Why it matters on an HVAC site
It is the cheapest lever on a contractor site and the most neglected. A location matrix usually has no links between its own pages at all, so 400 pages sit in isolation from each other.
Anchor text matters and is usually wasted. A site that links to everything as "learn more" has thrown away four hundred opportunities to say what the destination is about.
How to check it yourself
- Count inbound internal links per URL and read the distribution. Zeros are orphans; ones are nearly orphans.
- Measure the share of anchors that are descriptive rather than generic, which is countable.
- Check anchor variety. The same anchor repeated site-wide is its own signal.
Worked through in numbers
A crawl of a contractor site returns a median of 1 inbound internal link per page across 412 URLs, with 338 at zero.
Of the anchors that exist, 71% are "learn more", "read more" or "click here".
Adding a service-area index and cross-links between related services took the median to 4 and the descriptive-anchor share to 93%. The pages did not change; what reached them did.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Technical SEO. How pages on your own site point at each other, and what that distributes.