How To Use Link Whisper and Ahrefs To Build Internal Links in 10 Mins
Contents
Link Whisper customer Michael Dinich provided the following case study.
Michael is the owner of Wealth of Geeks. Founded in 2018, Wealth of Geeks is your one-stop source for the latest updates in tech and gaming, exclusive celebrity interviews, and pop culture news.
This simple SEO hack will boost your search traffic, reduce your bounce rate, and increase your page views in just a few minutes a day. While it may sound too good to be true, Link Whisper helped me achieve these results and can do the same for you.
Background
I stumbled onto this hack from the advice of a blogging friend who suggested I try Link Whisper. Since he raved about the internal linking tool, I tried it on my main website Wealth of Geeks.
Wealth of Geeks has more than five thousand pieces of content and publishes more than 30 articles daily, ranging from news to evergreen SEO-optimized posts.
Internal linking is challenging when generating that much content, as it’s nearly impossible to be familiar with each piece and how it should be linked together.
Within a few minutes of installing Link Whisper, it made killer internal link recommendations that weren’t even on our radar. We quickly improved our internal linking strategy using the plugin and saw a nice bump in organic search rankings.
Since it improved SEO, the plugin won me over. Still, I needed to quantify how much it helped, and installing Link Whisper on our newly acquired site provided all the proof I needed.
We purchased a parenting blog that received approximately 3,000 monthly visits from Google. Our goal was to get the site to 30,000 monthly pageviews to meet AdThrive’s minimum threshold for second sites.
Once we transferred the new site and installed Link Whisper, we immediately set about improving internal linking. We focused on posts at the bottom of page one or two of Google’s search results.
When Link Whisper helped us identify content gaps, we syndicated related supporting content to build more internal links without producing more original content.
Within 60 days of acquiring the site – and without publishing new content – we crossed 30,000 monthly pageviews and monetized the site with AdThrive.
The top money-earning post on the site climbed to spot two from spot nine simply by building better internal links.
I’m now a huge fan of Link Whisper. I use it on all my websites and recommend it to all my blogging mastermind group members.
Here is the step-by-step process we use to achieve these results.
How to Use Ahrefs and Link Whisper To Automate Internal Linking
As a site owner, auditing your site to ensure optimal performance is essential. Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools that comprehensively analyzes your site’s health.
Step 1: To get started, log in to Ahrefs and click on the ‘Site Audit’ option from the top bar.
You’ll need to have added your website as a project to see all the data, but once you’ve done that, you’ll have a wealth of information about your site.
Once you click on the ‘Site Audit,’ you will see this:
It will take you here. Click anywhere below ‘All Crawls’ to get to the reports.
Step 2: Click on ‘Link Opportunities’ on the left to see all the link opportunities based on your organic traffic and current keyword rankings.
How it Works: While we tend to remember our best posts and keywords for internal linking, Ahrefs helps you find specific opportunities you may otherwise overlook.
Ahrefs takes the top 10 search queries of each page on your website and finds those keyword mentions on any other post/page. When it finds a match, it will show as a linking opportunity.
The report will show the following:
- Source Post: This is where you insert the internal link FROM.
- Keyword: This keyword is in your source post and for which the target page is ranking, and
- Target Post: The target post, the one you insert the link to FROM the source post
Ahrefs will show many linking opportunities. But, it would take days to open each post and add internal links manually.
*Link Whisper has entered the chat.
Filter the linking opportunities by keyword volume to prioritize the best options for internal linking and make a list of the top suggestions.
Step 3: Install Link Whisper (if you haven’t already)
If you aren’t using Link Whisper, purchase and download it on your computer. When downloading, copy the license key, as you’ll need it when installing the plugin.
Step 4: Open your WordPress dashboard, and navigate to ‘Add New’ under the Plugins option on the left.
Click ‘Upload Plugin,’ choose the .zip file you downloaded, and install the plugin.
Next, navigate to the Link Whisper menu, enter the license key, and activate the plugin. You will then run a link scan to open up the necessary ‘Auto-Linking‘ feature.
Once you complete the link scan, click on the ‘Auto Linking’ feature on the left of the WordPress menu.
Select the Link Whisper sub-category ‘Auto-Linking’ on the left-hand side, and it will show this window:
Enter the keyword, post the link to the target page, and click ‘Create Auto Link Rule.’
Link Whisper will automatically create internal links from other posts that mention “Fincon” to your target page. The image shows that the plugin has created five internal links to our target post in under two minutes.
