How to link to a term but not part of another tern

I run a wildlife website, and I am trying to get my internal links working properly. It is quite an active blog, so there are thousands of blog posts and pages, which means that I cannot trawl through and link each word by hand.

I am looking to link a set word, only when not part of another chain, let me give you an example.

I have a page for lion, but also for sea-lion and even lion-ant.

I am linking phrases lion “west african lion”, “central african lion”, “asiatic lion”, “african lion” all to the lion page. I also have a sea-lion page, so sea lion words should be linked to that.

If the word lion appears without any other searched term, it should link to the lion page, but how can i set it up, so that lion only links if it is not part of another search term (ie it is actually sea lion, lion ant, mountain lion etc.).

I hope that there is a simple solution