For as long as I have been getting handed business cards I have never understood peoples fascination and focus on them.

There are some things in life you KNOW you should do, and they aren’t hard to do, but they just don’t seem to get done. Internal link building is one of these!

You finish your post, get everything ready to publish, publish and then think: ****, I should really should have built some internal links!

This post will show you how to do this in 5 minutes using this tool for your site so that you never have to worry about internal linking again.

I am going to cover…

● First: Sharing some data analysis that the guys at AuthorityHacker did which shows that YES, internal links really do matter for ranking in Google.

● Second: Showing how this can be done systematically through LinkWhisper (plus my review of this tool).

(‘Data’ and ‘systematically’… 2 of my favourite words. This will be fun…)

One of the most popular books of the year is James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which explains how small, repetitive tasks which become habits and have compounding effects to transform our lives. How does that relate to internal link building? This post covers one of those small simple tasks that will have ongoing compounding benefits to your site. By making the process of internal link building easier, faster, and automatic, you can systematize a good habit!

First: Do internal links matter for SEO?

Short answer is yes!

Internal linking matters for more than just SEO purposes, but for the purposes of this article we are focusing on the SEO benefit.

Don’t let internal link building for SEO purposes distract from the more important issue of user experience and driving traffic to your $ pages.

The guys at AuthorityHacker–specifically Michal Ugor–have created a fantastic article digging into the data of 1 million links.

See their full article here: Internal Links. Great article that goes into this topic in more detail!

The bottom line:

1. Pages that rank higher in Google averaged having more internal links pointing to that page than pages that didn’t rank as highly.

2. Anchor text matters for internal links and you can be more aggressive with exact match than typically you would be for off page links.

3. A decent rule of thumb is to have 5 internal links linking out for every post and, for the pages you want to rank, up to 100 internal links pointing to them. As with most rules of thumb this will have limited application.

a. NOTE: I was shocked when I saw my average was under 1 for outbound internal links on my posts!

Second: How to Systematically Structure & Sculpt Them? LinkWhisper Review

So we know links matter and would all love to spend the time analyzing and optimizing them for every post. The reality is most of us don’t have that time.

So what is the solution? How do we get the majority of the benefit as efficiently as possible?

That is where LinkWhisper comes in, a great new tool from Spencer Hawes of NichePursuits.

Here are the steps I use, leveraging SEMRush to identify the opportunities and LinkWhisper to systematically build internal links.

Note: Any time you systematically do something it is not as ideal as fully sculpting the page rank flow with a site architecture plan. But, for the busy online entrepreneur looking for a systematic solution, I hope this helps.

Procedure for Automatically Internal Link Building

1. Identify Opportunities using SEMRush (this is optional and can all be done with LinkWhisper)

a. Note this is similar to the significant success we have had identifying the content that needs a refresh and upgrade. We are excited to combine both upgrades and internal link structure improvements to the key pages we care about and see the results!

b. Go to SEMRush and sign in

c. Enter the Domain in question

d. Go to Organic Research

e. Keyword Identification – Select metrics of ‘Position 4-20’ and ‘traffic 100+’

• The key here is to identify low hanging fruit on keywords where a small impact in link juice being passed to them will improve their ranking.

f. Export to tracking sheet–see free copy of sheet you can copy

g. Page Identification–What are the top 10-20 pages you care about? You can use Google Analytics for this or SEMRush

h. Create final plan using judgement around what pages are low hanging fruit for boosting traffic and what pages you most care about

2. Install LinkWhisper and use the sheet you made in step 1 to set it up

a. Purchase LinkWhisper here

b. Install LinkWhisper

c. Activate LinkWhisper

d. Wait for InternalLinksReport (2-5 minutes)

e. Refer to the plan you made in step 1 and systematically go through each page adding internal links for the ones you care about

3. If LinkWhisper doesn’t have any recommended internal links

a. Search Google to identify top pages for the keyword you are wanting to rank for sitel:yourdomain.com “keyword” the results should show #1 as the page you are wanting to rank for the keyword and then the next 5 pages are likely great places to put an internal link back to your target page.

b. Edit page(s) and add link back to the main page you are wanting to rank for that keyword

Conclusion

Internal link building matters and is often neglected.

LinkWisper and some manual work is a great way to efficiently get your internal link building game back in order!

Hope this actionable article was helpful!

With every business I operate, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our systems and either make them more efficient or to provide better results. This is no different when it comes to our LightningRank services. For each Lightningrank service, we rely on expired domain tools to help us fulfill our services, and in the past, we have used Register Compass, but more recently we have switched to Spamzilla.

