Link Building Strategy: The Beginner's Guide

Link funnels is the method of building topical authority around your pillars and carrying it from the publisher all the way to your sales page. This is sometimes referred to as tiered link building which is when you build links to your links, but we suggest that you continue the theme from your tier 2 link all the way to your pillar content.

Alright let’s get down to the nitty gritty of it.

To successfully pull off this type of strategy you need to build a roadmap of each tier linking to one another. Let’s look at how you can achieve this:

Identify your pillar pages

All websites have key service or product pages you’d like to rank for, but which services do you want to build authority around at this period of time? Let’s use a psychology website as an example:

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  Anxiety

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  Couples counselling

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  Bipolar

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  Pain management

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  Anger management

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  Depression

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  Eating problems

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  Addiction

For this example, let’s say you want to target and rank well for anger management because it’s a new service you’re offering and you want to build more authority around this. This page would be professional-psychologist.com/anger-management.

This will be your pillar page where your link funnel will ultimately point to.

Building your content cluster

Building your content cluster is based on your pillar page. We’ll use professional-psychologist.com/anger-management as an example.

This page is about anger management services and how the psychologist can help. Because we’re pinpointing anger management services in particular, its then important to make your content cluster surrounding this pillar page also directly related to anger management.

These should be based upon what people are actually searching for around your keyword term – in this case anger management. There are search engine tools like Answer The Public which can help you with this. After adding the term ‘anger management’ into the tool, this is what we got.

Let’s zoom in on a few below

As you can see there’s some great blog ideas you can create for your cluster content based on user search results. For this example, we can use the following for our content cluster:

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  Are Anger Management Issues Genetic

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  Are Anger Management Classes Effective

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  Are Anger Management Issues A Mental Illness

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  Why Anger Management Is Important

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  Why Anger Management Doesn’t Work

If you create content clusters around these topics it might look like this: professional-psychologist.com/why-anger-management-is-important.

From this page it would host a link to your service page which is professional-psychologist.com/anger-management

Can you see a pattern forming?

From your content cluster you can then start to build your tiered link funnel strategy back to your content cluster.

Tier 1 links

Tier 1 links are generally in the form of a guest post published on another website which links directly to your content cluster.

Let’s work off our theme of anger management. The content cluster we’re trying to build links to is professional-psychologist.com/why-anger-management-is-important

So, it makes sense our tier 1 link also needs to be around anger/anger management. Now the trick with building link funnels is to remember we start to broaden the topics we write about in a way where it leaves a roadmap for Google to follow. Your topic should be what people search for before the topic you’re linking to. Confusing right? Let us make it simple.

Now it’s important to remember when guest posting on a publisher website you first choose a publisher which is niche relevant. It doesn’t necessarily mean you need to post on a site all about psychology, it’s more you need to post on a site in the health niche which takes psychology related topics. This is key, because a lot of people get this wrong.

Tier 2 links

Tier 2 links are essentially other guest posts created for external websites which link back to the tier 1 link you’ve just built above. These need to be directly related to the theme of your content cluster in order to work effectively within your strategy.

For our tier 2 links we want to broaden this out more with our guest post topic so it looks natural and adds more value for readers to start at the top of the funnel and work their way to the bottom. For our anger management theme, a good topic for a tier 2 blog would be: Why Am I Angry All The Time?

This may look like: healthyliving1.com/why-am-I-angry-all-the-time

This tier 2 would then link to healthsite.com/is-there-a-way-to-control-my-anger and the progression of links would continue through to your service page.

When linked to tier 2 you can really see the pattern of topics starting to transition together.

Putting it all together

Now the fun part let’s put all the links together to see what we have. Ultimately the overall goal should look something like this structure.

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