Taking the Fast Lane to Traffic Growth

The Hurdle: efficient internal linking

“Content is king”— an ancient adage that still holds today. But without proper internal linking to connect its parts, you’re limiting its reign and the full potential of your website.

Since 2016, Steve Hutt has been on an incredible journey with eCommerce Fastlane, his brainchild dedicated to helping Shopify businesses thrive. By 2024, Steve and his team have published over 14,000 articles (equivalent to writing a new post every single day for more than 38 years). 

However, with a treasure trove of content at their disposal, eCommerce Fastlane is facing new challenges:

Content Visibility Issues

Some of their older articles suffer from high click-depth, meaning they are buried under a mountain of new content, making it challenging for readers to discover them.

Inadequate Internal Linking

The vast amount of content means that some valuable internal links get overlooked, resulting in missed opportunities to connect related content and improve accessibility.

Poor Website Navigation

The website’s overall internal linking structure has become like a tangled ball of yarn. It’s not as easy for visitors to find their way around as it used to be.

With over 14,000 articles, adding internal links manually would be too demanding and time-consuming.

eCommerce Fastlane needed a smart, effective, and efficient way to interconnect all its website content, thereby scaling the impact of its content marketing efforts and ensuring readers can easily navigate the website.

The Solution: AI-powered internal link recommendations

To address these challenges, Steve Hutt turned to LinkStorm, an internal linking tool that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to find internal link opportunities automatically. LinkStorm found 43,305 internal link opportunities on eCommerce Fastlane’s website.

This allowed Steve and his team to automate the internal linking process while maintaining complete control over which link suggestions get accepted or rejected.

Building the internal links with LinkStorm only took 2 hours, a task normally requiring at least several weeks (or months) to complete.

A 6-week observation period from June 16 to July 31 was allotted before results were analyzed using Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

The Outcome: Boosted organic performance and stronger user engagement

Expanded user base

Effective internal linking increased eCommerce Fastlane’s number of users from 45K to 64K during the six weeks—an almost 20K increase versus the prior six weeks. 

Similar to backlinks, internal links can also distribute link juice, improving the SERP performance of target pages. Moreover, internal links with highly descriptive anchors also increase the relevance of linked pages for those keywords. 

The combination of enhanced relevance and improved SERP ranking resulted in better search visibility and, by extension, user count.

Better website navigatibility

Intuitive internal links encouraged users to explore other web pages on eCommerce Fastlane’s website, reaching a staggering 100K page views, a 19.9% increase compared to six weeks prior. 

Event count, or user engagement within the website, also ballooned by 24.3% from 295K to 368K, demonstrating a positive correlation between internal links and user experience.

The addition of internal links resulted in more interactions via link clicks and improved site-wide accessibility for seamless exploration.

Increased user activity

With more links to explore, eCommerce Fastlane found a boost in user activity across various timeframes. 

During the last 30 days of the report range, the number of daily active users reached 40K, a 27.3% increase compared to the previous 30-day period. 

This boost in user activity stayed consistent across different report ranges.

Improved search performance

Within 45 days of implementing the new internal links from LinkStorm, eCommerce Fastlane witnessed a dramatic surge in its search engine performance.

From June 16 to July 31, they observed 70.1 K clicks, a far cry from the prior six weeks, when there were only 39.5K clicks. 

Moreover, the impression count for the same report range also saw a substantial rise from 4.11 million to a remarkable 5.85 million, equivalent to 42.4% growth.

Despite the seasonal drop, eCommerce Fastlane enjoys much higher traffic than the previous period, showing that internal links can boost a website’s overall search performance.

More efficient resource management

As the adage goes, “Time is money.” It’s not simply because time is as valuable as money but because our time can be spent for income-generating means.

LinkStorm aims to expedite the internal linking process, helping users refocus their time and attention on growing their revenue streams.

By dedicating only a little over two hours to using LinkStorm, eCommerce Fastlane can better use its resources for other, more critical tasks.

There’s More To Internal Links Than Just Navigation

Internal links are a vital pillar of any holistic SEO strategy. Their impact goes beyond simply helping website visitors navigate the deep ends of a website.

Effectively building internal links can also boost target pages’ SERP ranking and elevate the site’s overall SEO performance.

With LinkStorm, gaining intuitive site-wide internal links is as easy as clicking a button.