Thread:SEOkitten/@comment-5175866-20160908225528/@comment-26321732-20160920143122

Hello, hello! Thanks for the kind words. I am glad to hear the presentation was helpful. Apologies for the delayed response here. . . I had to do some research and think about how best to approach this.

I can send a screenshot from Search Console, but the Search Analytics Report displays information for ranking keywords only. Since an important goal of internal linking testing is to move more terms into ranking position, the average on that report can actually go down as overall SEO health improves (e.g. more keywords in position 20 or 10 brings the average rank down but search visibility up).

Google reports an average search position of 5.2 for ranking keywords i In the past 28 days,  but this is a small sample set since there is so much search competition around this topic.

In a case like this, I feel like manual tracking is going to be the best approach. Recommend creating a spreadsheet that includes two groups: (1) keywords that rank in position 5-10 and (2) keywords that rank 11-100. These are the keyword groups we target in our tests too.

Record the number of relevant internal links added to each page and check the rankings once a week for 6-8 weeks. That is the range during which we would expect to see a change in search. I can check the average rank at the end of that timeframe too for an additional data point.

Tests like these are time-consuming, so no worries if this sounds like too much work at the moment. Internal links are important for human users and worth adding regardless of the impact on rankings.