots may not need a new spot in the main navigation. As already suggested, a stronger link from “boots,” a guide to picking the right soles, or an editorial page about hiking in a certain terrain might be enough to start correcting an earlier mismatch. Physically moving the category a spot or two higher in the site’s structure may not be the strongest choice.

The point: don’t treat every priority adjustment as a reason to restructure the site. Let links do some of the heaviest lifting.

The key reason for smaller changes? Starting with the smallest change that corrects a mismatch makes the outcome easier to evaluate.

Did the category respond?

Your internal linking strategy doesn’t end with confirmation that new links are in effect. The real value comes from watching what happens to the category chosen.

Let’s look at hiking boots one last time. If they begin earning more impressions or traffic, or if their sales increase after the changes, you have useful evidence that your site is now showing them as a priority for the business. You’ve undone the mismatch and aligned the site architecture to the business priority.

Avoid looking at one internal link as having caused everything that followed, though. Ecommerce sites change constantly. Inventory is always shifting, sales begin or end, competitors make moves, and search results always change.

What you’re looking for is “direction.” If a priority category was under-supported, your small steps strengthened its position within the site. Visibility and performance then began to move in your desired direction. If the new linking strategy yielded no change, it’s also crucial information: It’s time to reassess.

But the adage of “more links are not automatically better links” always remains.

Keep decisions simple

As you will have guessed, internal linking can quickly become complicated. Just remember that deciding where to begin is the opposite and doesn’t have to be complicated at all.

Just begin with what your business says is important — then identify the categories. Look at what your site is showing and telling. Do they align? If an important category is buried, supported weakly, or unconnected to pages that should naturally lead to it, there’s your mismatch.

But don’t overrespond. Keep every action proportional, look for your strongest relevant pages to help, and make the smallest useful changes. Then, watch the outcomes.

Our shoe seller doesn’t need to turn the entire site into “hiking boot central” to achieve goals. It just needs to stop telling visitors and search engines that sneakers are the category that matters the most. The job is to make sure yesterday’s site structure isn’t deciding tomorrow’s priorities and to use internal linking to tell the story the business wants to tell.