Since we’ve signed an NDA with our client, we can’t disclose their name.
We are currently partnering with a creative SaaS company that built a sales outreach tool based on hyper-personalization through visual content. Sales departments and marketers are usually scared of testing a visual content in their cold outreach emails due to fears of getting their emails in spam folders and their IPs blacklisted. However, our partner proved that it doesn’t need to be the case and hyper-personalization is the key to increasing conversions.
The whole story started in 2020 as a simple tool that evolved into the all-in-one toolkit for the hyper-personalization of sales emails. Since the competition is extremely fierce in the email marketing niche, our client decided to invest in a continual link building campaign as they noticed their competitors are building links on a scale.
Goals
We’ve got in touch with a client in April 2021, and they’ve shared the following goals:
- Increase domain rating (DR) since their main competitors are in the DR70+ range. It will help their priority pages to rank quicker and with fewer backlinks.
- Increase brand awareness through high-quality guest posts published on authority websites in their industry.
- Increase ranking of their product pages through the innovative internal linking structure (which they’ve lacked at the beginning of our collaboration).
Strategy
At the beginning of our collaboration, our client had a nice amount of detailed and relevant resource pages, but they’ve neglected the importance of internal linking. As a result, we’ve found that most of their pages weren’t linking to relevant priority pages.
They’ve covered most of the topics their competitors cover, but competitors simply outranked them in most cases with just a few relevant backlinks and lower-quality content.
After a comprehensive on-page audit, we found out that our client didn’t correctly set an internal structure. For instance, they linked from new resource pages to old ones but never linked from the old pages to newly published ones. So it was evident that we had to fix the internal structure before starting with a link building process.
The client booked our Enterprise package (see our pricing models) which includes a complete on-page consultation. Once the internal linking structure was set, we were finally ready to build amazing links to the client’s resource pages. Below you can see our strategy:
- Crawling through the whole website and find the ideal internal linking structure
- Finding the proper anchor ratio (internal links), update the existing pages, and requesting indexing (we’ve seen a nice boost in organic traffic and indexed organic keywords just two weeks after the implementation)
- 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 9 months, we were able to build 103 industry-related backlinks from DR60+ websites through different methods including:
- Guest posts (our primary method)
- Link insertions through hyper-personalized skyscraper outreach
- Reclaiming unlinked brand mentions (or mentions that were never linked which was the case most of the time)
- Getting mentioned on listicles (our definite winner)
Referring domains
Since the client already had link building processes set, they’ve acquired a nice number of strong and relevant backlinks before our collaboration. Before we started our collaboration, they’ve had 409 referring domains.
As already mentioned above, we’ve managed to build 103 industry-relevant backlinks on DR60+ websites pointing mostly to internal resource pages. Currently, our client has more than 670 eferring domains pointing to their domain. We’ve noticed that some of the resource pages started to get a steady amount of passive backlinks each week due to higher visibility and brand recognition in the industry.
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 DR60 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 most of their key competitors are.
Organic traffic & keywords
Our client got some long-tail keywords ranked in the top 10, but the search volumes were less than 100 searches/month translating to just 290 organic traffic.
As you can see above, building high-authority backlinks had a tremendous impact on clients’ overall traffic and rankings. We managed to rank 180 keywords to #1-3 on Google, compared to 10 at the beginning of our collaboration.
Key takeaways
A consistent link building brings exponentially growing organic traffic with higher rankings of relevant keywords. We’ve noticed that most new articles rank easier, most likely due to higher Domain Rating. Also, writing top-notch content in a highly competitive niche doesn’t guarantee top rankings as most competitors focus heavily on link building. On top of that, it is evident that fixing internal structure helps in passing “SEO juice” through priority pages ensuring a steady surge in traffic.
Here are the key takeaways of our link building collaboration during 9 months in numbers:
- 103 industry-relevant backlinks built
- Domain rating grew from 60 to 69
- Organic traffic grew from 290 to 3,140 (1,083% increase)
- Organic keywords grew from 1,238 to 5,570 (450% increase)
