Internal linking by funnel stage

Internal linking by funnel stage means planning your links so they follow the reader's progress: the hub lists articles by stage, each TOFU (top of funnel) article points to a MOFU (middle of funnel) comparison, each MOFU article points to a BOFU (bottom of funnel) page or the service page, and the money page links back into the guide. Every link uses descriptive anchor text that tells the reader what they'll get.

The goal is practical. A reader who lands on any page should find the next useful step, and every page you care about should be reachable from at least one other page. Google's own rule is simple: "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site." This article shows how to apply that to a guide organized by stage, and how to audit what you already have.

The four link directions in a funnel guide

Most internal linking advice treats all links the same. In a guide built by stage, each link has a job, and you can check whether each job is done.

Add a fifth, softer direction: related lists that cross stages. A reader on a cost article may want a definition, and a reader on a definition may already be ready to book. How to design those paths, and how to test them, is in designing read-next paths.

Hub to articles: link by stage, in reading order

The hub is the one page that links to every article in the guide. List articles in the order a newcomer would read them, grouped by stage. Readers understand labels like Learn, Compare and Decide better than TOFU, MOFU and BOFU. The GEO and AEO Guide on this site uses Learn, Do and Decide.

A few practical rules:

• Use each article's real title, or a short version of it, as the anchor text.
• Add a one-line description under each link so readers can choose without clicking around.
• Put the hub itself where people can find it: a menu item, a footer link or a card on related service pages. A hub with no links pointing to it is an orphan, however many links it contains.
• When a guide grows past one screen of links, split it into stage sections or sub-hubs rather than one long list.

The difference between a pillar, a hub and a cluster, and when one site needs several hubs, is covered in pillar pages, hubs and clusters explained.

Article to article: hand the reader to the next stage

Every article should end with one clear "next" link. It goes forward one stage:

• A TOFU article on "what is dry needling" (a hypothetical clinic example) links to a MOFU comparison such as "dry needling vs massage."
• That MOFU article links to a BOFU page, such as "what happens at your first visit," or straight to the service page.
• The BOFU page links to the booking or contact form.

In-body links add to this. Link where a term or option is mentioned and a sibling article explains it, and link each sibling once. Keep in-body links to pages that really help at that point in the text. A paragraph with several links in a row is harder to read, and Google advises: "Don't chain up links next to each other."

Avoid linking two articles that answer the same question. If you find yourself writing "for more on this, see" to a page that covers the identical topic, you probably have two pages competing, and one should be merged into the other. How to map every article to a money page without cannibalization explains how to spot and fix that.

Article to money page, and money page back to the guide

Each article in a funnel guide is assigned to one money page, the service, product or booking page that turns a reader into a lead or a sale. The article should link to that page in the body, where the service is relevant, and in its call to action. TOFU articles can link more softly ("how we treat this") than BOFU articles ("book an assessment").

The reverse link is the one most often missed. When a new guide launches, the relevant service pages should link into it, and the guide should link back to them. A service page can carry a short resources block with a few links to the guide's most useful MOFU and BOFU articles, such as cost and comparison pages. That helps buyers who arrive at the service page too early, and it makes the guide reachable from pages that already get visits. On our builds, this is part of launch: links from the relevant service pages into the guide, links from the guide back to them, and a hub card or a menu or footer link.

Anchor text that follows Google's guidance

Google's link best practices describe good anchor text this way: "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to." It also warns against generic anchors such as "website" or "article," and against overly long anchors, and it says to "resist the urge to cram every keyword," noting that keyword stuffing violates its spam policies.

Vary anchors naturally. The same target can be linked as "cost of physical therapy" on one page and "what a course of treatment costs" on another. What matters is that each one is accurate. For image links, Google uses the image's alt text as the anchor, so write alt text that describes the destination too.

How many links per page?

There is no correct number. Google says: "There's no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain. However, if you think it's too much, then it probably is." Any number you see in an agency's process, including ours, is a house practice for consistency, not a ranking rule.

A useful test is the reader's view. Each link should be something a reader at that point might reasonably want. One "next" link, a short related list, the money page and a handful of in-body links to siblings is usually enough for an article. A hub needs more because its job is to list everything. If you're adding links mainly to give a page "more links," stop.

Avoiding orphan pages

An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it. Search engines may still find it through a sitemap, but readers can't reach it from your site, and Google treats links as a signal: "Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl."

Orphans in funnel guides usually come from four places:

1. Articles published after the hub was last updated, so the hub never lists them.
2. Pages that were linked only from a homepage carousel or "latest posts" widget that has since moved on.
3. BOFU pages, such as cost or booking guides, that were built for ads and never linked from the guide.
4. Pages whose only links come from JavaScript elements that don't render a real a element with an href.

Fix them by adding each page to the hub, linking it from at least one sibling and, where it supports a service, from that service page.

How to audit internal links by stage

You can audit a guide with a spreadsheet and a site crawler. Search Console helps, but has limits: its Links report "isn't a comprehensive list of every link on your site" and "shows a sample of internal and external links," with tables limited to 1,000 rows.

1. List every page in the guide with its stage and the money page it supports. If you don't have this yet, start with a funnel content gap analysis.
2. Crawl the site and export, for each page, the internal links pointing to it and the links going out from it.
3. Flag any page with no incoming links from the guide or the hub.
4. Check each article's "next" link: does a TOFU page point to a MOFU page, and a MOFU page to a BOFU page or the money page?
5. Check each money page: does it link back into the guide?
6. Scan anchors for "click here," "read more" and keyword-stuffed text, and rewrite them.
7. Look for pairs of articles that link to each other with near-identical anchors. They may be answering the same question.

After fixes, you can see whether readers follow the paths with a GA4 path exploration, which is covered in the read-next article. The older guide to building topic clusters with internal links covers cluster structure in more depth, and internal linking strategies for GEO looks at links from the AI search side.

Conclusion

Internal linking by stage is not about link volume. It is four simple jobs done on every page: the hub lists by stage, each article hands the reader forward, each article reaches its money page, and each money page links back into the guide, all with anchors that say where the link goes. To see how linking fits the whole method, read how we build funnel content for SEO, AEO and GEO, and if you'd like help planning the architecture, see our content marketing services. More guides are in our GEO and AEO Guide.

Frequently asked questions