Over the past decade, the internet has shifted away from blogs toward social media platforms.
When blogs were king, websites were largely exploratory—we browsed them to gather information, make decisions, and connect with others.
But the rise of social media changed this dynamic completely. As a result, websites are no longer the exploratory medium of the internet; instead, they are now transactional.
Because of this, all of your pages are now effectively sales pages.
And these pages are only successful if they help a visitor close an information gap or solve a specific problem (ideally through a purchase of some sort!).
But the rules are a little different for sales pages…
One thing you should consider every time you spin up a new page is an SEO concept known as internal linking.
Quite simply, this is the practice of linking to other pages of your site. And it’s a powerful way to signal to both search engines and humans that a topic is important and relevant to your site.
For example, let’s say you’re creating a new page about cat food, and you’ve already got an established page about cats.
In this case, it certainly makes sense to link your main cat page from your new cat food page. And it may also make sense to link your cat food page from your main cat page.
This type of interlinking strengthens the signal between these two pages and establishes a strong connection that is easily detected by search engines. In other words, this bolsters your SEO.
Interlinking these cat pages is a win-win-win. Your cat page gets stronger; your cat food page gets stronger; and visitors to both of these pages will enjoy a richer, deeper experience.
But with sales pages, interlinking is not such an obvious win-win-win situation!
Know why? 🤔
Because links on sales pages are distractions that kill conversions!
And this is why savvy marketers go out of their way to reduce—or even eliminate—links on sales pages. (To win at sales, you need customers focused on buying rather than on distractions.)
Now let’s zoom out for a moment:
If the internet has changed to the point that your pages should now all (essentially) be sales pages…
And if links are bad for conversions…
Then what the heck do we do? Give up on interlinking altogether and throw away the essential site architecture benefits? (This also hurts us over time because we lose out on the compounding effects of link signals.)
I don’t accept that answer, and neither should you.
Juicy Links bolster SEO and preserve conversions!
Although I’ve known about this problem for some time, I only recently stumbled upon a fantastic solution I’ll call juicy links.
The idea is simple:
Juicy links pass all the link juice and preserve site architecture benefits, but without the intentionally-distracting display normally associated with links.
The point is for visitors not to notice these links while they are engaged in the conversion process. (And as far as search engines are concerned, these are just regular links.)
Watch the video below for everything you need to know about juicy links, including how to add them to your site!
Psst! There’s a juicy link on this page. Can you find it? 😎
Custom CSS for Juicy Links in the Focus WordPress Theme
If you’re using the Focus WordPress Theme, add the following Custom CSS to your site to enable juicy links:
.grt {
a {
&.juicy {
color: inherit;
cursor: text;
text-decoration: none;
&:hover {
text-decoration: none;
}
}
}
}
After adding this CSS, simply add <a class="juicy"> to turn any link into a juicy link!
