A key metric for any modern website or mobile experience is user engagement. This is often measured through KPIs such as time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate. But at the core of it all is one thing: Recirculation.
Recirculation means guiding users from one page on your site to another. In an era where visitors often arrive from social media or Google Discover and leave after a single article, encouraging them to explore more is essential. A proven way to do this is through smart, strategic internal linking.
We focus on making internal linking impactful and scalable. This includes AI-powered recommendations and SmartLinks, which automatically insert contextually relevant links across your content. Our recirculation modules — featured in tools like our Blueprints — are built on data, user testing, and best practices from the Google News Initiative.
Let's walk through the options and explore why these recirculation strategies work so well.
Jump Ahead:
Benefits of Recirculation
Recirculation isn't just about getting a user from Point A to Point B, it's about creating a meaningful journey. Think of it like a good road trip. Sure, you have the destination, but some of the most memorable times come from the scenic detours, unexpected stops, and curious side roads. On a website, recirculation does the same thing: It turns a one-click visit into a longer, richer experience that takes the user to other parts of your website.
Effective recirculation does more than just getting an extra click. It delivers real, measurable benefits, including:
- Increased User Engagement: Drives higher pages per session, longer time on site, and lower bounce rates.
- Improved Content Discovery: Surface the right evergreen or related content at the appropriate time for users that might have otherwise missed the content, extending the life and reach of your archives.
- Higher Revenue Opportunities: More pageviews means more ad impressions, higher RPMs, and stronger justification for premium placements or branded content.
- Loyalty Hooks: Rather than a one-and-done experience, the user gets more value from your website, and they might decide to not only stick around, but also come back for more in the future.
- Better SEO Performance: Internal linking helps search engine crawlers and users better understand your site structure, distributes authority, and boosts overall visibility.
Whether you're a publisher or brand, smart recirculation isn’t just a nice-to-have feature — it’s a core strategy for growth.
AI-Powered Related Content
AI does an amazing job of getting the right content in front of the right audience at the right time. One of the reasons it's so effective at this is because it maps related content so well.
The click-through rates are telling, too. We ran tests on AI-recommended articles vs. traditional recirculation methods (based on a section or tag) and found that the AI-recommended ones led to 20–50% higher daily click-through rates.
That's not all. The benefits of AI-powered content recommendations include:
- Improved User Satisfaction: Personalized content cuts through content overload, boosts engagement and brand loyalty, and enhances user satisfaction.
- Data-Driven Insights: AI collects and analyzes user data to understand their online behavior and offer insights into their next move. You can use this data to power your marketing campaigns and create unique content that appeals to your audience.
- Improved Reach: The more satisfied users are with your content, the more credible and authentic you will appear to Google Search, resulting in higher search rankings, increased exposure, and greater reach.
- Potential to Increase Revenue: Engaging content can make users more likely to subscribe or purchase, increasing conversion rates and business revenue.
Our recommended approach is a module with AI-recommended related articles within the body of your posts. This works well for both mobile and desktop. Another option is a side module for desktop experiences, or a module that appears below your articles.
Of course, those methods can be extended to more personalized content if you offer your users a signed-in or membership experience.
The Top 5
One element our Blueprints incorporates is a module at the bottom of every article called The Top 5. It's quite simple — five articles you absolutely can't miss and they're numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
This approach is based on Google News Initiative's guidance to (1) avoid the paradox of choice by giving users no more than 3–5 options, and (2) numbering top content makes it more appealing for users to click, giving a sort of "can't miss" or "fear of missing out" vibe.
Engaging 404s
From a user's perspective, nothing is worse than hitting a "404" page when you were expecting to find content. It's a frustrating feeling and not at all what you intended to see.
We turned that upsetting experience into a delightful one by recommending related content based on the URL slug or key phrases for the page you were seeking out. This is another AI-powered integration, which leads to much better results based on our testing.
Learn more about this functionality through our post on Engaging 404s.
SmartLinks
What if you could create links at scale:
- For words (keywords or phrases) that you use regularly across your site?
- For a particularly valuable piece of content you created, such as an explainer or a pillar post?
- Automatically instead of manually, one at a time, post by post?
These questions are precisely why we created SmartLinks. These are internal links that appear across your posts any time a certain word or phrase is mentioned. The SmartLinks Dashboard gives you a powerful way to manage these links, which quickly scale across thousands of posts.
The data supports the effectiveness of SmartLinks:
- A 25% conversion rate from SmartLinks to tag pages for an additional click after the initial one.
- For one publisher, 49% of clicks on SmartLinks are from SmartNews, bringing users from the app back to their site. (SmartLinks can appear in third-party apps as well.)
With SmartLinks 2.0, we go beyond basic linking to providing rich user experiences that are customizable. These include hover effects, opening the link in a new tab, and alternate styling that you want for specific links. It can also provide context such as trusted sources, custom tooltips, product previews, and other creative implementations.
If you'd like to learn more about how to get more out of your business with strategic internal linking best practices, reach out today for a free consultation.
