SearchPilot: nearby-region links lifted organic traffic 7%

A site with thousands of near-identical regional pages has an obvious internal linking gap: pages for neighboring areas rarely link to each other, even though they compete for related queries and sit close together in the site’s own geography. SearchPilot, the same controlled SEO A/B-testing firm behind our FAQ content split tests, ran a split test on exactly that gap, on a client with about 8,000 regional pages across the USA, each displaying nearby physical company locations by area.

What the test changed#

SearchPilot split the regional pages into a control group and a variant group. On variant pages, it added links from each regional page to its 6 nearest neighboring regional pages, roughly twelve new internal links per page on average. Control pages kept their existing linking pattern unchanged, with nothing else added. Everything else on both groups of pages, content, layout, the rest of the site’s navigation, stayed identical, so the only variable in play was the new nearby-region links.

The result, and what SearchPilot did not disclose#

Pages that received the new links saw a 7% uplift in organic traffic compared to the unchanged control pages. SearchPilot’s own conclusion was blunt: these regional pages had been starved of internal link equity, and giving them links from their closest neighbors passed some of that equity through, showing up as more organic traffic. Unlike SearchPilot’s FAQ content test, this write-up does not state a confidence or credible interval for the 7% figure, and it does not give exact test start or end dates, only that it ran as a controlled experiment on SearchPilot’s own testing platform.

A controlled experiment, not a correlation study#

This is a different kind of evidence than the site’s other internal linking coverage. JetOctopus’s DOM.RIA case study measured Googlebot crawl visits before and after one client moved links to a better position on its own site, a single-site, before-and-after read. Zyppy’s 23-million-link study went the other direction, correlating internal link counts against Google Search Console clicks across 1,800 sites, with no single site’s links ever changed as part of the study. SearchPilot’s nearby-region test sits between those two: one site, like DOM.RIA’s case, but with a genuine control group running at the same time as the variant, like Zyppy’s correlation could never establish on its own. It answers a question neither sibling piece can: whether adding links between already-existing, already-indexed pages causes a traffic change, isolated from whatever else happened on the site during the test window.

Why we care#

Crawl visits rising, as in the DOM.RIA case, and click counts tracking with link count at scale, as in Zyppy’s study, are both consistent with internal linking mattering. Neither proves that adding a link to an existing page changes its organic traffic, because neither ran a controlled test. SearchPilot’s nearby-region test did, and it found a real, if modestly documented, uplift: 7% more organic traffic on pages that gained links from their closest geographic neighbors, nothing changed on the control pages that didn’t. For any site with a cluster of related, thin, or isolated regional or category pages, that is the specific, tested case for cross-linking them to their nearest neighbors, not a general license to add links everywhere.