Buy best backlinks for one city guide: a hypothetical Lisbon plan
Everything on this page is invented to show the method. The blog, the numbers and the results are an example, not a customer story.
Example only
A pillar guide plus three supporting posts, $240 in the basket
Imagine a small English-language blog with a long guide called Three Days in Lisbon and three smaller posts that link into it. The aim is to lift the pillar, not every page.
- Pillar: Three Days in Lisbon
- Support: Alfama on foot, pastel de nata round-up, Sintra day trip
- Budget: $240, with $60 held back
How the basket gets built
Audit the pillar
Read it as a stranger would. Fix broken maps, outdated tram prices and the missing alt text before any money moves.
Check what ranks
Open the top ten for the main query in Ahrefs or Semrush and note the referring domains of the pages above you.
Filter the marketplace
English, travel or food niche, modest Domain Rating, real organic traffic. Read each row, drop the ones with no Portugal link at all.
Spend in the example
Two placements near $55 for the pillar, one at about $40 for the Sintra support post, one at about $30 for the food round-up.
Review the anchors
Mix of the title, the brand and a plain phrase like "our Lisbon walking route". No exact-match repeats.
The invented ledger
| Placement | Points to | Example price |
|---|---|---|
| Travel magazine insertion | Three Days in Lisbon | $55 |
| Portugal-focused blog | Three Days in Lisbon | $55 |
| Day-trip site | Sintra day trip | $40 |
| Food and wine blog | Pastel de nata round-up | $30 |
| Held back for fixes | n/a | $60 |
Why the pillar and the supporting posts are linked this way
One strong page beats four weak ones.
The pillar, Three Days in Lisbon, is the page that competes for the big query. The Alfama walk, the pastel de nata round-up and the Sintra day trip each link into it with a plain descriptive anchor, and each also earns a placement of its own. That way a reader who lands on a small post is steered to the pillar, and the links we bought are spread across a cluster that makes sense to a human. If you want to check the logic against your own budget, the $100 and $1,000 comparison has the same structure in table form. Simple enough.
Notice what is missing: no homepage links.
What this example cannot tell you
It is invented. Real donors have different prices, real competitors have stronger profiles, and a Lisbon guide faces rivals with budgets far above $240. Treat the plan as a template for thinking, not a forecast. The glossary will help with any column you do not recognise.
If it were a food blog instead
Swap the nouns.
A restaurant round-up for Porto would follow the same plan with different donors: food and wine blogs, regional magazines, a hotel site with a good neighbourhood page. The pillar becomes the city round-up, the supports become single dishes or markets, and the held-back reserve stays. The method is the same, and so is the caution about expectations. Easy swap.
What we would check afterwards, and when
Day two: open every placement. Confirm the link, the anchor and that the page reads like something a person would publish.
Rankings are fickle. They move for dozens of reasons, from a core update to a competitor's rewrite. One blog's curve proves nothing about the next. At week four and week eight, compare impressions for the main query in Search Console against the same weeks before the order. If nothing moves after eight weeks, look at the page itself before buying again, and read the calendar to rule out timing.