Field Notes: 

The Internal Linking Problem

This one goes back to 2024, and it starts with a website that had been alive for twenty-odd years. Two decades of content piled up layer on layer, most of it genuinely good, but the site had grown into something where the customer journey changed depending on which button you happened to press. The silos were tangled and confused. For readers of a certain age, the line "You're playing all the right notes, not necessarily in the right order" might resonate. That was our problem. We're a market leader, but the website let us down. 

So we tore it down and we rebuilt it. Cleaner, far more usable, a proper job. And in all that focus on usability, we missed the thing that mattered most: being found in the first place. Paid search was covering for it, masking how badly organic was actually doing.

So, we brought an agency in on a three-month trial. To their credit, they put their finger on it straight away: we had good content sitting on a broken structure. The catch was the pace. The plan they laid out was a long, slow march, the kind that just so happens to need the trial extending at the end of it. However, our team isn't built for slow. If we want something, we want it yesterday. So, we took their entire restructure plan and implemented the lot in four weeks. The agency didn't last.

Then came nine months of proper graft. We rewrote hundreds of pages of content to modern SEO and GEO principles. We cut cannibalisation, added alt text, renamed images properly, all the unglamorous detail work nobody ever sees. For backlinking, we enlisted an external agency to focus on improving our domain authority. 

And then the results showed up. Searches that had been sitting on page seven were suddenly at position seven. 

The thing about our team is that we're never happy with where we are. Once we hit a pinnacle or a personal best, we move the target forward. There's always something you can do to improve. So, looking at what we'd already done, it was apparent that the next thing that would help us move the needle was internal linking. 

That's where we hit a wall we couldn't climb with what we had. 

I could pull CSVs of canonical issues all day, but nothing out there would tell me where my high-value pages were sharing their equity, or where the linking opportunities were hiding.

So I went to IT with a specific ask. I wanted to feed in a set of search terms and the destination page I expected them to point to, and get back a clear list: exactly which pages already linked to it, where the gaps were, and what the anchor text was doing across the lot of them.

That became a tool that would go on to be named Lennon Tree Connect - an internal linking tracker. It immediately removed months of work from my future in one go. It solved one specific problem, did it well, and the exciting thing was that there was nothing else that could do it. 

Of course, there are SEO audit tools available for a premium price, but none of them solved the internal linking problem. Lennon Tree Connect did, and it was the first domino in the chain. 

- The Gardener. 2026-06-22.