In this case study, you’ll learn how guitarguitar, the UK’s largest guitar retailer, improved user experience (UX) and boosted organic visibility by optimising internal linking on their website. By leveraging Screaming Frog’s custom search function, they efficiently identified linking opportunities, reduced crawl depth and enhanced Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) performance, all while increasing user engagement across their website.
This highlights the strong connection between internal linking and website performance.
The client
guitarguitar is the UK’s largest guitar retailer with 6 stores across the UK, running since 2004, with over 160 expert employees. They stock everything a musician could possibly need, whether they’re a beginner, intermediate or pro player rocking the main stage.
guitarguitar are the first and only UK guitar retailer to offer a 3-year warranty and 30-day exchange as
standard.
The challenge
guitarguitar’s main goal was to enhance the user experience on their website, as they noticed users had to click through multiple pages to reach important content, leading to longer navigation times and a less efficient browsing experience.
The client knew that improving internal linking to these deeper pages would not only improve user
experience, but also increase the flow of PageRank to them. This would make them more important in the eyes of the search engines and improve their organic visibility.
PageRank, developed by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is an algorithm that ranks web pages based on the idea that a link to a page acts as a citation or endorsement. The underlying principle is that pages with more links (especially from authoritative sites) are seen as more valuable or influential. While this concept wasn’t new—it had been used in academic citation systems to identify influential papers—it was adapted by Google to measure the relevance and importance of web pages. The more high-quality links a page receives, the higher its PageRank, helping it rank better in search results.
This presented a major challenge though as guitarguitar knew what pages were 3+ clicks deep thanks to the crawl depth reporting in Screaming Frog, but needed a seamless and quick solution to help identify linking opportunities across such a large website.
Their strategy
The client tackled this challenge using Screaming Frog’s custom search function. While they knew which pages needed better internal linking, they lacked an efficient way to identify, organise and prioritise the pages that should link to those deeper ones.
By compiling a list of primary, secondary and even tertiary keywords for each deep page, they ran these through the custom search feature to locate relevant pages that didn’t yet have hyperlinks.
This significantly sped up the process of finding internal linking opportunities. The identified pages were then updated to improve both user experience and PageRank flow.
Without Screaming Frog’s custom search, this would have been an extremely time-consuming task for a website of this size.
The results
guitarguitar have experienced huge improvements in crawl depth where their internal link distribution
and weaker pages are getting stronger and the volume of pages that are 3+ clicks away from the
homepage are continually declining.
The client has seen great improvements for indicative UX metrics such as both bounce rate and
pages per session in Google Analytics.
In terms of organic performance, these changes have boosted the visibility of those key pages and across the site, as shown in the Sistrix graphic below.
Client quote
Screaming Frog has become one of our key platforms when working on fixing broken links and finding
internal linking opportunities across the website.We have been able to become much more efficient when undertaking these tasks and we’re able to
invest this invaluable time and effort on other important aspects of SEO.
Want to learn more?
Want to learn more about enhancing your website’s UX and SEO through strategies like internal linking? This case study complements the actionable insights found in the SEO-focused chapters of Digital and Social Media Marketing: A Results-Driven Approach (3rd edition). Explore the book for in-depth techniques that can help improve your search rankings and user experience.