This year, you've asked a lot of great questions about SEO! We have a few more to answer before the end off the year.

In this episode, we're wrapping up listener questions about SEO, focusing on tools like Link Whisper for internal linking, the importance of Google Search Console for tracking keyword rankings, the misconceptions surrounding Wikipedia's role in SEO authority, and strategies for optimizing content for AI searches.

Resources Mentioned:

Google's Tips for Succeeding in AI Search - https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/05/succeeding-in-ai-search

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This year, you've asked some great questions about SEO. We have a few more to answer before the end of the year.

Welcome back to the podcast. If you're joining us for the first time this month, we've been wrapping up listener questions as we get ready to close out a great year on the Pay Less for Traffic podcast.

Today we have four awesome questions related to SEO. Two are tool related and the other two are strategy related. Let's dive right in with our first listener question. She asked, "On the Niche Pursuits podcast, they mentioned a plugin called Link Whisper that can keep track of which internal content we should link and what we should highlight as the anchor text when we do. As the amount of content on the site grows, is that a helpful tool or do I know my own content best? It's so hard to know when a tool is better suited to do a job and when it should stay on a human plate."

First of all, I just want to say great podcast choice. Niche Pursuits is one of my favorites from the blogging community. Jared and Spencer are very generous in the knowledge that they share on the podcast. Spencer is actually the creator of the Link Whisper plugin, so it's one of the frequent ad spots on the podcast. If you've listened to Niche Pursuits, I'm sure you've heard of it.

Our listener question actually did a great job of summarizing how it works. It's basically an internal linking tool to help you save time linking out and linking in to your new content. Honestly, this could have probably been its own "Let's Pay Less" episode, but I didn't feel right doing a full walkthrough of this plugin on the podcast because I don't actually use it.

So to answer this question, I thought I'd share with you some of the things I considered when deciding if Link Whisper was right for me. And even though I decided I didn't need it, you could easily come to a different conclusion than I did.

First, I asked myself if there was another way to easily locate orphan posts. This is one of the big features of Link Whisper, where you can quickly see which posts have zero inbound or outbound internal links.

As I've shared in a previous episode, the free Yoast SEO plugin also allows you to see the number of inbound and outbound links in a post. It's not quite as detailed as Link Whisper, but it is enough for me to quickly see where I need to focus my attention.

Second, I considered how much time I actually spend on internal linking. Is it such a chore during the blogging process that I need a tool to make it go more quickly? And just as this listener said...

As your website grows, it can be more challenging to remember all of your old content and whether or not they have good places to plant links that point to your fresh content.

I think a big factor in answering this question is if you have your blog posts organized in some way. I personally use Airtable to manage a database of the content on my website. I can group it by category and topic, so I can quickly find some blog posts for internal linking when I create a fresh post.

If you have a huge bank of content or if you've never really done internal linking before, it might be worth it to pay for Link Whisper for a season to clean things up more easily. Or if you're writing a whole bunch of new content every week, Link Whisper might be a good option to save you some time in your workflow.

Finally, I considered if the cost of the tool was worth the end result for me. In my case, I'm able to do internal linking without too much of a time commitment. I'm not writing huge amounts of content right now. My website's not massive and my database keeps me organized. There are many other tools that I would like to try out with the $8 a month that I would spend on Link Whisper.

If internal linking is such a headache for you that you just kind of don't do it at all, then Link Whisper could definitely be worth the cost. Because, as we've talked about in a previous episode, internal linking is absolutely essential for your SEO.

While our first question had a more open-ended answer, our next listener question is a bit more open and shut, in my opinion. This listener asked, "What is the best free website to check the rankings for keywords on my website?" The answer to this is hands down Google Search Console. This is a free tool that gives you tons of information about your keyword rankings straight from the source.

