Internal links and site structure guide
Link Useful Articles to Your WordPress Service and Product Pages
Add a link from an article to a service or product page at the point where the reader's question becomes a need the offer meets, and skip it where there is no fit.
On this page
Link an article to a service or product page where the article’s question turns into a need that the offer meets, and nowhere else. That is usually one link, sometimes two, placed in the sentence where the reader reaches the limit of what they can do alone. A sitewide banner or the same sales link pasted into every post gives readers little reason to click and makes the useful links harder to find.
Google’s link guidance, checked September 27, 2026, asks for crawlable <a href> links and anchor text that makes sense on its own. Those are mechanical checks: the first is a crawl requirement, the second a best practice. The editorial decision, which article should lead to which offer, is yours, and this guide is about making it deliberately.
Map each article’s question to an offer
List your articles in one column and write the question each one answers in the next. Then ask, for each row: at what point would a reader want help that you sell? Some articles have a clear answer. Others have none, and forcing a link there is the mistake to avoid.
An illustrative map for garden.example, a fictional garden design business:
| Article | Reader’s question | Relevant page | Where the need appears |
|---|---|---|---|
| How to plan a small garden | Where do I start? | Garden design service | The step where drawings and measurements are needed |
| Pruning tomatoes | When and how do I prune? | None | The reader is doing the work themselves |
| Choosing raised bed materials | Wood, metal or stone? | Raised bed installation | The section on building beds on a slope |
| Planting calendar | What goes in this month? | Seasonal maintenance plan | A note on keeping up with the calendar each month |
| Soil testing at home | Is my soil acidic? | None directly; the soil guide | The result that needs a professional test |
Two of the five rows have no commercial link, and that is a reasonable result. The pruning reader wants to prune. The soil reader is better served by a deeper guide first.
Place the link where the need appears
The best position is the sentence where the reader discovers the work is harder, larger or more specialized than they expected. Here is an illustrative passage before editing:
Measure the space, note where the sun falls at different times of day, and mark any slopes. Check our services page for more information.
The link is detached from anything the reader is doing, and “services page” says nothing about which service. After editing:
Measure the space, note where the sun falls at different times of day, and mark any slopes. If the garden slopes more than you can level by hand, our garden design service includes a site survey and a scaled plan.
The bold words are the anchor, linked to the garden design service page. The link now appears at the moment a real limit shows up, and the anchor names the destination. The sentence also says what the service includes, so the reader can judge whether to click.
Avoid placing the commercial link in the first paragraph of an informational article. A reader who arrived to learn something has not yet reached the point where your offer helps, and a link that interrupts the answer can read as an advertisement.
Write anchors that describe the offer
Name the thing the reader will find: “garden design service”, “raised bed installation”, “seasonal maintenance plan”. Avoid “click here”, “learn more” and “our services”. Avoid forcing a search phrase into the anchor when a plain name reads better; Google’s link guidance, checked September 27, 2026, asks whether the reader needs those words to understand the next page.
For the full method of rewriting anchors inside their sentences, see Rewrite weak internal link anchors. This guide only decides where the commercial link goes.
Check the destination and the route back
A link is a promise. Open the service or product page and confirm that it answers the question the article raised. If the article sent a reader who is worried about a slope, does the service page mention slopes, surveys or what happens on a difficult site? If not, the fix may be a sentence on the service page rather than a different link.
Then check the route in the other direction. A service page can link to the guide that helps a prospective customer prepare, for example the small garden planning article, at the point where it asks the customer for measurements. That link helps the reader and gives the guide a home. It also reduces the chance that the guide ends up with no contextual links at all, a gap the orphan page check can surface.
This site follows the same pattern: a guide explains a task and links to the documentation page that owns the exact product procedure, rather than repeating it in full. The guide on orphan pages, for example, links to Read the links report at the step where the product has a relevant command. You can inspect those links as working examples.
Measure without assuming the result
If you want to know whether the links help, measure it with your own data. In your analytics tool, record how many visits the service page receives from each article before and after the change, over the same length of time, and note any other changes you made. A rise in clicks from one article is evidence about that article. It is not proof that the change improved rankings or sales, and a small site may not have enough visits for a clear answer.
Before you publish the link
- The article has a point where the reader needs help you sell. If not, no commercial link.
- The link sits in that sentence, not in the introduction or a generic closing line.
- The anchor names the service or product.
- The destination answers the question the article raised.
- The service page links back to the guide where preparation helps.
- You have a before and after record if you plan to measure.