I Tested Every Internal Linking Tool—Here’s What Works 🎉

I Tested Every Internal Linking Tool—Here’s What Works 🎉

Internal linking is one of the most important aspects of optimizing your website and content. Internal link optimization is considered a low-hanging fruit kind of optimization which can result in quick wins. Yet, internal links are one of the (by far) most neglected, underestimated, and overlooked SEO optimizations. It can significantly impact your website’s search engine rankings, user experience, and navigational performance.

If you strategically link pages within your site, you not only help search engines to better understand your website’s structure but also improve visitors’ navigation by providing them with related information they can go to and read.

The only problem is that the bigger your site the harder to manually go through all the pages and include relevant helpful internal links in each post. It gets even more confusing and challenging if multiple people work on creating content for the site. That’s when internal linking tools, like Twylu, become your life savior!

I’ve tested numerous internal linking tools as part of my job as an SEO professional and in this article, I will go over the best internal linking tools for SEO along with their Pros and Cons.

These internal linking tools can help you simplify different aspects of internal linking optimization from auditing, and anchor text analysis to finding orphan pages and so on, letting you optimize your site’s internal link structure with the least effort.

No matter your level of SEO proficiency, I will do my best to do an honest, easy, and easy to understand review of the best internal linking tools that exist to date so that you can make an informed decision about which internal linking tool will best suit your specific needs and requirements.

Specialized Internal Linking Tools

There are two types of Internal linking tools:

1. The specialized internal linking tools: They focus on helping you with all aspects of optimizing your website’s internal links and that’s the main and most of the time only aspect of SEO they help with.
2. General SEO tools or plugins with Internal linking feature: These nonspecialized tools have an internal liking audit or optimization feature alongside the rest of the features and SEO tools they offer.

Some of the features that most internal linking tools offer include:

• Internal link audit
• Anchor text audit
• New internal link suggestions
• Current internal link optimization
• Anchor text optimization
• Internal link tracking
• Automatic internal link insertion
• Internal links problem identification

Best internal links are not just relevant and anchor-optimized but are also strategically placed and are part of a bigger internal linking structure. Let’s start with reviewing the best specialized internal linking software that are at your disposal as of right now:

1.  Twylu

Twylu helps you with super powerful internal linking opportunities through its Optimize page. It uses Google Search Console data in addition to custom terms for broader internal linking suggestions.

Custom terms are best for finding links for new or low-traffic pages for which there is less or no Google Search Console data.

Twylu crawls your entire website and identifies potential internal link opportunities from the existing text on your different pages. You can then sort these opportunity pages based on their referring domains, their internal authority score, or Google Search Console traffic data such as clicks, impressions, or average position to find the most powerful pages you can use to build internal links from.

Twylu’s proprietary Internal Authority Score (IAS) helps you understand your site’s distribution of page rank or link juice. This IAS score is very useful for finding pages that need improvement in terms of internal links. Twylu’s IAS can also be used to identify powerful pages from which you can create internal links to other pages with lower internal authority scores.

Twylu provides you with automated new internal link recommendations and optimization opportunities for your existing internal links using the existing content and internal links of the website.

Moreover, Twylu’s task management system and collaborative tools allow the management of link insertion and tracking of their health after they are marked as done. Twylu also supports multiple projects and lets you even limit your audit to only a directory making it perfect for professional teams managing complex sites.

With Twylu, you can easily create a strategic, well-structured internal link network to improve the site’s internal linking structure which can lead to quick SEO gains.

Twylu has very well-structured pricing that easily fits any budget starting from $29/Mo for the solo plan to $397/Mo for the enterprise. Twylu also provides a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Pros

• Automated internal link suggestions
• Powerful internal linking audit tools
• Automatic identification of site-wide links (footer and header links)
• Powerful anchor text analysis tool
• Proprietary Internal Authority Score (IAS) to gauge your internal linking optimization for different pages
• Integration with Google Search Console (GSC)
• Use automated GSC keywords or set manual keywords for each page based on which Twylu will find internal link opportunities.
• Sort pages to get internal links from based on their referring domains, traffic data, etc.
• Discover internal link issues such as orphan pages, excessive-linked or underlined pages, broken internal links, redirects, etc.
• Gain quick SEO wins
• Pricing for all budgets
• Powerful task management system and tracking of created internal links
• Great crawler settings to specify which pages to crawl or disregard.
• It supports all languages.

Cons

• No automated javascript link insertion

2. LinkStorm

LinkStorm uses AI to analyze your website’s content. It then suggests internal links for optimized connections. It crawls pages to audit links, finds issues like broken or redirected links, and optimizes anchors.

