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Traffic is king. Domain authority, link volume, page authority, trust flow…there are dozens of different ranking factors and buzzwords in the SEO world, but the reality is this: none of it matters if you’re not getting traffic.
When we launch a link building campaign, we’re not chasing vanity metrics. We’re looking at what your site needs most and where we can deliver big wins in your niche. In this case study, we look at an ecommerce site with a LOT of competition and black-hat activity in their niche.
In a single quarter, we increased their traffic by over 210%. And we’re not talking about a couple hundred searches either:
Let’s dive into how it happened.
Disclaimer: Confidentiality
We have purposefully omitted names, keywords, and other identifying details that could clue readers into who this particular client is. They are in a competitive SEO space that is rife with black-hat SEOs, and we also sign NDAs when necessary to protect the proprietary marketing information of our clients.
We always put our clients’ privacy first, even if it means we have to redact some cool data from our case studies.
Organic Growth With Link Building
One of the best parts about the results with this client was it was clear that SEO drove the increased business. Oftentimes, we see agencies taking credit for huge gains, but see Analytics data that conveniently omits the fact that it all came from other channels.
For these guys, organic was the rockstar of their inbound traffic, by a lot. September 2020 reported 19.1k organic sessions; December 2020 closed out with 40.2k, more than a 210% increase in a single quarter.
Think about that for a minute. What would you do with double the revenue in less than 3 months? What’s more than that, SEO traffic doesn’t disappear the second you stop pumping money into it the way paid channels do.
This is real, sustained growth that isn’t reliant on liquid capital pumping into it every month.
How did we do it?
There’s no secret sauce here; we did content-focused, white-hat link building in the ways that have always worked (and always will).
For this website, you don’t see a giant spike in referring domains or link volume. It’s increased quite a bit, sure, but it’s been steady and sustainable. Take a look at some of these screenshots:
No dips and valleys, no sharp upwards trends, none of the garbage that gets sites penalized 3 weeks after they see their increase.
This is a big part of why we preach quality over quantity, and we don’t celebrate those vanity metrics we talked about earlier. You can get those crazy high, case-study-worthy spikes in revenue and traffic without going overboard on your strategy. Speaking of…
The Anatomy of a Well-Rounded Strategy
Variety is the spice of life, and it’s also the spice of an SEO strategy. We set clear goals based on data and focus on building a natural, user-friendly, high quality backlink profile that will position our clients for sustainable growth during and after their campaign.
No arbitrary numbers here. What is the DA, PA, spam score, link volume, and content quality of our client against the top 10 competitors in their SERP? That’s our target.
From there, we create links of all types, with all kinds of rel= attributes, with a focus on amazing content. Trust me, Google knows what’s happening when 1000 dofollow links come from badly written pages.
We blend strategies from packages like our Monthly Mix, which gives us the diversity and volume we need to be competitive, with services like our Premium Links. Those are guest posts and press releases on sites like Yahoo, AP News, Entrepreneur, and more that carry some insane DA with instant ranking power behind them.
Best of all, we make sure that all of our links have the individual potential to rank for snippets, tangential results, long-tail keywords, and more. That attracts tier 2 backlinks and qualified traffic, which is sometimes more valuable than the domain authority itself.
In short, we believe in doing it right the first time, and doing smart, holistic SEO work.
Interested in seeing what we can do for you? Get in touch with us here, or head over to our services page to learn more.
