---
title: "SearchPilot: nearby-region links lifted organic traffic 7%"
url: https://seomadman.com/studies/nearby-regions-internal-linking-ab-test-searchpilot
section: studies
published: 2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z
author: Adam Hafez
topics: ["Technical SEO"]
---

# SearchPilot: nearby-region links lifted organic traffic 7%

## The short answer

SearchPilot ran a controlled split test on a site with roughly 8,000 regional pages across the USA. Variant pages gained links from each of the 6 nearest neighboring regional pages, about twelve new internal links per page; control pages got none. Linked pages saw a 7% organic traffic uplift.

## Key takeaways

- SearchPilot's client operated approximately 8,000 regional pages across the USA, each showing nearby physical company locations by geographic area.
- The variant group added links from each regional page to its 6 nearest neighboring regional pages, roughly twelve new internal links per page on average.
- The control group of regional pages received no new links, isolating the added internal links as the only variable in play.
- Pages that received the new nearby-region links saw a 7% uplift in organic traffic compared to the unchanged control pages.
- SearchPilot's own write-up does not disclose a confidence or credible interval for this result, unlike some of its other published split tests.

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](/studies/faq-content-ab-test-searchpilot), 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](/studies/internal-linking-crawl-coverage-case) 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](/research/internal-linking-crawl-depth-zyppy-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.

## Sources

1. [SEO Split Test: Lessons from Nearby Location Links](https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/seo-split-test-lessons-nearby-location-links) - SearchPilot (primary)