Local SEO internal linking: how to connect regional hubs and suburb pages

Parent, child, related and supporting links each do a different job

Internal links are the links between pages on your own website; external links point to someone else's site. Google's Search Central guidance on links says Google uses links as a signal of what a page is relevant to, and to find new pages to crawl. Its SEO Starter Guide adds that Google mainly finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled. So a suburb page with nothing pointing at it is hard to find, for customers and for Google.

The same link page says that paying attention to the anchor text of internal links can help both people and Google make sense of your site. That's the whole job: each link should show how two of your pages relate. On a local site nearly every internal link falls into one of the four kinds below. Keep them apart and a hub stays useful instead of turning into a wall of suburb names.

The first three run between your hubs and suburb pages. The fourth runs in from guides and FAQ answers, and it's the one most local sites forget.

One worked hierarchy for a hypothetical plumber

Say a plumbing business based in Caloundra works across the Sunshine Coast and sells two main services: blocked drains and hot water. It has enough genuine work and local detail for a page on each service in three suburbs, Caloundra, Buderim and Maroochydore. That's one regional hub, two service hubs, six suburb pages and one guide. The three hubs sit at the same level, just under the homepage: one groups the work by place, the other two by service. So they link to each other sideways, and each suburb page sits under two of them.

Not sure a suburb has earned its own page yet? Work through when local landing pages deserve indexing first. The table shows what each page links to.

A table is the plan; the copy is where each link earns its meaning. Here's how the blocked drains hub might introduce two of its suburb pages, with the linked words in quotes. This is illustrative copy built from the business's own job notes: "Many Caloundra drain call-outs are older homes with clay sewer lines, where tree roots get into the joints, so 'blocked drains in Caloundra' explains root cutting and what a camera inspection shows. In Buderim, more jobs involve stormwater on sloping blocks after heavy rain, which is what 'blocked drains in Buderim' covers." Each link sits in a sentence that tells the reader why that page is worth opening.

For sideways links between suburbs, the plumber uses one rule: link to the suburb a customer could just as easily be in, because they live near the boundary or own property in both. In this illustration, the job notes show many Buderim customers also own rentals in Maroochydore, so those two blocked drains pages link to each other. Caloundra customers rarely overlap with the other two, so the Caloundra page reaches them through the regional hub instead of a direct link. The guide on spotting a blocked drain early links in to the blocked drains hub at the point where the reader decides they need help.

Parent links and anchor text: every suburb page points up

Look at the Buderim page in that table. It has two parents, and that's fine. The URL makes it a child of the blocked drains hub; the customer's geography makes it a child of the Sunshine Coast hub. Google's breadcrumb documentation recommends breadcrumbs that show a typical user path rather than copying the URL, and it allows more than one breadcrumb trail per page. So the page can carry both trails, or just the one most customers would follow. Either way, link to both parents in the body copy too.

Breadcrumbs help, but a link inside a sentence carries more meaning. Google's page on links says the words around a link matter, and it warns against chaining links next to each other, because readers can't tell them apart and each loses its surrounding text.

The table compares three ways to write the same links. Google's link page gives "click here" and "read more" as examples of anchor text that's too generic, and asks you to resist cramming every related keyword into the anchor, noting that keyword stuffing breaks its spam policies. Then apply these rules:

• Describe the destination. "Blocked drain plumbing across the Sunshine Coast" tells people what they'll get.
• Keep it short and natural. Google says that if it feels like you're forcing keywords into the anchor text, it's probably too much.
• Use a real HTML link. Google says it can generally only crawl a link that's an a element with an href attribute. A menu that JavaScript builds from ordinary href links is fine, but if its items only navigate through a script click event, Google can't reliably pick up where they lead.
• One wording, one page. Don't send the same anchor to two different pages. If "blocked drains in Caloundra" opens the suburb page in one place and the service hub in another, readers can't predict where they'll land.
• Name places the same way everywhere. Pick one form for each suburb and region, such as Sunshine Coast rather than a mix of Sunny Coast and Sunshine Coast region, and use it in headings, anchors, page titles and your Business Profile.
• Vary the wording across source pages. The same exact phrase on every page reads like a template, because it is one.

Child links: hubs point down in the body copy, not only the footer

Google's page on links puts the minimum plainly: every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. For a suburb page, that link belongs in a hub's body copy, with a line about what's on the page. A footer or menu link counts as a link, but it carries no sentence around it, and Google says the words before and after a link matter.

Menus and footers still do useful work. They give every page a route back to the main hubs and the contact page. What they can't do is explain a suburb page. A footer listing forty suburbs tells a reader nothing about any of them, and on a phone it's a long scroll of small links. Treat the footer as a backup route, never as the only one.

Keep suburb pages close to the homepage. Click depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the homepage. Google doesn't publish a maximum, so treat "within about three clicks" as a common rule of thumb, not a Google rule. In the worked hierarchy every suburb page is two clicks from the homepage: homepage to a hub, hub to the suburb page. Search Console's help page for the Links report suggests using it to confirm that users can get from page A to page B with the fewest clicks.

