John Mueller of Google said that by just moving a link from one position on a page to another position on a page - you likely won't see any ranking boost from that action. He said on Twitter "I wouldn't assume that you'd get a boost out of just moving links from one part of the page to another part though."

Sure, moving links around from a usability perspective might make sense. But for SEO purposes alone, it probably won't make a huge difference in your rankings.

There are probably exceptions to this, like having a link in your footer's legal disclaimer versus your body content - that probably is a bigger change from Google's perspective.