Nearby Linking Recipes for Local SEO

The Challenge of Manual and Taxonomy-based Linking

Sites organized around "what and where"—like professional services directories, home improvement lead-gen sites, real estate platforms, or local business listings—often rely heavily on rigid, manually maintained location taxonomies for internal linking. This top-down approach (e.g., country → county → city) typically covers only major locations, leaving many deeper pages underlinked and overlooked. Manual internal linking or internal link building is labor-intensive, difficult to scale, and rapidly becomes outdated, resulting in internal broken links (404 errors) and poor user experience. Additionally, manually selected pages introduce human biases, potentially missing newer, relevant pages. Learn more about the common frustrations around internal linking challenges.

Nearby recipes overcome these limitations by dynamically building links based on actual geographical proximity rather than administrative boundaries. They enhance your internal link building strategy, ensuring comprehensive inlink coverage at scale, dynamically updating as your site evolves, eliminating human bias, and supporting iterative optimization—making internal linking precise, comprehensive, and effortless. Explore further details on how internal linking works in our guide to recipes.

How Do Nearby Recipes Work?

When creating internal linking recipes, you typically define rules specifying:

  • Source pages: Pages you want to build links from
  • Destination pages: Pages you want to build links to
  • Anchor text: Text used in the link
  • Modules or blocks: Where the links appear on your page
  • Relevance constraints: Conditions ensuring linked content is relevant

To effectively set up internal links, you can define clear rules for relevance and linking structure.

The nearby feature adds an additional layer by incorporating geographical proximity:

  • Geographical radius: Define how near or far, in kilometers, destination pages should be from your source page's location.
  • Geocoding: Internallinking.io allows you to select the page content containing geographical data (latitude/longitude or a place name), automatically converting this into geographical coordinates.

Practical Example

Consider a page about a plumber in Malvern. Relevant inlinks naturally include other closely related professional services. Nearby recipes expand relevance geographically, building links to services beyond traditional administrative boundaries:

  • Heating specialists in Colwall (approx. 4 miles away, despite different counties)
  • Plumbers in Powick
  • Bathroom fitters in Leigh Sinton
  • Gas engineers in Barnards Green

These local SEO links are geographically close, making them highly relevant, even though traditional taxonomies might not link them effectively. You can see this approach in action in our RVshare Case Study.

Balancing Geographical Radius and Relevance

Effective internal linking for SEO involves careful balancing. A very small geographical radius might limit linkage, isolating pages and making it challenging to build enough inlinks. Conversely, a large radius might link to many less relevant pages, diluting the effectiveness of your local SEO internal link building efforts. The optimal radius varies significantly based on your site's scale and type:

  • National parks linking to campgrounds (US)
  • Luxury real estate listings (Cyprus)
  • Postal code regions (Belgium)

Each scenario demands tailored radius settings as part of your internal linking best practices to balance precision and relevance.

Iterative Refinement and Analysis

Internallinking.io streamlines the process of optimizing internal linking and local SEO:

This iterative process allows rapid optimization to enhance your internal linking SEO strategy effectively. To add more sophisticated rules, see our tips on creating additional linking recipes.

Dynamic Updating and Automation

Internallinking.io, as an internal linking tool, dynamically rebuilds the linking graph after each crawl:

  • Automatically removing internal broken links, avoiding 404 errors
  • Ensuring new eCommerce pages receive immediate, relevant inlinks from nearby locations, continuously building links to maintain optimal internal linking structure

Seamless integration on your site ensures these updates go live without manual intervention, significantly reducing the effort to fix internal broken links on your website.

Customer Love

“Similar AI’s nearby linking feature […] transformed a manual, time-consuming process into an automated system that better serves both our content team and our users. The intelligent, intent-driven linking structure not only eliminates maintenance workload but also creates a more natural user journey through related content.”
— Martijn Scheijbeler, SVP Marketing at RVshare

Benefits of Nearby Recipes

  • Improved User Experience: Quickly deliver geographically relevant links
  • Enhanced Local SEO Relevance: Strengthen local SEO link building efforts and internal linking SEO signals for search engines
  • Automated Precision: Dynamically manage geographic relevance beyond administrative constraints

By utilizing nearby recipes, your local SEO and internal linking strategy become geographically precise, contextually meaningful, scalable, and vastly superior to manual, taxonomy-driven link building methods.