Checklist
Organic backlink checklist for your first pillar post
Five links is enough to learn something. This page is the order I would work in, with the boring bits first, because the boring bits decide whether the money is wasted.
The question under the question
Owners keep asking whether a pillar post needs links at all, or whether twenty small posts would do just as well. Both can work. The pillar simply gives your links one place to land.
An organic backlink, in the plain sense, is a link that looks like a real site chose to reference you. Earned ones come from being useful. Others are placed on a relevant site and written to read like a citation. We sell the second kind, and we say so.
Spread across twenty thin posts, five links do almost nothing for any single page. Pointed at one strong guide, they at least give that page a fair test.
Before the first dollar: the page
- Read the post out loud once and fix every sentence you trip on
- Add the date you last checked each fact, price and rule you mention
- Link to the post from your home page and from two of your own shorter posts
- Check it loads fast on your phone over mobile data, not just on office wifi
- Put your name, town or trade on it somewhere a stranger can see
- Write the page address and today's date in a notebook
Five slots, five jobs
| Slot | What to look for | Rough spend |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A blog in your trade, any size, readable English or your language | $1 to $10 |
| 2 | A local or regional site that names your town or country | $5 to $25 |
| 3 | A broader site one step up from your niche | $10 to $40 |
| 4 | A site with real organic traffic, even if the Domain Rating is modest | $15 to $60 |
| 5 | Hold this one back until slots 1 to 4 have sat for a month | Leave empty |
Filters to set in the marketplace
- Niche close to yours, or the nearest neighbour you can find
- Language the same as your post
- Organic traffic above zero, because a site nobody visits cannot send you anyone
- Referring domains that look like a site people link to on purpose
- A price you would be happy to pay again next month
Say a made-up plumbing firm has a 3,000-word guide on boiler servicing. It buys four links at $4, $12, $22 and $38, a total of $76, and keeps the fifth slot empty. After a month it compares impressions for that one page in Search Console. That is the whole experiment, and the numbers are only an illustration.
What to leave alone in week one
Skip the homepage. Skip the page that sells. Links to your guide can reach those pages through your own internal links, which is slower but safer.
Do not use the same anchor twice. Three links reading 'cheap boiler service' in a row is how a pattern gets spotted. Mix the brand name, the plain page title and a loose phrase that a person would write.
Once the basket is ready, read the offer teardown before you pay, then use the week-by-week page to know what to expect. If a word here is new to you, the glossary covers it.
Keep a record of every link you buy, with the donor, the price and the date, in one small spreadsheet. A year from now it will be the only thing that tells you what worked.