The regional hub carries the full list, grouped by service or by part of the region so a customer can scan it, with a sentence or two for each group. A service hub links to the few suburb pages with the most genuine demand and local detail, then sends readers to the regional hub for the rest. Google says there's no magical ideal number of links on a page, but if you think it's too much, it probably is.

The hub needs substance of its own, too. Two of the doorway abuse examples in Google's spam policies fit badly built hubs: pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy. A hub that explains the region and what changes from area to area is a real page. A grid of suburb names pointing at near-identical pages isn't. For what makes each child page worth the link, see service area pages for genuine local coverage.

What the menu and footer should still carry:

• The homepage, each service hub and the regional hub, so every page is one click from a parent.
• The contact page and your phone number, because a customer can be ready to call on any page.
• A link to the regional hub or service areas page, not the full suburb list.
• Nothing that only works through a script click event; every item should be a standard link Google can follow.

Related and supporting links: sideways and in from guides

Sideways links are where local sites tend to overdo it, often by linking every suburb page to every other one. Use one test instead: would a customer reading this page plausibly need that page next? Google frames it as linking in context to other pages on your site that would help readers understand this one. If the answer is "maybe", leave the link out.

If two suburb pages keep wanting to link to each other because they say the same thing, they may be one page in disguise; when to merge overlapping SEO pages covers that call.

Supporting links run the other way, into your hubs and suburb pages from content that answers questions. A guide on hot water system warning signs should link to the hot water hub at the point where the reader decides to get it looked at, and to a suburb page when an example names that suburb. An FAQ answer can do the same in a single clause. These links reach readers who arrived with a question and have now moved on to booking, which a menu link rarely does.

Sideways and supporting links usually come from this short list:

• Same suburb, other service: link it when the business really does both jobs there and the same household might need both.
• Same service, a neighbouring suburb: one or two suburbs next door or in the same customer catchment. The regional hub already lists the rest.
• A guide out: one guide that answers a question customers ask before they book.
• A guide in: each guide links to the service hub it supports, and to a suburb page only where the guide's example is set there.
• An FAQ answer in: a short link to the page that does the job, placed where the answer ends and the next step begins.
• The contact page: every suburb page needs a direct next step.

A publish-day routine for every new suburb page

Orphan pages are usually created on launch day: the page goes live, the sitemap updates, and nothing in the content links to it. Run this routine before you call a new suburb page finished. It takes a few minutes per page and saves an audit finding later.

Then put internal links on a review cycle. Recheck them after each batch of new suburb pages, after any change to menus or page templates, and after a redesign or platform move, when old URLs and redirects tend to multiply. Website migration and SEO handover covers what to check when the whole site moves.

Watch for these when you review a hub and its suburb pages: suburb pages linked only from the footer or a menu; a hub that's nothing but a grid of suburb names; the same keyword-heavy anchor, such as "plumber Caloundra", pasted onto every link to one page; links that still point at old addresses and pass through a redirect; and suburb pages nothing links to at all. A sitemap can list those last ones, but Google's sitemap documentation says listing a URL doesn't mean every listed item will be crawled and indexed.

1. Add the page to the regional hub, in the right group, with a sentence on what it covers.
2. If the suburb is one the service hub features, add it there too with its own line; otherwise make sure the service hub points readers to the regional hub's full list.
3. Link up from the new page to both parents in the body copy, and set its breadcrumb trail.
4. Add one sideways link from a neighbouring suburb page where the same customer could be choosing between the two, and link back.
5. Find one existing guide or FAQ answer that mentions the suburb or the job, and link from it to the new page.
6. Open every new link and confirm it lands on the final URL with no redirect in between.
7. Record the date, the page and each link added in a simple link log, so you can compare results later.

How to audit internal links and measure the change

Internal links can't rescue thin pages, and no one can promise a ranking from them. They make the pages you've built easy to reach and easy to understand, which is the groundwork the rest of local SEO sits on. If you plan to add suburbs over time, the guide to Geo SEO covers that suburb-by-suburb approach.

Clicking through by hand works for a handful of pages. Past that, use a site crawler, which follows links from the homepage the way a search engine does. Export the URLs it found and compare them with the URLs in your XML sitemap. Any suburb page that's in the sitemap but missing from the crawl has no followable link path from the homepage. Google's sitemap documentation describes a well-linked site as one where Googlebot can find all the important pages by following links from the home page.

Search Console adds Google's own view. The Links report lists your most internally linked pages, and selecting a URL shows which of your pages link to it; its help page notes the report shows a sample, so some URLs, such as pages that aren't indexed, can be missing. The URL Inspection tool can show a referring page Google possibly used to find a URL, and its help page says a blank value doesn't mean no referring page exists.

To see whether a change helped, record a baseline first: the link log from your publish routine, plus each affected page's clicks and impressions in Search Console's Performance report. Its help pages explain how to filter the report to URLs containing a string, such as /blocked-drains/, and compare two time periods side by side. In GA4, a path exploration shows a tree of the pages people open after a starting page, so you can see whether hub visitors go on to suburb pages. Read the result as evidence, not proof: seasons, competitors and other site changes move the same numbers, which local SEO seasonality and reporting helps you separate out.