Think Protection

Note: If you want to get the list of Tech and Security related sites that we used for this case link building campaign, then click here to get access to the list!

Hello. My name is Dan Buzan, co-founder of both Benevalue and Contega Media, digital marketing agencies focused on providing outstanding link building services. Using this case as an example, I’d like to answer one of the most common questions that I’m asked every day:

How can I kickstart my SEO and actually see first results within the first couple of months? Everyone tells me that I won’t be able to see any movements for at least half a year!

Let me show you how we increased organic traffic by almost 1.5x (+45%) within two months using only White Hat link building methodologies, straight hands, and a complex SEO approach.

The client is one of the leading alarm companies in Canada (seven years in the market). It provides smart security systems for homes in the Canadian and North US markets.

What was the main goal?

The primary goal of the campaign was to reduce the costs of a very pricey PPC campaign by arranging constant organic traffic for the main group of commercial keywords related to home security alarm systems. The original campaign was pricey not because of poor skilled PPC providers, but because of the market costs for clicks in the niche (check out the screenshot below). The general rule of thumb is to keep a balance of PPC and SEO keywords. Each side should bring extra value to the other.

35 bucks per click. Not bad, right? Extremely budget-consuming core commercial keywords were the main factor in considering SEO services.

What was the solution?

In short, the task was to up-rank current keywords from the second, third or later pages so that they appeared in the top ten results in Google, then to start to integrate and promote new keyword options with significant search volume. After six months of a full, complex SEO campaign, our target site was able to triple its initial statistics.

How we managed the On-site SEO part

In order to achieve our main goal, we provided our target site with a full suite of on-site SEO. This mostly took the form of technical and content audits.

Technical audit

• Indexation, crawlability and sitemap analysis
• Mobile optimisation
• General design flaws and recommendations
• External link analysis
• Image optimisation analysis

Content audit

• Keyword analysis
• Content duplication and cannibalisation analysis
• Meta title/description analysis

It took a full month to complete this stage and to locate and start to fix all of the identified on-site SEO issues. Indeed, this is still a work in progress; there were a lot of pages that needed a content update, a lot of duplicated titles, many missing descriptions, etc.

Boring, technical stuff… I know!

What’s more interesting is how we managed off-site SEO link building

The whole link building campaign was built using White Hat SEO methodology, in which all the links that we secured were completely safe and did not violate Google TOS in any way. As a result, the following link profile prevents any potential worries about upcoming Google updates, as all the links were built in a natural and ethical way. We used only White Hat guest posting on sites that were relevant to tech and security niches with DR 40+ and at least 1k of organic traffic by Ahrefs. We only posted on highly trusted forums related to the home security niche in order to diversify our link profile.

Following the 2019 Google March update, we were able to make the conclusion that one of the main link building factors to affect positive ranking movements, besides content relevance, is a strong and diversified total link profile. This means you need to leverage a wide variety of link types.

In short, if it continues like this, the relevance factor will officially announce the end of guest posts about home decor appearing on web design related sites

In short, if it continues like this, the relevance factor will officially announce the end of guest posts about home decor appearing on web design related sites

95% of guest posts nowadays come from WordPress CRM. No matter how great these are in terms of SEO stats, they are still WordPress links for the Google bots. That’s why you need to consider alternative CMS in order to have different kinds of links. Links from community platforms, sites on Joomla, raw HTML-based sites, etc, should be considered from now.

First month

Our 20-link plan for the first month, in terms of anchors, was as follows:

• 10 DR 40+ guest posts on tech and security-related sites
• 10 diversified links from communities and niche forums

Why do we use so many branded anchors? Because they are the most natural type of anchor for first-month link building. Therefore, if you want to start your link growing organically, we recommend a similar anchor distribution. However, don’t over-complicate it with precise proportion planning. Here is a quote which strongly resonates with my vision of anchor planning:

Anchor Texts Should Be Natural, Not Planned © – Ryan Stewart from Webris

We used natural anchors to warm-up our link building profile before we started to add more exact keywords in the second month.

Second month

Another 25 links (+5 links increase)

• 12 DR 40+ tech and security-related guest posts
• 13 diversified links from communities and niche forums

Another Note: Did you notice that If you want to get the list of Tech and Security related sites that we used for this case link building campaign? Click here to get access.

As we can see from the first screenshot, Ahrefs shows +245 organic growth in the last seven days. This means that the starting point was around 2.7K monthly organic traffic, as is proven by Ahrefs batch analysis from the initial offer:

Now, let’s compare initial stats and two-month progress

Simple maths allows us to see the actual results in numbers. We can see that, with the help of two months of our link building campaign, our total number of keywords has increased by almost double (80%), from 1500 to 2700 ranked keywords. This led to a 45% organic traffic boost!

Fairly obviously, there is a strong correlation between the number of keywords ranked and organic traffic growth. But, what’s more interesting is that there was a lot of content, published in 2014 and 2015, that hadn’t been ranked at all. This only popped up now because of the overall site ranking boost:

With the help of external backlinks, a lot of keywords that were far below 100 ranks appeared in the <50 positions.

In such cases, you need to check whether these pieces are up to date and add new content that will explain any recent updates in more detail because you probably don’t want people in 2020 to read stuff from 2014, do you?

Wow, you’ve almost got to the end! High five!

Let’s sum up what you can learn from this case

No results from SEO in the first 3-4 months

This might be true for 2 or 3-month-old sites and projects with zero content. But, if you have a lot of good articles and other content pages and your traffic is stagnant, or even decreasing, it’s a good indicator that you’re missing strong backlinks in your SEO strategy.

But this case clearly shows how, in just two months, 20+ strong backlinks can kick-off your ranking from the starting point, as long as you publish them in a very organic and natural-looking manner with a wide range of anchor types!

Always run a full on-site SEO audit before your link building campaign.

You need to make sure that target pages for link building are fully ready in terms of on-site SEO. This means you need to check them for the following issues, using SEO crawlers like Screaming Frog or Siteliner:

1. H1-H3 titles, descriptions (missed, duplicated, number of symbols in titles>65 or <30)
2. Duplicated content, low uniqueness or fewer than 250 words
3. Non-optimised Images >100kb
4. Check your pages for accessibility – “orphan pages” (can users access this page from the homepage or via any other internal link aka “bread crumbs”?)

Diversify your types of links, anchors and destination pages

Following the 2019 March update, having a wide variety of link types is more important than ever. Therefore, you need to make sure that you publish at least 2-3 other types of links besides genuine guest posts. For that purpose, forum links (not blog comments – they’re junk) from trusted relevant community boards will work. They won’t give you much link juice and most of them will be no-follow, but it’s a great solution to the question of how to diversify your link profile according to the latest White Hat standards.

What makes this case study unique?

Besides a strong link building campaign and on-site SEO fixes, the most result-driven factor, in this case, was the accumulated potential in the published content that wasn’t ranking at all and was discovered by Google bots only after links kicked in. This means you can expect a similar effect if you have a lot of keywords ranking on the third page of Google’s SERP.

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