Here’s another case study where a client has seen a significant increase in organic traffic from our link-building efforts. This was achieved using guest posts and link insertions.
Backstory
About the client
The client operates in the e-commerce field and its core products are clothing items and accessories. As it’s an e-commerce site, the main goal was to rank the most profitable category pages.
In addition, the client wanted to achieve rankings as fast as possible because the holidays and winter season are where most of the money is made in the niche.
They already ranked in the top 10 for some keywords, but the most important pages ranked on the 2nd and third pages of Google.
The Challenges
This project came with two core challenges:
#1 The client’s products are pretty specific, which makes it difficult to find relevant link opportunities.
#2 We noticed that competitors were actively building links and improving their SEO. Their link profiles were also expanding, making it harder for us to catch up and surpass them.
However, we identified that the competitors’ link profiles seemed to be relatively low quality. This meant that we didn’t need to build 100s of links to pass them.
Our Plan of Attack
As we had a very specific focus on improving rankings for three category pages, we decided to launch two separate link building campaigns:
#1 Guest post outreach
#2 Link insertion outreach
We also analyzed the client’s existing link profile and anchor text distribution to understand what types of anchor texts we could use.
We found that they often used aggressive anchors that mainly consisted of the main keyword they were trying to rank. This is very unnatural and risky.
So to reduce the risk of receiving a manual or algorithmic penalty, we made a note to only use partial, branded, and random anchor texts when building links.
#1 Guest posts
With both link-building campaigns, we aimed to find link prospects as relevant as possible.
If the page itself wasn’t about the broader topic of the niche, we created a guest post that married the two topics together to ensure that the links come from relevant sites and/or relevant pages.
It was easy to find guest posting opportunities, as the broader niche that the client is in is vast.
We created a list of prospects using Ahrefs Content Explorer and wanted only to contact sites with a Domain Rating (DR) of at least 30 and have at least $1,000 of organic traffic value.
This article further explains why we use traffic value instead of organic traffic, but the idea is that it will give us a higher quality list of prospects.
#2 Link insertions
As the niche is super specific, finding relevant prospects for this campaign was trickier.
We went out and found roughly 500 websites that had good quality metrics, and that talked about very relevant topics.
Results Overview
We grew their organic traffic from a little under 6,000 visits per month to over 34,000.
All the client really needed was links and as you can see, we achieved a 3-4x traffic growth by the Holiday season. The traffic kept growing once the season was over.
ROI for the Client
The average cost per click in this niche is $1. The campaign turned ROI-positive during the 2nd month when the traffic increased by nearly 5,000 visitors.
This was achieved because the site was already well established. It had a DR of 30, with a good amount of links and existing content that was already ranking in the top 30.
Relevant and authoritative links were the missing ingredient that the client needed. Once the links started rolling in, traffic followed quickly after that.
What We Did in Specific
#1 Built 42 guest post links
The average DR of the links was 46 and the median organic traffic was 9,800.
#2 Built 21 link insertions
The average DR of the link insertions was 44 and the median organic traffic was 13,900.
Future Plans for the Campaign
The client achieved first page rankings for the most important pages before the Holiday season. The rankings kept climbing and we’re now in the phase where we’re competing within the top 3.
We will continue to build links to the most important pages to achieve the first position for all of them.
In addition, we performed a link gap analysis to find pages for the client that only need a few links to get a significant boost.
We then sorted the pages based on potential ROI and are now building links to the pages with the highest ROI on the link-building investment.
PS! If you want us to take a look at your site to assess if we’re able to add significant value to you through our services, get in touch.
PPS! As a bonus for reading through the entire case study, we’ll offer a free video audit analysis of your website and what we could do for you.