By integrating Google Search Console, LinkStorm provides a detailed view of link performance. You can easily perform one-click internal link placements for enhanced SEO with LinkStorm.

LinkStorm’s page crawler audits all existing links to identify issues like broken or redirected links and suggests fixes. This feature is extremely helpful in maintaining a healthy link structure.

Overall, it offers effective and data-driven internal linking rapid link development, thorough audits, issue discovery, javascript direct link placement, and anchor text optimization. All these features make LinkStorm a valuable tool for improving your website’s internal linking structure.

LinkStorm has pricing plans starting from $30 for small, $60 for medium, and $120 for large sites.

Pros

• LinkStorm offers a detailed overview of your internal links
• Find new opportunities for relevant internal links
• Fixes internal link issues for you (broken links, redirections, nofollow, etc)
• Direct link placement with JavaScript to optimize your internal link automatically.

Cons

• AI dependency
• JS link insertion can be problematic with search engines that won’t crawl with JS enabled.
• You will lose all the internal links you create when you unsubscribe.
• Automatic JavaScript link insertion can create duplicate links (linking to the same destination with two different anchor text linking to two different destination pages with the same anchor text or linking to the same destination page with the same anchor text more than once from the the exact same page.)
• The link auditing feature is basic.

3. Link Whisper

Link Whisper is one of the well-known internal linking WordPress plugins. It suggests internal links automatically as you start writing! It is an AI-based WordPress plugin that will scan your site and find pages that need links. There is also an auto-linking feature to automatically build internal links for the keywords you set for it. Again be aware that automated internal links that work based on Java Script link insertion have their own risks.

Link Whisper can make the internal linking process seamless and efficient across your site. It provides basic internal link reports and integration with Google Search Console to provide traffic data insights to enhance your internal linking strategies.

Link Whisper also has a quick-fix option for broken links and lets you add target keywords for improved internal link suggestions. In fact, Link Whisper can suggest linking across different domains for users managing multiple sites. This makes it an efficient solution for multi-site SEO strategies.

The plugin is comparatively cheaper as it is billed annually for a small amount. This is because it doesn’t really need to crawl your site, because as a WordPress plugin, it has access to your content via the WordPress database.

It costs $97 for 1 site license, $167 for 3 site license, and $217 for 10 site license. If you get the 1 license package, it will cost you only around $8 a month but again remember that if you stop using this plugin you will lose all the internal links you have built with it.

Pros

• Internal link suggestion as you write
• Compatibility with different WordPress editors and themes
• Easy to install and use
• Continuous suggestions with added content
• Budget-friendly pricing

Cons

• May end up suggesting a lot of irrelevant links
• It only works for WordPress sites
• It does not support all languages
• If you uninstall this plugin you will lose all the links and optimizations
• Reporting and auditing features are kind of basic

4. Internal Link Juicer

Internal Link Juicer is another automated internal linking plugin for WordPress. It is designed to optimize your site’s SEO by linking relevant content using specified keywords. I personally have had negative experiences using it from conflicts with my theme that cost me hours of debugging to find the cause of creating duplicate links, over-optimizing, and losing all the internal links it has built for me once I had to uninstall it.

There are many promises such as intelligent anchor text variation, customizable linking with blacklist/whitelist options, and flexible linking for posts, pages, categories, and custom fields.

Internal Link Juicer promises high site performance with a link indexing feature. It also provides a statistics dashboard to track internal links.

Internal Link Juicer also works with the most popular SEO plugins like Yoast and Rank Math. This helps it to identify which keywords each page of the site is relevant to for better internal linking optimization.

Again be aware that it inserts links using Java Script, and it can lead to duplicate links, over-optimization, and losing all the optimizations if for any reason you need to stop using it, which was exactly what happened in my case.

You can use it for free with limited features that are only available on one site. Many of the advanced preferences and features are only available in the paid version. The premium packages, which include more features and multiple site licenses, cost $69.99 to $1299.00 annually.

Pros

• Automates the process of internal linking. Automated link insertion can save you time but you might end up with issues such as duplicate links, over-optimization, etc.
• Link indexing to not slow down the site.
• It’s easy to use, just set target keywords for different pages and it will link from other pages of the site with that target link.

