Using Links to Boost Traffic
Backlinks are a hot topic in SEO. Everyone wants a perfect backlink strategy that will produce ranking and traffic results every time. The biggest issue with structuring a perfect backlink campaign is that no one size fits all. At the end of the day, successfully structuring your off-page SEO comes down to one thing, the competition.
Instead of beating around the bush, let’s get right into our case study. We are going to break this up into 5 parts to keep it simple.
- Qualification
- Analysis
- Development
- Implementation
- Results
Part 1: Qualification
Before even beginning to start a backlink campaign, it is important to first make sure you actually need one. Backlinks, yet a very important part of successful SEO, are not always required for every aspect of your campaign. If the site is penalized or has on-site issues, backlinks are not what you need to focus on at the moment. This is why the very first step is Qualification. There are a few basic things you want to check before even considering if you should start a backlink campaign.
- Indexation – Check that the site is indexed and healthy and ensure you have a good amount of relevant content across multiple pages on the website. If you have a one-page website, depending on the competition, you may need more content to position yourself properly in the SERPs.
- Penalties – If your website has any kind of penalties then it is important to correct those issues before considering building backlinks. Otherwise, your efforts will be in vain.
- On-page – If you have very little content on your website or are going up again ranking pages that have very good on-page, you may need to add more content to your page or better optimize Titles, meta and so on. It is also important to ensure you don’t have any canalization. Having duplicate metadata or common content competing with each other on the website, your rankings will struggle when building backlinks.
- Backlinks – Your current backlink situation can define whether or not you should be building more. First of all, you could have a penalty or be sandboxed if you have an abundance or bad links, which may require a disavow. It is also important to note what amount of backlinks your competition ranking page has. If the top ranking sites have zero, or only a few links, then you may want to look at their websites and consider better on-page or their inner linking structure. If the competing website is ranking with few links, the ranking page may be getting its authority from inner linking on the website from other pages that have a good backlink structure.
- Anchor Text – Over optimized anchor text can cause an issue when optimizing your site. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be running a backlink campaign, but this could influence the type of campaign you are running. In the case of over-optimized anchors, you may want to focus on just a branding link campaign before pushing too hard at keywords.
In the video below I go over the steps used to check your site and qualify it for a backlink campaign:
Target Website and Primary Keywords
- Local SEO Training – https://localclienttakeover.com/
- Google My Business SEO – https://localclienttakeover.com/courses/google-my-business-seo-specialist/
- Local Citation Building – https://localclienttakeover.com/death-local-citations/
Now that we have qualified our website we are ready for the next step.
Part 2: Analysis
This step is probably the most important when it comes to setting up your link building campaign as it sets the foundation for the entire thing. In the analysis step we are going to take a close look at our competition and determine things like how many links we need to be building, what anchor text we should be using, and what link velocity we should use (how many links we should build per month). It’s vital that we determine these factors based on the current top-ranking competitors for our keywords as that is the ONLY way to effectively determine what is currently working according to Googles algorithm. There are 3 data points that we want to be sure to analyze so that we can effectively develop our backlink campaign.
- Number of Links – You first want to look at the number of links going directly to the top-ranking pages for your target terms. This does not mean the entire website but specifically the ranking webpage. The total number of links to the website is important because you may require more website authority all around to compete for your target keywords. If this is the case then you definitely want to make your homepage a primary target when starting your backlink campaign.
- Anchor Text Percentages – The number of times your target term, related terms, lsi and branded terms show up in your competitor’s anchor text is a good indication of what type of anchor text percentages Google finds effective to rank a webpage. When we break down the competitor’s anchor text into classifications and determine what percentages they have on average, we can follow that blueprint when crafting our anchor text for our links.
- Number of Tier Links – Something you have to consider about the top-ranking sites is, not only the number of links but, how powerful their backlinks are. Just because you build the same number of links doesn’t mean you will outrank them. This is why we want to take a look at the number of links that are going to the competitor’s backlinks as well. This will give us a good understanding of how much building up the authority of our own backlinks, should be apart of our campaign, or give us a good idea if we will just need a more authoritative campaign in general.
