What internal linking looks like across 79 South West businesses
Most writing about internal linking, including the version of this article that stood here until today, explains what internal links are and asserts that they matter. That is easy to say and impossible to check.
So here is what we actually found. As part of the Local Digital Visibility Index we parse the homepage of every business we measure and record whether it links to three things: an about page, a team page, and a credentials page. Those are internal links, and they are the cheapest possible test of whether a site was built for people who want to know who they are dealing with.
Across 79 businesses in seven South West indices, 76 homepages parsed cleanly. The result is a straight line.
The finding
Section titled “The finding”| Internal links on the homepage | Firms | Median Digital Visibility Score | Median Visibility pillar |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 of 3 | 10 | 45.5 | 30 |
| 1 of 3 | 27 | 58 | 33 |
| 2 of 3 | 25 | 61 | 38 |
| 3 of 3 | 14 | 69.5 | 45.5 |
Every step up adds points, with no reversal. Between the bottom and top groups there is a 24-point gap in overall score and a 15.5-point gap in search visibility.
The individual links are not equally common:
- 58 of 76 (76%) link to an about page
- 35 of 76 (46%) link to a team page
- 26 of 76 (34%) link to anything resembling credentials, accreditation or registration
Only 14 of 76 firms — 18% do all three. 10 firms do none of them: their homepage offers no route to who runs the business.
What this does not prove
Section titled “What this does not prove”This is the part most articles skip, so it is worth being direct about it.
This is correlation, not causation. Adding three links to a homepage will not move a site 23 points. The far more likely explanation is that these three links are a proxy: a business that maintains an about page, a team page and a credentials page is usually a business that maintains its website generally — which is also the kind of business that has a fast site, valid structured data and a complete Google Business Profile. The gradient is real; the arrow of causation is not established by this data.
Three binary checks are not an internal-linking audit. We do not measure click depth, orphaned pages, anchor-text distribution or link equity flow. A site could pass all three checks and still have a poor internal structure.
The sample is 76 firms in one region. It is enough to be interesting and not enough to be a law.
What the data does support is narrower and still useful: among comparable local businesses in the same sector and city, the ones whose homepage tells you who they are tend to be the ones performing better in search. If your homepage fails all three checks, you are keeping company with the bottom group.
It varies more by sector than you would expect
Section titled “It varies more by sector than you would expect”| Index | Firms | Median links | Median score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swindon estate agents | 8 | 3 | 68.5 |
| Bath estate agents | 15 | 2 | 64 |
| Bristol estate agents | 18 | 2 | 57.5 |
| Exeter solicitors | 8 | 1.5 | 69 |
| Cheltenham law firms | 6 | 1.5 | 61 |
| Bristol dentists | 9 | 1 | 56 |
| Gloucester construction | 12 | 1 | 46 |
Counts are firms whose homepage parsed and which carry a score, so a sector’s row can be smaller than its published index.
Estate agents link to their people; construction firms mostly do not. That is a genuine sector norm, and it is worth knowing which norm you are competing inside — the useful comparison is against your own sector’s median, not against a general benchmark.
Note also that Exeter solicitors post the highest median score in the whole set on a median of 1.5 links. Sector norms differ, and a single signal never carries a score on its own. This is exactly why the index weights six pillars rather than one.
How this was measured
Section titled “How this was measured”Every figure above is reproducible.
- The homepage of each business is fetched once per quarter and parsed for links whose href or anchor text matches about, team/people/staff, and credentials/accreditation/registration patterns.
- Each check returns
true,false, ornullwhere the page could not be parsed. A null is excluded, never scored as a zero — three homepages failed to parse and are absent from the percentages above, which is why the denominator is 76 and not 79. - The three checks form the Content & trust pillar, which carries 10% of the overall Digital Visibility Score.
The scoring itself is deliberately plain arithmetic — a ratio and a weighted sum, no model — so that any figure here can be recomputed from the published data with a spreadsheet. The methodology states the rules, the pipeline is open source, and the datasets are CC BY: JSON · CSV.
If you want to check the gradient rather than take it on trust, the statistical methods for doing so are written up separately — regression analysis for the trend, ANOVA for whether the differences between those four groups are larger than the noise. We have one quarter of data, which is not yet enough to run either properly; that changes as the monthly series accumulates.
What to do about it
Section titled “What to do about it”Ranked by how much it matters for a local service business, not in general.
1. Make your homepage answer “who are you”
Section titled “1. Make your homepage answer “who are you””If a stranger lands on your homepage, can they reach a page naming the people who will do the work, within one click? For 54% of the firms we measured, no. For a solicitor, a dentist or a builder, that is the question the visitor is actually asking, and it is also what E-E-A-T is reaching for.
Credentials are the biggest gap: two thirds of firms show none. If you are registered, accredited or regulated, the homepage should link to the page that says so.
2. Link with anchor text that names the thing
Section titled “2. Link with anchor text that names the thing”“Click here” and “read more” are wasted. The anchor is the strongest single statement you make about what the destination is about, and generic anchors throw it away. Name the entity: “our Bristol conveyancing team”, not “find out more”.
3. Prioritise the pages that earn
Section titled “3. Prioritise the pages that earn”Internal links distribute authority, and most sites spend theirs on navigation furniture — privacy policies and cookie pages get linked from every page while the service page that generates enquiries is three clicks down. Count how many internal links point at your most commercially important page. For most local sites the honest answer is “fewer than point at the privacy policy.”
4. Build the cluster, not the page
Section titled “4. Build the cluster, not the page”A page that stands alone competes alone. A service page supported by a location page, a process explainer and a case study — all linked to each other — states a topic rather than a single term. That is the principle behind topical authority, and it is what the Visibility pillar is really measuring when it counts how many of a sector’s keywords a firm ranks for at all.
5. Fix orphans before adding anything
Section titled “5. Fix orphans before adding anything”A page reachable only from the sitemap is a page you are paying to host and getting nothing from. Crawl your own site and list every page with zero inbound internal links. Deal with those before writing anything new — see the technical SEO guide and the indexing and crawling checklist.
Where your own firm sits
Section titled “Where your own firm sits”If your business appears in one of the seven indices, your scorecard shows your Content & trust score and which of the three checks you pass, alongside your position against your sector median: browse the indices.
If a figure about your business is wrong, tell us and it gets corrected and logged in the changelog. Scores are never adjusted on request — the method is applied identically to every business in a cohort, including businesses that ask.
Data: PYC Local Digital Visibility Index, Q3-2026, 79 businesses across seven South West indices, measured 27 August 2026. Published under CC BY 4.0 — reuse with credit to Phil Yarrow (PYC), https://hub.pyc.agency/indices/. Analysis by PYC.