SEO – Internal Link Building

USE THIS spreadsheet for internal link building: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tslBLahd8XLWbFI7yEaHViqMr2jkOeFwd_Q5x7Awk5c/edit?usp=sharing

Some of you will already have a list of URLs mapped to primary keywords.

If so, fantastic – paste them into the first tab of your Google Sheet (this is the one titled: ‘#1 – URLs / Keywords’) and jump straight to step #2.

If not you can use either SEMRush (click here for a free 14-day trial).

But first, you need to gather a list of URLs from your website.

If you have a sitemap (which you should)…

You can simply copy/paste the list of URLs from the sitemap into the sheet.

But if not, here’s another super-quick way to do this:

Go to Google and search for the following:

site:clientdomain.com

This will return a list of all the pages on your website.

I also recommend setting the number of results per page to 100 under ‘search settings’:

You can then use this free Chrome bookmarklet to scrape all 100 results from the SERPs.

Paste these into the URLs column in the Google Sheet.

Next, use ahrefs.com to extract the keywords.

Just go to the URL report (under Organic Research) in SEMRush.

Paste the first URL from your Google Sheet into the search bar.

Click Export.

Open the .csv in Excel, then copy/paste the list of keywords into this free tool.

This will convert the list of keywords into a comma-separated list.

Copy the comma-separated list into the ‘primary keywords’ column in your Google Sheet.

Rinse and repeat for the rest of the URLs on your list.

“LSI keywords” is really just a technical term form “related keywords” and while there is much debate about how useful they are for optimizing content…

…they are a great source to find related keywords we can use to build internal links!

For example, if we take the keyword ‘product launch formula’…

An LSI keyword could be:

• ‘product launches’
• ‘launching a product’
• ‘how to launch a product’

And because you’ve already got a list of keywords for each of your URLs…

Finding LSI keywords should be a breeze!

Start by brainstorming related keywords. Add them to your spreadsheet.

Still, brainstorming will only get you so far. So here are a couple of other methods:

How To Find LSI Keywords With Google

Copy one of the keywords from your Google Sheet and paste it into Google.

Scroll to the bottom of the results page and you should see a list of related searches.

Copy relevant keywords into the LSI Keywords column in your Google Sheet

Note: not all keywords will be relevant, so be picky!

Rinse and repeat for the rest of the keywords (and for all the URLs) on your list.

How To Find LSI Keywords With LSIGraph.com

To find LSI keywords easily you can use LSIGraph…

Go to LSIGraph.com and paste in a keyword from your spreadsheet.

Then click Generate.

It should then find and kick back a bunch of LSI keywords.

Add any relevant ones to the LSI Keywords column in your spreadsheet.

Then repeat for each keyword on your list.

Good news: most of the hard work is done. SEO Auto Linker will handle pretty much everything from here.

I know the plugin hasn’t been updated for a long time, but it’s what I use and I can only share what I do with you.

But first things first…

You need to install the plugin.

Once installed, go to the plugin page in your WP dashboard and click Add New Link.

Next, go back to your Google Sheet and select the tab labeled ‘#2 – For WP’.

This sheet pulls all of the keywords you entered into a neat list.

This can then paste into WordPress.

All you have to do is select a URL from the dropdown.

Copy/paste the URL keywords from the ‘COPY ME’ column into SEO Auto Linker.

Like this:

Click Save.

SEO Auto Linker will comb through your website looking for occurrences of those keywords in other posts/pages.

If it finds any, it’ll automagically add an anchored link to your specific blog post.

Note: I usually set the Links per Page option to 1, as I don’t want a ton of links on every page – that just looks spammy.