In the video below I go over the steps used to analyze the competition so that we know how to properly structure our campaign in the next step:
We now have the information we need to get started developing our backlink campaign strategy.
Part 3: Development
Now that we know what we are up against, its time to use that data to determine how to structure the perfect backlink strategy. In this step, we essentially just want to map out our backlinks so we know what anchor text we are building to each target URL. This usually takes people a lot of time in their agency but because we did the proper research it’s actually a fairly simple step. In the following video, I show you how simple it is to select your anchor text when you have done a proper anchor analysis.
Part 4: Implementation
With our gameplan in hand, we can now start building our links. When building our backlinks we want to consider the number of links going to the website we are building the link on. We can easily utilize outreach guest posts and niche edits to obtain our links, which gives us an opportunity to only use sites that have quality links pointing to them. However, guest posts are new content and will not have links pointing to the post themselves, and niche edits could have links pointing to them but aren’t always the case.
Fortunately, we can take the tier 2 linking into our own hands by building links to our niche edits and guest posts. Going up against higher competitive websites, we decided to use a higher link velocity with a more robust tier linking strategy. This included about 22 links a month which consisted of 2 guest posts and 20 niche placements. In order to outdo the competition, we then powered up our guest posts and niche placements with 30 tier 2 links.
As said before, the authority of the domain brand itself is also a ranking factor and can weigh heavily on your backlink campaign results. So we also ran a do-follow press release along with building anywhere from 40-50 quality brand links to our homepage each month. This seemed appropriate seeing as how the top-ranking site, udemy.com, has over 28k referring domains pointing to its homepage. The campaign was officially started in April 2019 and in a short period of time, we began to see the results of a well-structured backlink campaign.
Part 5: Results
Google Data Studio Before and After Snapshot
Click Here for The Live Data Studio Report
3x Visibility…You can begin seeing the success of our traffic link building campaign after only 3 months, by comparing the total impressions for our pages. In 3 months, we tripled the number of impressions our pages appeared for and captured not only increased visibility for our target terms but also for many valuable related search terms. We attribute these results to our anchor analysis and anchor text selection process which is designed to capture a swath of relevant searches.
SEM Rush Snapshot Before Campaign Start
SEM Rush Snapshot After Campaign Start
2x Keyword Market Share, the total number of keywords ranking for in a given period, is a great metric to report on instead of relying on the performance of a few individual or vanity keywords. The better keyword metric is the total number of keywords and in the screenshots above you can see we doubled our market share in each of the positions.
Top 3: From 2 to 4
4-10: From 2 to 5
11-20: From 0 to 14
21-50: From 19 to 39
51-100: From 42 to 115
Google Analytics Organic Traffic March 2019 vs April 2019
Google Analytics Organic Traffic April 2019 vs May 2019
Google Analytics Organic Traffic May 2019 vs June 2019
New Users, Month over Month. Every month our link building campaign drives valuable new traffic to our webpages. We have turned link building into a viable traffic source. Month 1 saw an increase of 11.65%, month 2 increased by 18.71% and month 3 by 19.39%. You can see our results are slowly compounding as the months progress in the campaign.
Get Your Own Hand Crafted Backlink Campaign Running in The Next 30 Minutes…
Building a quality campaign is tough and takes a lot of work as you can see, but having a backlink campaign that you can rely on to drive results and increase traffic for your website or your clients, is imperative to long term success. This is why after seeing the results of our own campaign, we knew we had to make this easy for you to get started. With Web 2.0 Rankers traffic links you get to skip the analysis, skip the development, skip the implementation, and go straight to the results. Providing a full hands-off campaign along with Data Studio analytics reporting, you can not only run your backlink campaign consistently but also see the results.
Learn more about Web 2.0 Rankers traffic links here and start increasing your traffic with the power of backlinks.
Of course, we are still running our case study and will continue to report our results ongoing so don’t miss it…