Cons

• Lack of contextual understanding, like most automated internal linking tools with link insertion it just blindly insert links without following a specific internal linking strategy like cluster pages, silos, etc.
• Platform dependency. It only works for WordPress sites.
• You will lose all the optimizations and internal links you build with it if you need to uninstall this plugin.
• Audits and reporting are primitive
• It can suddenly conflict with your theme or plugins and cause issues that force you to uninstall it.
• You can end up creating duplicate links if you already have hard-coded links (actual links that are not placed with this plugin.)

5. LinkBoss

LinkBoss helps with internal linking across various sites within a single dashboard. It is just another AI-driven internal linking tool that offers one-click bulk interlinking. Again automated link insertion using Java Script without any moderation comes with its own risks including internal links that won’t fit well, poor choice of destination pages, and duplicate link creation (when you already have hard-coded links there.) Not to mention that you will lose all the internal links once you stop using this tool. LinkBoss also provides automated topic clustering and semantic internal linking powered by NLP.

This tool also provides AI-written anchor-rich paragraph insertion if the link doesn’t fit the current copy of the site. This a feature that I personally wouldn’t use if I were a user of LinkBoss because of all the risks it comes with regards to AI-generated content and unnatural flow of the web copy just for the sake of inserting an internal link in a page that it does not originally fit in.

LinkBoss offers yearly and monthly subscriptions. Its monthly subscription varies from $11 to $149, and the yearly subscription costs from $99 to $1297.

LinkBoss internal linking tool provides basic insights, promising fast search engine indexing, and improved crawlability and use experience.

Pros

• Automated internal linking in bulk (⚠️ be careful with this feature)
• Topic clusters and use of semantic links powered by AI and NLP
• Could potentially save a lot of time and is easy to use but with everything automated and not moderated comes at its own risk.
• Manage multiple projects from the same dashboard.
• It comes with a free trial.

Cons

• Managing credits is difficult for even small to medium size websites, for example with the $36/mo plan you only get 1000 credits, compare this with Twylu’s $29/mo plan which comes with 15,000 credits.
• AI suggestions are not always accurately aligned
• Automated link insertion is risky, it can cause duplicates, over-optimization, and speed issues, and you will lose all the internal links you build with it once you stop using this platform.
• You will lose all the internal links you create with LinkBoss once you stop using it.

6. Linkilo

Linkilo is just another internal links optimization plugin for WordPress. With Linkilo You get automated internal links with suggestions based on the existing content of the site.

You can improve your internal links with keyword-based linking automation, smart link recommendations, analysis of anchor text, orphan page detection, and helpful link statistics.

Linkilo also works in conjunction with popular SEO plugins like Yoast and Rank Math providing an enhanced internal linking performance based on the SEO metadata set for each WordPress page.

Internal link suggestions are based on the page’s meta tags, URL slug, Google Search Console, and custom-set keywords. You can also set an ignore list.

Again as with other internal linking WordPress plugins if you deactivate this plugin for any reason you will lose all the internal links it has built for you like in the case of conflict with other core plugins you use or in the case of slowing down the site.

The plugin offers flexible pricing with occasional discounts. Depending on the number of sites, it currently costs from $59 to $499 annually.

Pros

• Interactive UI and easy to use
• Quick SEO wins with automation to save time (it could go wrong for all the reasons I mentioned throughout the article about using automation for internal linking.)
• Affordable
• Comprehensive link overview reporting

Cons

• The plugin may slow down your site
• You will lose all the internal link optimizations when you deactivate it.
• Sometimes, the suggestions may not be entirely relevant

7. Beki AI

Beki AI identifies the internal linking opportunities using AI-driven insights and automation. You can build links within a few clicks as well as track the link’s health to boost SEO performance and improve user experience.

With this tool, you can generate optimized anchor texts while keeping your content organized for easy linking.

Beki AI claims its tool helps over 300 teams in SaaS, e-commerce, and other businesses increase their organic traffic and maintain site authority with minimal effort. Its Link Monitor feature helps maintain link integrity to ensure an effective SEO strategy.

The paid versions of Beki AI costs from $15 to $99 per month, depending on the number of websites, pages, and AI links in each package.

Pros

• Free trial available
• AI-generated anchor texts
• All content in one place
• Link health monitoring
•  Advanced algorithms

Cons

• Lack of comprehensive link reporting
• Limited orphan page detection
• Lack of customizable link suggestions

8. InLinks

InLinks initially was a dedicated internal linking software but now they provide features that go a little bit beyond mere internal linking such as schema markup embedding, topic planner, content assistant tool, even AI content writing tool and social media content assistant.

Their internal linking tool, which is an integral part of InLinks, crawls and audits the entire site and has a JavaScript integration to automatically insert links and schema markup to your pages and posts. This simply means if you stop using InLinks your optimizations will be all gone.

