The verdict
Take twelve posts at random from the blog and count the contextual links in the body text of each. Not the menu, not the sidebar, not the related-posts block. Three to six per post is where a blog is doing its job. On most clinic blogs the number is zero, and twelve posts is enough to prove it without reading a hundred.
The finding I write up most often on a clinic blog is a count, and the count is usually zero.
Not a low number. Zero contextual internal links across twelve posts sampled at random, on a blog that has been running for three years.
The method, and you can run it yourself
Twelve posts, half an hour
- Take twelve posts at random. Not the twelve most recent, which are usually the best ones. Sort by date and take every nth post across the whole archive.
- Count only links in the body text. A link that appears on every post is navigation. It tells you nothing about this post and it is not what you are measuring.
- Count the destinations separately. Five links that all go to the same service page is one relationship, not five.
- Note how many point at a service or condition page rather than at another blog post. A blog that only links to itself is a closed loop.
- Three to six per post is the band. Below three the post is isolated. Above six in a 900-word post and you are usually linking for the sake of it.
Why a sample rather than the whole archive
Because the answer does not change and the practice owner needs to see it, not read a spreadsheet about it.
Twelve posts fits on a page. If eleven of twelve have no contextual links, nobody asks whether post forty-seven was different. The point has landed and the remediation is obvious.
Sampling also stops the audit turning into a project. An internal linking finding is only useful if somebody acts on it, and a finding that arrives as a 200-row spreadsheet gets filed.
What the count is actually measuring
Whether the blog is connected to the business.
Google says it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl, and that good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page being linked to. A post with no links out is a post making no claim about what it relates to.
It is also a reasonable proxy for whether the posts were written by somebody who knows the practice. A clinician writing about a condition they treat will link to the treatment page without being asked, because the link is the natural next sentence. A post bought by the batch will not, because the writer has never seen the rest of the site.
The result that is worse than zero
Three to six links per post, all of them to other blog posts, none to a service or condition page.
That passes the count and fails the purpose. The blog is circulating attention among itself and never handing the reader to the page that describes what you do. I would rather find zero, because zero is obviously broken and this looks fine on a report.
My note: I do not count links added retrospectively by a plugin that matches keywords. Those tend to point at whatever page happens to own that phrase, which is how a post about neck pain ends up linking to a blog post about office chairs.
What to do with the number
Fix the twelve you sampled first. They are a representative dozen and they will teach whoever is writing what a contextual link looks like in practice. Then apply it forward, and only go back through the archive if the blog is small enough that it is an afternoon.
The pages the links should be pointing at are the ones with a floor under them, which is covered in how long a clinic page has to be. A blog linking into thin service pages does not help much.
Google’s own guidance on people-first content asks whether readers leave feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources. A post that answers a question and then offers no way further into the site is that feeling, made structural.
The short version
- Twelve posts at random, spread across the archive. Not the twelve newest.
- Count contextual links in body text only. Navigation is not a finding.
- Three to six per post is the band.
- Count unique destinations, not raw links.
- Zero is the usual answer on a clinic blog.
- Links only to other posts is worse than zero, because it passes the count.
- Fix the twelve you sampled first. They teach the pattern.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and internal linking is usually the cheapest thing on a site that already has the pages.