Note: If you write a new post with the defined keyword, Link Whisper does not add internal links automatically. You must refresh the auto-linking report for it to update. You can find that button at the top left.
Voila, you have successfully used Ahrefs and Link Whisper to automate internal linking for your website! This is a great way to optimize your internal linking for maximum SEO benefit. In addition, creating a habit of tracking your internal link opportunities each month will benefit your growth.
By taking this approach, you can ensure the pages and posts on your site are linked together, and visitors can quickly find the relevant content. Internal linking will also help Google understand your website’s structure and how to serve relevant content better. It may also help your content rank better in search.
Grab a Link Whisper Coupon here.
Why Are Internal Links so Important for SEO?
Based on my personal experience of owning multiple sites and running a blogging mastermind group, these are the most important reasons to focus on internal linking:
- By linking to other pages on your site, you help Google understand the relationships between your pages and the overall topic of your site. It makes it simple for Google crawlers to index your pages and rank them accordingly.
- Internal linking helps improve your site’s usability by guiding visitors to related content.
So not only does internal linking help Google bots crawl and understand your website, but it also benefits your users, which should be a top priority.
Will it Hurt To Use the Same Anchor Text Over Again?
So, you may wonder if using the exact anchor text “Fincon” in five separate posts is too much. It can often go up to 10-20+ internal links on the same anchor text. The simple answer is NO; Google will not penalize your site.
If we assume you are a personal finance blogger with two posts, passive income ideas and residual income.
Generally speaking, people use these words interchangeably, but they mean two different things. Google bots may also view them as similar content.
However, if you have 20 internal posts linking to the posts about ‘passive income ideas’ with the anchor text ‘passive income’ and 20 articles with an internal link to the ‘residual income’ post with the anchor text ‘residual income,’ this will give a clear indication to Google that;
- They are two different articles and do not overlap
- It will clarify which is about passive income and residual income.
Internal linking is essential to help Google better understand your website and content.
Note: In using Link Whisper on multiple websites, I have not encountered a situation where I have auto-generated so many links that it could potentially become a problem with Google. However, to be on the safe side it’s probably best to avoid one-word anchors that are extremely common and generic, such as “lifestyle” or “frugal.”
Pro Tips To Use Ahrefs Link Opportunities and Link Whisper:
1. Create Content Clusters
Suppose you have just a few internal linking opportunities for the keywords shown, and it has a good search volume (signaling good traffic potential). In that case, you can create a content cluster around this topic to build page authority.
You write more content you can link from the target page or syndicate content if you cannot write.
The benefit is two-fold. Using our previous example:
- First, our keyword, i.e., Fincon, has a search volume of 3,000 monthly searches, which is a fair amount. You want to boost your page rank, and creating similar content will help you build authority with Google and get to the top three positions on the first page of search engine results.
- Second, create supporting content around the topic and create content clusters. Google will begin to rank you more quickly in that niche.
Note: The link opportunities feature can also help you with keyword research. Often, you will find a keyword with great traffic potential, but the target page is not evergreen content.
Therefore, it would be best if you could use such an opportunity. For example, you can go to the target page and do one of the following:
- If your slug isn’t specific and works well with the target keyword, update your content and add more information to make it evergreen
- If your slug is specific and won’t make sense with the updated content, you can take the risk of changing the slug.
If you follow this method, it will give you great keyword suggestions with high traffic potential.
2. Orphaned posts
Orphaned posts are web pages on your blog that have no internal links from other pages.
In short, you still need to build inbound links on your website to these pages, and doing so will make it easier for these posts to appear in search results.
If you don’t build internal links to orphaned posts, Google assumes the content is unimportant and ignores them. In addition, your readers may have difficulty finding them.
Link Whisper helps you find all these orphaned posts on your site in one place — select ‘Reports’ under the Link Whisper menu on the left-hand side of your WordPress Menu.
It will show your complete link profile.
Click on ‘Orphaned Posts’ to see the entire list.
If you identify important posts with zero internal links, start creating internal links from your top posts, which will help boost rankings for those posts.
Don’t Wait To Build Internal Links as a Part of Your SEO Strategy
Internal linking is one of the most essential SEO techniques. It helps establish website hierarchy and keeps your visitors engaged on your website. Internal linking can boost your rankings and increase organic search traffic when done right.
You can use Ahrefs to find internal links opportunities, and Link Whisper’s auto-link feature can quickly create internal links with one click. It has never been this easy before, and the ROI is high.
Good luck, and start optimizing today!