InLinks puts too much emphasis on the use of entities for SEO optimization and content development. It helps with creating content plans based on the entity and SEO analysis of the sites that already rank high on Google search results.

InLinks internal linking tool is powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP), to find relevant content for internal linkings. It claims that it eliminates keyword stuffing, irrelevant links, and manual linking tasks, helping users avoid time-consuming spreadsheets or outsourcing expenses.

InLinks internal linking tool also provides internal linking analytics, allowing users to monitor link distribution and anchor text selection.

If you have a large website, this tool will be particularly useful (but very expensive) for you as manual link management can be highly inefficient, prone to error, and super time-consuming. InLinks helps with improving topic authority, user engagement, and site structure leading to increased organic visibility.

The package prices are based on the number of internal links you can create. The starting plan lets you only create 100 internal links at $49 per month.

Pros

• Entity-based content optimization
• NLP-based internal link suggestions
• Multiple language support
• Works with both navigational and contextual links
• Bulk features for agencies

Cons

• Links do not appear in the source code
• Limited reporting features
• Lack of streamlined workflows and none intuitive interface making it hard to use
• No Google Search Console Integrations
• If you cancel your account or remove their script, the links and optimizations will disappear.
• Too expensive I would say

9. SiteSeer

SiteSeer offers a JavaScript website integration to automate and suggest optimizations for two important SEO aspects of your site: Title Tags and Internal Links. It crawls a site and provides a title score and a link score for every page it crawls which ranges from 1 to 100.

SiteSeer comes with an internal link auditor which analyzes links across various criteria. It carefully considers the number of links to each URL, anchor text diversity, keyword use, and link placement.

It comes with CloudFlare integration and a WordPress integration to automatically publish titles and link optimizations to the site without the need to manually make these changes yourself.

It helps you find pages that need internal links or pages that have internal link issues. It then provides specific recommendations to enhance each page’s internal linking. Its internal link suggestions identify relevant pages to link from, which lets you create internal links with varied anchor texts that improve navigation and help with SEO rankings.

The main value creation of SiteSeer is to drive organic growth by ensuring that each page has an optimized title tag and is optimally linked for the best search engine performance. Title tags and Internal links are two aspects of SEO that are usually considered to deliver a quick gain.

The pricing of this tool starts at $40/month and goes up to $300/month, depending on the number of sites, and number of pages you can optimize.

The Professional and Power plans also include the SiteSeer Sitemap feature.

Pros

• Free trial period of 21 days without credit card
• Comes with an extra SEO quick win (like Title Tag optimization) and a Sitemap feature.
• Performance tracking
• Works with all kinds of sites

Cons

• Not a good fit for sites with less traffic
• It may not work with sites that render content with JavaScript

10. Interlinks Manager

Interlinks Manager is a WordPress plugin that gathers detailed data on internal links for your posts and pages and provides internal linking insights. This plugin comes with a link juice analysis and also has a Pro version with additional features.

Interlinks Manager comes with a dashboard that lists your pages and posts alongside their content length, internal link count, inbound internal links, and recommended number of internal links, and optimization which simply tracks if the post has the number of recommended internal links.

With Interlinks Manager, you can identify non-optimized content with the help of the Filter and Sort features. It estimates the internal link juice distributed to each URL, which can be handy to identify the pages that need an internal link boost.

The customizable algorithms help you adjust link optimization and link juice calculation based on your specified needs.

You can also go with the pro version which enables advanced features like internal links click tracking, automated internal link suggestions, and an automatic linking system based on specified keywords.

The Interlinks Manager pro version also includes a status code checker which is great for finding broken or redirected links.

The pricing for the pro version ranges from $39 to $149 yearly.

Pros

• Link juice calculator
• Automated link suggestions (Pro version)
• Click tracking (Pro version)

Cons

• The free version is very simplistic
• The pro version does not come with a free trial
• Limited to WordPress sites
• Requires time to understand all the features
• Simplistic Reporting and lack of thorough auditing features

11. Linksy

Linksy is another premium WordPress plugin that claims to help boost website rankings by creating smart links that are contextually relevant across your website. To find and implement internal links, Linksy uses Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Linksy basically identifies and suggests links based on semantic relationships, it has an auto-linking feature and also helps organize your website pages/posts into topic clusters (silos) which can help with the site’s topical authority. Each silo is made up of a pillar post and a few supporting posts linking to it.

Auto-linking works with most popular page builders or editors including WordPress default Gutenberg editor as well as Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, etc.

