Since we’ve signed an NDA with our client, we can’t disclose their name.
We are currently collaborating with an innovative email marketing platform that offers a variety of features including email warm-up, email campaign automation, and email deliverability checker. Email marketing changed drastically in the last few years, and there is a huge need for effective email deliverability software. Our client helps businesses to build clean email lists ensuring high email deliverability and low email bounce rates which keep businesses away from spam folders and IP blacklists.
Our client has a small, remote team that serves more than 5,000 customers including various major B2B companies. Since email marketing, especially email deliverability is an extremely competitive niche, and our client is still a young player in the industry, the lack of link building and content promotion focus is their biggest challenge.
They decided to send us a message and talk about a potential collaboration. It is important to mention that they know the importance of having a well-structured and detailed blog section that serves as a nice lead generation. We conducted an initial content and backlink audit and immediately noticed a huge gap, or potential for our client when it comes to growing organic traffic through targeted link building.
Goals
We’ve got in touch with a client in June 2021, and after an initial meeting, the client shared the following goals:
- Increase brand awareness through high-quality guest posts published on authority websites in their industry
- Build strong backlinks on a consistent basis to continue a steady growth of their organic traffic as well as Domain Rating (DR)
Strategy
Our client had a nice collection of blog posts that were professionally silo-ed, but they didn’t have resources to focus on link building. Since their content was in-depth, they acquired pretty nice backlinks naturally, but their competitors were doing link building full-time. It was tough for them to keep up with competitors without a link building strategy in place.
The goal was to conduct comprehensive keyword research and identify the content with the biggest potential for organic traffic growth. We wanted to find 5 – 10 articles that target high-volume keywords (1,000+ searches/month) with fairly low competition (KD below 15). Once we had priority pages, we conduct a comprehensive on-page audit using SurferSEO and found some content gaps. Their internal content team implemented the changes on content based on our research and everything was ready for the targeted link building campaign.
Here are the key steps of our link building strategy:
- 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
Results
In 6 months, we were able to build 94 industry-related backlinks from DR60+ websites through different methods including:
- Guest posts + utilizing our blogger network (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)
- 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 607 referring domains at the time we started collaborating.
As already mentioned above, we’ve managed to build 94 industry-relevant backlinks on DR60+ websites pointing mostly to internal resource pages. Currently, our client has 761 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 DR48 which was pretty good, but compared to key competitors, our goal was to grow DR to at least 55.
You can see that a current DR is 56 which is a noticeable increase and our client is now close to DR60+ which is where the most of their key competitors are.
Organic traffic & keywords
Our client struggled with organic traffic due to a lack of high quality backlinks needed for competitive keywords to rank.
As you can see above, building high-authority backlinks had a tremendous impact on clients’ overall traffic and rankings. We managed to rank 234 keywords to #1-3 on Google, compared to 112 at the beginning of our collaboration.
Also, what’s very interesting is the sharp growth of organic traffic and ranked organic keywords. As we mentioned before, our client didn’t have any link building campaigns prior to our collaboration. We started with 10 – 20 backlinks per month, and it is evident that traffic and organic keywords correlate with the amount of authority and relevant backlinks.
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 utilized our blogger network to be able to execute a more aggressive, but still an extremely targeted and relevant link building campaign.
Here are the key takeaways of our link building collaboration during 6 months in numbers:
- 94 industry-relevant backlinks built
- Domain rating grew from 48 to 56
- Organic traffic grew from 2,185 to 4,745 (211% increase)
- Organic keywords grew from 4,272 to 7,570 (177% increase)
