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On your first question about where to start. You don’t start by trying to rank for leadership coaching directly, but you also don’t ignore the topic. You target a mix of keywords across the topical space and let Google tell you which ones it’ll let you win. For a low authority website like yours, you start building authority sideways, starting at the lowest tier of keyword difficulty.
Concretely for your niche, that mix would be: long-tail variants that contain leadership coaching or executive coaching (like “leadership coaching for software engineers” or “executive coaching for non-profit founders”), semantically adjacent terms that don’t contain the head term but live in the same space (like “manager development programs” or “first-time CEO mentorship” or “C-suite advisory”), and audience-specific or problem-specific queries that your target customers actually search (like “how to give difficult feedback as a new manager” or “imposter syndrome for first-time CEOs”).
Pick 30-50 keywords across these three buckets, weighted toward whichever has lower personal KD for your domain. Use Semrush’s personal KD score, not generic KD. A keyword showing KD 17 industry-wide can be KD 67 for your specific domain, so generic numbers will mislead you. Write short focused pages, one keyword per slug, keyword in slug and H1. Publish them all. After 2-3 weeks of GSC data, see what ranks.
The winners are your real topical authority signals. Then you expand sideways from the winners. So if “leadership coaching for software engineers” lands at position 4, you don’t drill deeper into that exact term, you publish “leadership coaching for product managers,” “leadership coaching for engineering managers,” “leadership coaching for CTOs,” “leadership coaching for technical founders.” Same theme, different audiences, all riding on the authority you just earned.
Each round of sideways expansion makes the next round easier because the topical authority compounds. After many rounds, the head term “leadership coaching” gradually comes within range as a consequence of cumulative authority across the cluster, possibly.
The mistake to avoid is publishing pages like “leadership coaching benefits,” “what is leadership coaching,” “best leadership coaching” early on. These all target the head term itself and you’ll fail to rank for any of them while also cannibalizing each other.
On your second question about backlinks. The “wait before acquiring backlinks” thing is a myth. New domains naturally start with backlinks from owner profiles, GTM partners, integrations, podcast appearances, communities you’re already in. There’s no rule preventing new sites from acquiring links from day one and you should start outreach immediately.
The pace concern and exact-match anchor concern are real but overcautious for organically acquired links. The penalty risk mostly applies to people doing obvious manipulation, like buying 50 backlinks in a week with the same exact-match anchor, or running a private blog network. If you’re getting links naturally through real outreach, podcast appearances, guest posts, partnerships, citations, the anchor mix takes care of itself because real outreach produces a natural mix of brand mentions, naked URLs, partial-match phrases, and occasional exact match. Don’t engineer ratios.
About where to point them, the “everything to home page initially” advice is overly conservative. Pointing a backlink directly at the page you’re trying to rank is fine and often more efficient because that’s where the authority does the most direct work. Home page is fine for general authority, but if you’re building a specific page targeting a specific keyword and someone’s willing to link to it, point them there.
The thing that matters way more than where you point or what anchor you use is the source quality. A backlink from a page that gets traffic beats a backlink from a high-DA page that gets nothing. Chase pages with traffic, not domain authority scores. A blog post that ranks for something and gets clicks every month is more valuable than a homepage link from a DA-70 site that nobody visits.
On your third question about internal linking, both ideas you mentioned are partially right but the “build hubs and spokes upfront” approach is wrong for a new site. Tier-based architectures and pre-planned hub-and-spoke models are human constructs that Google doesn’t see. What Google sees is which of your pages are ranking and which are getting clicks. You don’t know that yet because you haven’t published. So the correct sequence is:
– Publish your portfolio first without internal-linking everything to everything
– Wait for GSC data
– See what ranks
– Then add internal links from your authority sources (home page, ranking pages) to the pages that need help. Specifically the pages sitting at positions 5-15 with impressions but few clicks. Those are striking-distance pages where a small authority boost from internal links can push them onto page 1.A few rules that hold regardless:
– Don’t make links bidirectional by default, it’s pointless
– Don’t link from authority pages to pages already at position 1-3, that’s wasted authority
– Limit roughly 2-5 in-body links per source page, more dilutes what each recipient gets
– Footer and nav links are heavily devalued, so the linking that matters is in-body contextual links with descriptive anchor text
– Don’t link to pages that can’t realistically rank given your current authority, that’s just wasting authority on dead ends.The architecture is emergent. You build the link network around what’s actually working. After a few rounds of publishing and reading GSC, the structure of your site becomes obvious because you’re essentially supporting your winners and using them to lift their neighbors.
On your fourth question about cannibalization – you’ll create it as you publish if you’re not deliberate. The mechanism is that two of your pages end up qualifying for the same query at retrieval time, then Google’s SERP construction blocks them from each other and neither shows. Some quick rules to avoid creating it:
– Adjectives like “best” and “top” don’t differentiate slugs. “Best leadership coach” and “top leadership coach” effectively land in the same bucket because Google’s synonym systems, built from query logs, treat them as substitutable
– Subfolders don’t differentiate either
– Singular versus plural don’t differentiate
– Synonyms don’t differentiate, so if you write a “leadership coaching” page and an “executive coaching” page with otherwise overlapping content for the same audience, they’ll cannibalize.The simplest test before you publish a new page is to search Google for both your candidate keyword and any near-variant you’ve already published. If the top 10 SERPs overlap heavily, more than 70% same results, Google sees them as the same intent and they’ll cannibalize.
If you suspect cannibalization later when something ranks erratically or two of your pages alternate ranking, the cleanest diagnostic is to use GSC’s Removals tool to manually remove one suspected page. If the other bounces back into ranking within 12-24 hours, it’s confirmed and you have your answer about which page is the cannibalizer.
The rest is as u/weblinkr says.
Hope this helps.