Linksy’s link reports show you the list of posts and pages with their link stats including Inbound Links, Outbound Links, and External Links.

The pricing of Linksy ranges from $59 to $219 per year mainly depending on how many websites you will use it on.

Pros

• Automation features
• Regular updates
• Compatible with all the latest PHP and WordPress versions
• Easy setup of internal links and auto-linking for target keywords

Cons

• Only works for WordPress sites
• Does not offer a trial period
• Limited audit features
• Can’t be used on sites you don’t have access to (for example to analyze competitors’ internal linking strategy.)
• Limited languages support

Non-Specialized Tools With Internal Linking Features

Non-specialized tools with internal linking features are usually SEO tools that include internal linking as one feature among many other optimization features. Unlike specialized internal linking tools, these tools cover a wide range of SEO features, such as keyword research, content optimization, and backlink tracking, alongside their internal linking capabilities.

If you are searching for the best internal linking tools for SEO that include an all-in-one SEO solution, you may already be using or going for one of the following tools.

Although these non-specialized tools provide a balance of SEO functionalities that can help you with different aspects of your SEO optimization, non-specialized tools, for the most part, lack a lot of in-depth features that are offered by the specialized internal linking tools.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins that helps with different aspects of on-page SEO optimization, including a premium internal linking suggestion that automatically recommends relevant content to link to as you write a post.

The Yoast internal linking suggestion is a premium feature which means it is not included in the free version of the Yoast.

Yoast internal linking suggestion tool suggests relevant links and highlights prominent words without having to leave the editor. Moreover, you will get the number of internal links as a new metric in the SEO overview of your pages to easily spot the posts needing more links.

Yoast internal linking suggestion does not come with an in-depth internal links or internal anchors audit feature.

Rank Math

Rank Math works with pillar content identification, anchor text optimization, and contextual relevance while suggesting internal links for your site. Its real-time link checks and automated suggestions ensure every post has optimal internal links. Moreover, its Google Search Console integration provides insights for monitoring internal link health.

Rank Math’s approach to internal links as a WordPress SEO plugin is not anything new. It works with Pillar content, these are simply your focus pages, the evergreen pages, or the pages you want to promote their internal link score. Remember that you need to set a few different posts as pillar content and select relevant categories and tags for your current post for Rank Math’s as-you-write internal link suggestions to start to work.

Rank Math mainly uses the focus keywords and titles of the articles to suggest relevant internal links. So you select a few content as Pillar, then whenever you create a new blog post or page and as you start writing, if your text has a keyword that matches the focus keyword of a Pillar content it will show up as a link suggestion.

Rank Math’s Internal linking feature is pretty basic and lacks the comprehensive audit feature of specialized internal linking tools like Twylu.

AIOSEO

AIOSEO is one of the most used SEO plugins for WordPress. It offers many different features for enhanced SEO, including an internal linking feature called Link Assistant which comes only with the Pro plan and above.

Link Assistant helps identify internal link opportunities and orphaned pages with the option to directly apply the link suggestion right from the Link Assistant dashboard without the need to directly edit the post.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has been a popular keyword research tool over the years. In addition to its phenomenal SEO features, it helps you improve internal linking. 

Ahrefs’s internal linking feature includes suggesting the best internal linking opportunities, observing link issues like broken links and orphan pages, and helping with planning link structures.

My Final Thoughts

Internal link optimization is one of the most powerful SEO techniques that can take your website’s SEO to the next level! By using specialized internal linking tools like Twylu, LinkStorm, and Link Whisper, or even non-specialized tools like Yoast SEO, you can audit your site for internal link issues and even partially automate the internal link creation for your site.

Internal links not only improve your website’s navigation and user-friendliness but also are considered one of the quickest SEO wins you can quickly gain and are 100% under your full control.

Be aware that if you use any of the above tools that build internal inks using javascript link insertion you will immediately lose the internal links you create with them once you unsubscribe or stop using them. For this reason, a tool like Twylu can be much more beneficial as it has one of the best internal link auditing features and link suggestions, and instead of automating the insertion of the internal links it provides you with a native internal linking task management feature with tracking of the tasks to make sure they are correctly done.

Twylu not only saves you time with its task management features but the optimizations you make with it also won’t be lost when you unsubscribe from it. It also provides you with valuable internal linking information from the broken links, and orphan pages to internal linking structure and anchor text report.

Using Twylu as one of the best internal linking tools out there can help you ensure your website’s internal links are relevant, contextually appropriate, and strategically placed.