What is hub-and-spoke internal linking?

A hub page covers a core service broadly, for example Web Design. Spoke pages go deeper on a specific location or sub-service, like Web Design Christchurch. Blog posts and case studies then link back up to the relevant hub and spokes. It keeps your site organised and tells search engines what matters most.

How many internal links should a page have?

There's no fixed number. The real test is relevance: link where it genuinely helps the reader go deeper on a related topic. A handful of well-placed, relevant links beats a page stuffed with links to everything.

What is an orphan page and why does it matter?

An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it. If nothing on your site links to a page, search engines struggle to find and rank it, and customers can only reach it by search. Every important page should be linked from at least one other relevant page.

Does anchor text actually matter for SEO?

Yes, within reason. Descriptive anchor text like "Google Ads management in Auckland" tells both readers and Google what the linked page is about. Generic anchors like "click here" waste the opportunity. Keep it natural, not stuffed with keywords.

Internal Linking for Service Businesses: A Hub-and-Spoke Guide

Why internal linking is worth doing properly

Most service businesses treat internal links as an afterthought, a few random mentions of “click here” scattered through the copy. That’s a missed opportunity. Internal links are how you tell Google which pages matter most, and how you guide a reader from “just looking” to “ready to enquire.”

Get the structure right and authority flows to the pages that actually convert. Get it wrong, and your best pages sit orphaned while Google can’t work out what your site is actually about.

The hub-and-spoke structure

The simplest structure that works for almost any service business is hub-and-spoke.

The hub is your core service page, the broad one. Think Web Design, SEO or Google Ads Management. It explains the service in general terms and links out to every spoke underneath it.

The spokes go deeper. That might be a location page (Web Design Christchurch), a sub-service (Web Design for Plumbers), or a specific offer. Each spoke links back up to its hub, and sideways to closely related spokes where it makes sense.

Blog posts sit above and around the structure. A post like how much a website costs in Australia should link down into the Web Design hub, and the hub’s FAQ or supporting content can link back up to relevant posts.

This gives every page a clear place in the structure and at least one path in from somewhere else on the site.

Anchor text: be specific, not clever

The words you use for a link matter. “Click here” tells a reader and a search engine nothing. “Google Ads management in Wellington” tells both exactly what’s on the other end.

A few rules that keep this natural rather than stuffed:

Match the anchor to what the page is actually about, not the keyword you wish it ranked for.
Vary the phrasing across different links to the same page, don’t repeat the identical anchor everywhere.
Keep it readable first. If an anchor reads awkwardly, rewrite the sentence around it rather than forcing it in.

Where links belong on the page

Placement matters as much as anchor text.

Early, where relevant. A link near the top of a page, in context, carries more weight than one buried at the bottom.
In FAQs. FAQ answers are a natural, low-friction place to link to a related service or deeper guide, exactly how I’ve done it through this article.
In closing sections. A short “related reading” or call-to-action at the end is fine, but it shouldn’t be the only internal linking on the page.

Finding orphan pages

An orphan page has nothing linking to it. If your only path to a page is typing the exact URL or finding it in search, it’s orphaned, and it will struggle to rank no matter how good the content is.

A simple audit: list every page on your site, then check whether at least one other page links to it. For a trade business running location pages across several cities, this is easy to overlook, a new location page can go live and never get linked from the hub or from a relevant blog post. I catch this by reviewing the site structure whenever a website redesign or new page goes live, and it’s one of the things I check as part of a full SEO audit.

A worked example

Say you run a plumbing business with a Google Ads page, an SEO page, and location pages for three cities.

The Google Ads hub links to each location’s Ads page, and to a blog post like how much a plumber should spend on Google Ads.
Each location Ads page links back to the hub, and across to that same city’s SEO and Web Design pages, since a customer researching one service is often a good fit for the others.
The blog post links down into the hub and across to a specific location page where the example fits, and out to a related read like is Google Ads worth it for tradesmen if the reader is still deciding.

None of this is complicated. It just needs to be deliberate rather than accidental.

A simple template to copy

For any new page you publish, ask three questions before it goes live:

What’s the one hub this page belongs under, and have I linked to it?
What two or three spokes or posts are genuinely related, and have I linked to them?
What existing pages should now link down to this new one?

Answer those three honestly and you’ll never end up with an orphan page again.

If your site’s internal linking is a mess of dead ends and disconnected pages, that’s exactly the kind of thing I fix as part of ongoing SEO work, or get in touch and I’ll take a look.