Link Building Case Study: 105% Organic Traffic in 12 Months for Local Business Website
In the right hands, link building can help lift a website's search traffic.
It can also destroy your organic traffic if you have no idea what you're doing.
In this link building case study, we'll examine how you can achieve the former.
It all starts with choosing the right link builder for the job.
In this case, it's Legiit's very own Priyank Soni.
Priyank Soni of RankRight
Priyank Soni is the mastermind behind Rankright, a full-scale SEO service provider at affordable prices.
He started his Legiit journey at the end of 2020 and has several services available—one of those we'll spotlight later.
A local business owner in the home services niche approach Priyank for SEO help.
The client was getting an average order value of $2,500, which is pretty good.
Its site was gaining traction on local search—again, not bad.
However, its blog posts weren't ranking for their target keywords. There was barely any traffic coming in the site.
Upon closer inspection, Priyank was able to identify the issue:
Weak backlink profile.
What made things worse was that the site had backlinks.
But they were from low-quality websites with artificial traffic graphs when viewed on tools like Ahrefs. Examples include article directories, fake user profiles, and others.
These backlinks are doing more harm than good and causing the site's rankings to drop.
What Priyank Did
From here, Priyank knows precisely what he needs to do for the client:
Build a much stronger link profile to increase Google traffic!
However, here's the catch:
He can't just build authoritative links immediately.
As a seasoned SEO expert, Priyank knew what he must do first before launching a full-blown link building campaign.
And it all begins with on-page SEO.
On-Page and Technical SEO
A house with shoddy foundations won't stand the test of time.
It will soon crumble no matter how sturdy the materials used for the house are.
The same goes for SEO.
You can't expect a website, let alone a great blog post, to rank if its on-page optimization is messy, even if it has the best backlinks.
In a nutshell, on-page SEO refers to improving the site page's chances of ranking on top of SERPs.
So what gave away the site's need to improve its on-page efforts?
Answer: the site's blog posts weren't ranking.
Either the pages weren't optimized from the start, or the site was having other issues affecting its ability to rank.
Speaking of which, the site also needed work on its technical SEO.
This refers to improving the site's crawlability and indexability.
Fixing all these issues not only helps search spiders rank your site faster.
It also primes the website to make acquiring relevant links much easier.
Below are some of the most important things Priyank did for the site:
* Internal linking audit - Suggested building internal links on certain site pages.
* Content audit - Identify low-performing content and suggested improvements.
* Metadata audit - Checked meta title and description of each page and suggested improvements.
* Canonicals - Identify canonical links of certain pages to avoid duplicate content and redundant indexing.
* Broken links and pages - Replace broken links and pages with working ones or remove them altogether.
* Images optimization audit - Find images with more than 100kb and compress them to decrease file size without compromising quality.
Keyword Research and Clustering
After fixing the site's foundation, Priyank prepared to create content clusters or silos.
Let it be known that an awesome post alone won't be enough to generate thousands of organic traffic.
To reach the first page of Google, you need tons of fresh content about your topic.
This is why content silos are important. Their goal is to increase the site's topical authority or relevance.
The higher the topical relevance, the sooner multiple pages on your site will rank on top of search engine result pages (SERPs)
And that's the key here—creating lots of interlinked high-quality content relevant to the site's topic.
It starts with the pillar page (preferably an educational resource) that links to cluster pages or supporting articles.
This is executed through proper keyword research.
Brainstorming relevant long-tail keywords to the site's topic allowed Priyank to piece together silos for various subtopics of the site.
At the same time, he upgraded the old posts to optimize them for their respective keywords.
Priyank then assigned the same content to their rightful clusters to help increase the site's topical authority.
Link Building
After publishing the silos, Priyank proceeded to develop a link building strategy.
Just by doing the above steps and with zero links, it's just a matter of time for the same site to rank much higher than before.
However, Priyank strives not just for higher keywords ranking when people search Google.
He wants to put the site at the very top of search engines!
To do this, he acquired high-quality links pointing to the client's site.
Below is the link building process he used
* Link profile audit - The first step Priyank took that set off this SEO campaign. Check the site's backlinks and identify the best and worst backlinks of the site.
* Disavow file creation - Put the domains of the client site's worst backlinks in a text file and upload them to the Disavow Tool. This is only done when the site is undergoing a negative SEO attack.
* Backlinks gap - Find out backlinks that competitor sites have but the client site doesn't.
* Anchor analysis - Identify anchor texts used by top competitors and determine the ratio. Then implement a variety of branded and URL anchors to be used for building links.
* Execution - Started building 4 to 7 backlinks each month. Backlinking started around June 2021.
Priyank employed various link building strategies to land these links.
But all these links come from his DR 50+ Powerful Backlinks On RELEVANT Sites W/ Traffic service on Legiit.
You might think four monthly backlinks are low for an off-page SEO campaign.
However, even a few links can impact your organic traffic as long as they come from authoritative websites.
This is precisely what Priyank brought to the table in spades through his Legiit service.
Results
Thanks to Priyank's link building efforts, the client started seeing results within 2-3 months.
It started from 1.8K organic traffic in June 2021 to 2.7k in September of the same year.
But the real kicker came after March 2022, when it hit 5.1k organic traffic and never looked back.
From the image above, you can see that the organic traffic growth coincides with the growth of referring domains.
Don't believe Ahrefs? Check out its Google Analytics YOY growth:
It shows 105% organic growth from full-2021 to full-2022.
Increased by 40,000 new organic visitors. Even a 1% conversion means $1,000,000 in revenue in a year!
Conclusion
The power of link building cannot be denied.
This case study proves why link builders are a crucial component of your SEO strategy and internet marketing in general.
At the same time, you can't just pick any link builder from a hat and run with it.
You need someone who can build links that deliver your desired online marketing and SEO results.
In this case, look no further than Priyank.
The case study above is just one example of what he can do for your site. View Priyank's other Legiit services to learn more about how he can help you.
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