But I know that Google Search Console can be little bit overwhelming and it can be hard to find what you're looking for. If you want to get a list of the keywords you're ranking for, you'll log into Search Console and click on Performance on the left side of the screen. You'll see a graph at the top of the page. The graph defaults to just showing you two things, impressions and clicks. You'll see those as blue and purple.

If you want to see your rankings, you'll check one more option on the graph, which is average position, and that will be orange. That shows you where your post typically falls in search results. Once you've clicked on that, you'll scroll down under the graph and make sure you've clicked the tab that says Queries. This will give you a list of all the keywords your domain is ranking for on Google.

And because you've chosen average position as an option on the graph, that data will now show on the chart below. And you will be able to see the average position for all of the keywords that you're ranking for.

If you'd like more of a temperature check for your keyword rankings, there's a new feature on Google Search Console called Insights. You can find it in the same left-hand toolbar where you found performance. Once you've clicked on that, you can poke around at the keywords and posts that are trending up and down on your site.

Now, frankly, this is another topic that I could talk about all day, but I just wanted to answer your question that Google Search Console is the best place to get keyword information about your website. It's going to be the most accurate and it's free.

Now let's move on to some more SEO strategy questions. I had a listener reach out because she had recently seen people cold-pitching an offer to write a Wikipedia page for a business because they claim it's important for SEO authority. The listener wanted to know what my thoughts were on that, but it kind of cracked me up because she also said, "I have a pretty good idea what you're going to say."

So, in a day when building authority for your website is more important than ever, one might think that having a page on Wikipedia is a good way to show that you're an authority. And it would be. But the issue is that Wikipedia now has very strict notability guidelines to determine if a page warrants being published on Wikipedia.

I would say the majority of online teacher business owners wouldn't meet the notability requirements for Wikipedia. Where some people get caught up with SEO and Wikipedia is the thought that dropping links to their website as a reference in existing articles would be a good way to get some external links pointing to their website. Because as we know, the more sites that point to your website, the higher your domain authority will eventually become. People view Wikipedia as this gold mine of opportunity because they can add references to existing articles that point to their website. But those links are no follow. And staff from Google has debunked this theory as well. John Mueller has said, "Randomly dropping a link into Wikipedia has no SEO value and will do nothing for your site. All you're doing is creating extra work for the Wikipedia maintainers who will remove your link drops. It's a waste of your time and theirs." So, long story short, Wikipedia isn't going to be a magic shortcut for building website authority. It could be helpful for keyword research, but that's a topic for another day.

Now it's time for the hottest topic, which I've saved for last. A listener wrote in and said, "I'm trying to figure out more about how to show up in the new AI searches. Any extra tips are welcome."

I assume that what this listener is talking about is being featured as a citation or source in the new AI Overviews on Search. This is not something I've spoken about on the podcast yet because I'm a huge fan of only changing strategy when it's supported by data. And until AI Overviews rolled out more comprehensively, I didn't want to point anyone down the wrong path.

As of right now, the data is showing that overall website clicks are down quite a bit when the query triggers an AI overview. But data is beginning to point to the fact that if a website is cited in the overview that's triggered, their website clicks are slightly higher. Now we're not talking a huge difference in clicks, but this has led to a wave of bloggers trying to optimize their posts to rank in these AI overviews. This process has a name. Instead of SEO, it's called GEO, which stands for Generative Engine Optimization. Full disclosure, this is not something that I'm doing, but it's not for the reasons you might think.

I looked at an article written on the Google Developers site, about how to help your website perform better in the days of AI search. I'll link it below, but I'll summarize a few of the things they suggest to get noticed by AI. First, focus on unique, valuable content. Second, provide a great page experience. Third, ensure bots can access your content. Fourth, use structured data, also known as schema. And fifth, support your content with images and video.

I don't know about you, but this sounds an awful lot like SEO. So my opinion is that if you focus on SEO best practices, you'll naturally start to get cited in AI overviews. Many of the posts that I write for clients right now get featured in the overviews on Google. And I, for one, don't give AI a second thought.