RegisterCompass was great over the years but it’s more expensive and I find the usability of the program to be a bit harder. When taking a 3 hours period, with Register Compass we would find about 5-6 quality domains, however with Spamzilla since we have started using it, we have been able to find double that amount in the same time period on average.

We have been using this tool for just under a month and since then our team has loved it and has been able to be more productive with it, so we wanted to show you some of the cool features that go along with it. If you are interested in building out your own PBN or having us do it, using our improved system, you can take a look at this case study we did a few weeks ago.

Variety of filters to choose from

The filter section is great. It allows you to customize exactly what you are looking for down to the Topical Trust Flow you are looking for. Another feature I really like is that you are able to select the anchor text language, which helps to quickly eliminate thousands of spammy domains.

If you have a particular set of filters you like, you can also save the preset so it’s quickly usable the next time you go to find domains as well.

Usability of the Dashboard

Once you are searching for domains, the look and feel of the dashboard is very user friendly. You can quickly see the Topical Trust Flow categories under the Maj Topics heading which allows you to easily look for domains that are in the niche you are looking for.

You also have the ability to click on the number in the TF column and it will bring up the MajesticSEO screen where you can dig deeper and look at the backlinks. The one thing I don’t like is that you can’t move the headings and arrange them the way you want them to be arranged, but it’s pretty easy read the headings that it’s not a big deal.

If you are looking for domains for either building out private blog networks or you are looking for a money site domain, this tool is a fantastic tool to have and it comes at the fraction of some of the other tools in the space.

Today Content Refined turns 2.5 years old and Maddie has recently shared a BIG post about the journey!

Read about the entire journey here – Content Marketing Company or my Content Refined business review.

Plus they just had a video produced to help people learn more about Content Refined…

In this post I want to share 3 lessons I have learned from my position (idea identification, initial system architecture and assembling/stewarding the team).

Background:

In the summer of 2016 Maddie joined my team with the mandate of systematizing the content creation process for my portfolio of sites. She killed it!

From that effort we decided to launch Content Refined as a content marketing company.

I documented that launch when I announced it in this post – https://websiteincome.com/content-marketing-strategy-launch-business/

It grew incredibly well, achieving 10% week over week growth for the first few months.

There have certainly been a fair number of challenges/opportunities and in this post I hope to share from my perspective what the 3 most significant lessons were.

Lesson 1: Systems Can’t Replace People!

For everyone that reads this site they know I LOVE systems. Systematized business processes and systematic solutions to problems are core values for the business.

However, despite the engineers desire in me to build a system that doesn’t require great people to run it never happens. Great systems allow great people to execute better.

As I significantly shifted my focus in 2017 to adbank my core businesses needed to be managed and any business where there was a manager responsible for running the business did well. However any business that was solely dependent on a system went off the rails.

Maddie grew the business, Laura managed it while Maddie was on mat leave and I have had limited ongoing involvement. No system could have been built to adapt to the changed and achieved what the team has achieved!

Lesson 2: Churn is a Moral Sapingl!

Content Refined has been a great business with significant initial success and very solid longer term performance. But as with any recurring revenue business that is non-essential, churn is the enemy!

Trying to keep growth moving while fighting churn is a never ending battle and can be very unmotivating.

Sometimes even solid months feel like this…

For anyone who ever wants to dig more into recurring revenue business models this is the best article on any subject ever and it focuses on metrics – https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

Lesson 3: Focus on your Strengths in a Congruent way!

Congruent has been my favourite business word for awhile. Ensuring the people, value proposition and systems are all aligned congruently is critically important.

Building that congruence around the set of strengths that makes you unique and focusing on it has been where our biggest successes have come from and also, when we drifted, where our biggest failures occurred.

For Content Refined, the effort around data analysis (to determine what tools/metrics give our content the best predictive ability to perform well in Google) has been very rewarding. Trying to broaden and sell other services where our set of strengths didn’t align didn’t get off the ground in a significant way (for example, an email marketing service to existing clients).

Being accountable for results and not just words, as a content marketing company that uses data (and the thousands of articles we’ve already published) to continually refine what is working now, is what has Content Refined clients loving the service.

Summary

I hope my view on the 3 key lessons while stewarding the growth of Content Refined has been useful.

If you have any content marketing needs be sure to book a free call with Maddie or Laura… they often share some pretty incredible and specific to your site insights on those calls! You can book here if there is availability.