Since we’ve signed an NDA with our client, we can’t disclose their name.
We are currently collaborating with an innovative SaaS platform that ensures connectivity between CRM and marketing & sales tools. Marketing and sales department should work together to achieve the best results, and often, it’s not the case. Failing to communicate between departments can lead to missed deadlines, lower marketing ROI, and unsatisfied clients.
They had a talented team of experts, innovative software that has been used by more than 1,000 B2B companies, but somehow, they’ve still failed to outcompete their competitors.
After a quick initial audit, the reason why our client couldn’t keep up with a fierce competition was obvious – they had only a few blog posts that were pretty shallow, and they’ve completely neglected link building as they’ve believed people will naturally link to them.
Goals
We’ve got in touch with a client in January 2021, and after a few meetings, it was evident what the client’s goals were:
- Increase brand awareness through high-quality guest posts published on authority websites in their industry
- Increase their domain rating (DR) to be able to compete with big players
- Create a detailed and consistent content publishing strategy
- Build strong backlinks on a consistent basis
Strategy
Since we avoid paying for the links or building links on PBNs, it was tough to build links for product pages. There was a huge content gap, and we’ve started our partnership with comprehensive keyword research, content planning, website structure planning, and performing current link building audits.
We found out that, in order to successfully execute a link building strategy, our client has to focus on their content creation first. The goal was to create 20 resource pages covering the most relevant keywords with keyword difficulty (KD) less than 20. Once the resource pages were created, the plan was to create a smart internal linking structure that will bring a “link juice” to the priority pages – product pages.
Once our client had 20 resource pages, and internal linking structure on point, we started with a hyper-personalized link building campaign that consisted of the following steps:
- Identifying priority pages & potential anchor texts
- Prospecting & finding the key decision-makers (mostly head of content/head of marketing roles)
- Writing a hyper-personalized email copy (we started with three different versions of copy and subject lines to be able to perform A/B testing)
- Create an email outreach sequence (basically automating our outreach and follow-ups)
- Negotiating about the links and guest post topics
- Repeat
Results
In 11 months, we were able to build 147 industry-related backlinks from DR60+ websites through different methods including:
- Guest posts (our primary method)
- Link insertions through hyper-personalized skyscraper outreach
- Broken link building
- Reclaiming unlinked brand mentions (or mentions that were never linked which was the case most of the time)
- Collaborations with other bloggers through interviews & round-ups
Referring domains
Since the brand was established in 2016., they’ve already had a nice backlink profile counting around 552 referring domains at the time we started collaborating.
As already mentioned above, we’ve managed to build 147 industry-relevant backlinks on DR60+ websites pointing mostly to internal resource pages. Currently, our client has more than 1,100 referring domains pointing to their domain. One of the biggest reason for the passive growth of backlinks is definitely their content that gets visible around the web.
You can see some of the websites where we’ve got our client mentioned.
Domain rating (DR)
Once we started with a link building campaign, a client’s domain was DR57 which was pretty good, but compared to key competitors, our goal was to grow DR to at least 65.
You can see that a current DR is 69 which is a noticeable increase and our client is now close to DR70+ which is where the most of their key competitors are.
Organic traffic & keywords
Our client struggled with organic traffic due to a lack of resource pages and low rankings of their existing pages.
As you can see above, building high-authority backlinks had a tremendous impact on client’s overall traffic and rankings. We managed to rank 126 keywords to #1-3 on Google, compared to 19 at the beginning of our collaboration.
Key takeaways
It is evident that a consistent link building brings a constantly growing organic traffic that comes with higher rankings of relevant keywords. We’ve noticed that most of the new articles rank easier, most likely due to higher Domain Rating.
Here are the key takeaways of our link building collaboration during 11 months in numbers:
- 147 industry-relevant backlinks built
- Domain rating grew from 57 to 69
- Organic traffic grew from 768 to 4,693 (611% increase)
- Organic keywords grew from 2,935 to 6,238 (212% increase)
