What’s one of the best ways to grow your search engine ranking? It’s by building backlinks. You already know that. Everyone already knows that.

But you know what? It’s not just about how many backlinks are pointing to your website. It’s also about tier 2 backlinks.

In this article I’m going to show you how you can leverage tier 2 backlinks to increase your ranking.

What are tier 2 backlinks?

Well, tier 2 backlinks are other websites linking to the websites that are linking to you. I know that’s a bit wordy but think of it this way; if your website is let’s say faisalanwar.co.uk which is my website, hypothetically say I have links from an article on bbc.co.uk . Now if other people link to the bbc.co.uk article that links to me, that helps with my rankings. It’s that simple.

Why is that important? This is because it tells google that both the bbc.co.uk article and the URL that it links to, which is faisalanwar.co.uk is important. The more people that link to the bbc.co.uk article, the higher authority it receives and the more authority that page receives, the higher the authority of faisalanwar.co.uk becomes.

So how do you increase your rankings through tier 2 backlink building?

1. Check sites that link to you

You go through all the sites that link to you. You can use Good Search Console or Ahrefs.com. These tools will show you a list of all the websites that link to you.

2. Filter sites with most authority

Now go take those URLs and filter the ones that are the most authoritative. Both Google Search Console and Ahrefs will sort them in order. The ones that are most authoritative the top.

3. Google what those links are about

Take those links and google what they’re about. Here, what you’ll notice is that there’s other pages similar to them. So take the competing URLs, put them in Ahrefs and you’ll see who links to them.

4. Get in touch with the webmaster

Contact those webmasters and ask them to link to your bbc.co.uk or your dailyfx.com or your economist.com article or what other site may be linking to you. The email template you want to use is this:

Hey David,
I noticed that you’re linking to cnn.com and the article that discusses how start-ups are cleverly marketing using SEO. There’s this other article on bbc.co.uk that also shares a few tips on how to start-ups cleverly use SEO, when they have no marketing budget.
If you think it’s amazing you should link to it as well. You’ll not only make my day, you’ll make my year.
Many thanks,
Faisal

To conclude, follow these steps to help encourage more backlinks to the sites that are linking to you and your rankings will start climbing, as you build these tier 2 backlinks. Now remember to be patient. You have to give it, three to five months for the backlinks to kick in and then you’ll notice that your rankings will start rising.

Have I got you thinking? How have you improved your tier 2 backlinks?