Every article should carry between two and four links to the catalog, placed inside the text, in the exact paragraph where the reader has just understood they need that product. Informational content links to a category; decision content links to a product page. And you have to review them: a link to a discontinued product is worse than no link at all.
Summary
- The banner at the end doesn't work. The link goes inside the text, in the paragraph where the reader has just understood they need that product.
- Informational to category, decision to product page. That's the whole rule, and categories also age better because they survive catalog changes.
- Between two and four links per article. Fewer signals there's no commercial path; more turns the text into a brochure and the reader stops trusting it.
- The anchor describes what's on the other side. «15% vitamin C serum» works; «click here» tells neither the reader nor Google anything.
- When you discontinue a product, check which articles mentioned it. A broken link is bad and a silent redirect to the home page is worse.
Why almost no store blog links to its catalog
It's not laziness. It's because the blog and the store are usually built at different moments, with different goals and sometimes by different people. Someone decided they had to «make content to rank», articles were written about industry topics, and no one stopped to think about what should happen after someone read them.
The result is a blog that does its job halfway: it attracts visits and hands them back to Google. When you review the internal linking of a store with forty or fifty articles, what you usually find is that only a handful link to any product, and almost always from a final banner nobody looks at.
A post that leads to no product page just takes up space in the sitemap.
Where the link goes (and where it doesn't)
This is the part that gives the most results and the one most often done wrong. The link doesn't go at the end: it goes in the paragraph where the reader has just understood they need that product.
Article about skincare. At the end, a separate block:
Discover our products → View catalog
The reader has already decided to leave. The block has an ad format, which is why the eye skips it. It answers no question: it's an interruption.
Middle of the article, explaining what to do with dehydrated skin:
…and that's where a serum with low-molecular-weight hyaluronic acid comes in, which
penetrates more than traditional formulas.
with the link on the product name.
The link is the natural continuation of the sentence. The reader clicks because they've just understood they need it, not because they were asked to.
The difference isn't design, it's timing. A link placed when the reader doesn't yet have the problem clearly is noise; the same link three paragraphs later is help.
Product page or category: the rule
The usual doubt is where to point. The short rule is informational to category, decision to product page, but it's worth understanding why:
| If the article is… | Link to… | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Informational or discovery «what it is», «how it works» |
Category | The reader is still comparing. The category lets them choose and doesn't expire when stock changes |
| Buying guide or comparison «which to choose», «X vs Y» |
Category + 2-3 product pages | The category gives context and the product pages pin down the options you mention |
| Specific product question «how to use it», «is it good for» |
Product page | The reader already knows what they want. Sending them to a category adds an unnecessary step |
| Brand or news post | None forced | If there's no natural path, forcing one shows and costs credibility |
Categories age better than product pages. If you're unsure between the two and the article will live for years, link to the category: it will still work when that specific product no longer exists. It's the difference between a link that maintains itself and one you have to review every season.
How to write the anchor text
The link text has to describe what's on the other side. It sounds obvious and yet the mistake keeps happening:
- Bad: «you can see it here» — says nothing, to neither the reader nor Google.
- Bad: «our flagship product» — vague and self-referential.
- Good: «15% vitamin C serum» — describes the destination with the word people search for.
- Good: «our selection of serums for sensitive skin» — when it goes to a category.
And a warning: don't use the exact same anchor in twenty articles. Vary the wording naturally, the way you write when you're not thinking about SEO.
How to do it on each platform
The editor changes and so do the details that bite, but the criteria are the same everywhere. If you want the detail for your case, we have a page per platform: Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, WordPress and Magento.
WooCommerce
The WordPress editor's link finder locates products directly as you type their name, which makes it the most comfortable platform for this. If you use blocks, the product block also lets you insert the product page with image and price inside the text — useful in comparisons, though for regular linking a text link performs better because it doesn't look like an ad.
Shopify
Articles live at /blogs/blog-name/ and products at /products/. The editor
lets you link without trouble, but there's one detail that bites: if a product is in several
collections, Shopify can generate different URLs for the same product page.
Always link to the canonical URL, the /products/ one without the
collection in front, so you don't split signals between duplicates.
PrestaShop
The content editor lets you insert normal links, so technically there's no mystery. What's worth doing first is exporting the list of products and categories with their URLs, to have it in front of you while you write instead of hunting down each product page by hand.
Watch out for ID-based URLs. If your store generates paths like
/12-product-name, that path changes if the catalog is reorganized. Check that you have
friendly URLs enabled before linking fifty articles.
The part nobody does: reviewing it
Linking at publishing time is half the work. The other half is those links still making sense a year from now, and that's where almost every store fails:
- Discontinued products. When you retire a reference, check which articles mention it. A broken link is bad; a silent redirect to the home page is worse, because the reader doesn't understand what happened.
- Reorganized categories. Structural changes break internal links without warning.
- Articles that aged. If the post still recommends the range from three seasons ago, the link works but the recommendation doesn't.
A quarterly review is enough for most stores. What matters is that it's a real review and not a broken-link crawl: a link that returns 200 may be leading to a product you no longer want to sell.
How to know how many you have right now
Before you start linking, measure where you're starting from. It's a number almost no one in a store knows, and it usually comes as a surprise:
- Pull the list of all your blog URLs from the sitemap.
- For each one, count how many links go out to
/products/, to your categories or to your platform's product-page paths. - Divide: how many articles have at least one. That percentage is your starting point.
If you would rather not do it by hand, our commercial linker test runs exactly these three steps against your domain and gives you the number. Free, no sign-up. And if you want to see what the full job looks like, it is written up in connecting your blog to your catalog.
If the number comes out below twenty percent, you're not an exception: that's normal. And it's why this is usually the fix with the highest return per hour of work on a store's blog — you don't need to write anything new, just connect what already exists.
Frequently asked questions
How many catalog links should an article have?
Between two and four in an article of about fifteen hundred words. Fewer usually signals the article has no commercial path; more turns it into a brochure and the reader stops trusting it.
Does it help SEO or only conversion?
Both. It passes internal authority to the pages that sell, which are usually the ones that get the fewest links from outside, and it tells Google what relationship exists between a topic and a product.
What if my blog doesn't talk about products?
Then the prior question is a different one: why that blog exists. If the content has no path toward what you sell, it may be bringing in visits that were never going to buy. It's not always a mistake —there's brand content worth having— but it's worth knowing how much of your blog is in that situation and deciding it, instead of letting it just happen.
How many of your posts lead to a product page?
It's the star number of the free diagnosis: we count how many of your articles link to your catalog and which ones get traffic and zero commercial exits. By email, no cost.
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