As the popularity of online retail businesses continues to grow, so does the competition among entrepreneurs to increase the sales and profitability of their websites.
For that, it is essential to have online visibility and build organic traffic to your site.
This is a success story featuring a local business that started off with 1.5K estimated organic traffic. OneLittleWeb helped them grow their organic traffic by 60 times (bringing in approximately 90K visitors per month) in less than 10 months.
In this case study, I will be explaining step-by-step how we have pulled this off.
Overview
Client’s Industry: Online retail platform. |
They started to work with us: February 2020. |
Organic traffic then: 500 (Ahrefs) – 1.5K Estimated Real Traffic |
Organic traffic now: 73K+ (Ahrefs) – 220K Estimated Real Traffic |
Service provided: Outreach-based Guest Post backlink service. |
Pain point: Keywords were extremely hard to rank. |
Duration: 10 months and counting. |
Number of backlinks secured so far: 66+ |
It all started around ten months ago when the client approached us to build their traffic.
They have been a major industry player since 1997, but lately, they were experiencing a rather sluggish online presence and low organic traffic.
They wanted to increase their sales and had super ambitious goals for capitalizing on digital opportunities. However, their webpages were not ranking on search engines. A full-blown SEO campaign was needed to turn things over.
We began working with them to enhance their web presence in Feb 2020.
Client’s Expectation Vs. Results
The client came to us, expecting to grow their organic traffic by a few thousand visitors. However, the keywords they wanted to rank were challenging to work with, and some of the most competitive in the industry.
Take a look at the details for the primary keyword that they wanted to rank for:
Guess what?
They now rank #1 for this keyword after working with OneLittleWeb for about 10 months.
This was just one of the many difficult keywords that we helped them with, and now they are successfully ranking for many of them.
Look at their organic traffic when we started off. They only had 500+ organic visitors per month.
….and here is where it stands now after 10 months with OneLittleWeb: More than 73K in organic traffic!
The estimated real traffic is at least 3X or higher. So, they get approximately 220K+ real traffic now.
How did We Pull this Off?
We started off with a detailed audit that helped us create a road map for this project.
The audit helped us answer the following questions:
- What’s the on-page and off-page SEO status of the website?
- Who are their top competitors?
- What improvements (on-page and off-page) are needed to outrank the competition?
Post-Audit Findings and Solution
The thorough analysis made it easy for us to find the pain points so we could look for appropriate solutions.
We found 3 major problems that needed to be fixed.
In the following section, I will be explaining each of them.
Problem #1: Weak Competitive Position
We did a thorough analysis of the top 15 competitors to determine the factors that helped them rank higher.
The findings showed that they ranked for some excellent keywords with low competition and high search volume. In contrast, our client was only trying to rank for some extremely difficult keywords.
Also, the existing content on our client’s website was low quality and offered no value to website visitors or the search engines. The website was unstructured, unoptimized, and even missing out on search intent.
But their poor backlink profile surprised us the most. While most of their top competitors had a healthy backlink profile, our client had no more than 15 quality backlinks at that time.
However, a fortunate opportunity helped us with the link building for our client. Want to know how? Patience!
We’re heading towards it.
The Solution to Problem #1
1. New Keyword Ideas
We conducted thorough keyword research to find relevant and easy-to-rank keywords that the competitors were already ranking for. Our team also pulled some excellent keywords that the rivals were not ranking for.
With better keywords in place, we were all set for a ranking higher than everyone else.
2. Improved Content
The next objective was to create an effective content strategy.
We started by gaining an in-depth understanding of what the competitors were doing. Then we came up with strategic plans to beat the competition with quality content.
We decided to create and optimize content with better value and information.
Positive results soon became evident.
3. Better Backlink
Now that we had better keywords and content in place, we needed a better backlink strategy to enhance organic ranking, better indexing, and referral traffic.
Here is what we did:
Most of the competitors’ backlinks were Web 2.0, PBNs, or link farms. However, we didn’t want to miss out on the high-quality backlink opportunities that the competitors had.
To be in a better competitive position, we secured backlinks on high-quality opportunities found using reverse engineering. We also secured in-content backlinks with tailored blogger outreach campaigns.
With better keywords, content, and backlink strategy in place, we were in a competitive position to move to the next step.
Problem #2: Poor On-page Optimization
Before we started securing backlinks for this particular client, another big issue needed to be addressed – improving the on-page optimization.
Let’s see how we resolved this:
The Solution to Problem #2
1. Speed Optimization
Since page speed is one of the critical factors used by Google Algorithm to rank a site, we needed to work on it.
So, we took the necessary steps to increase the page speed, such as optimizing its codes, images, improving server response time, etc. We had to ensure that the images used in the content weren’t too large.
2. Mobile-friendly Website
Considering more than 50% of the total web traffic is from mobile, it was necessary to optimize their website for mobile devices. It is also an important ranking factor for Google.
So, we focused on this issue and made sure their site was optimized for mobile search.
3. Getting rid of Duplicate Meta Tags
Having duplicate metadata does not affect search engine ranking, but it could hurt the CTR on SERP. It can also be confusing for search bots causing them to skip pages with duplicate metadata. That’s why our SEO specialists always advise creating unique metadata for every page.
We updated the metadata for all the pages with unique titles and descriptions.
4. Optimizing for Featured Snippets
According to Search Engine Land, featured snippets get 8.6% of all SERP clicks. And you don’t get a featured snippet if your website isn’t optimized for it.
How did we optimize our client’s website for featured snippets?
First, we identified promising content that was already ranking on the 1st page of the search results. This was followed by optimizing the content with proper headings (H2, H3, etc.), breaking larger paragraphs into smaller blocks (40-60 words).
Few months after the optimization, the number of featured snippets for the client’s website increased 3 times.
5. Improving Search Intent
Ranking a website in 2021 is more challenging than ever before. Google is much more efficient and smarter when it comes to showing search results that match exact search intent.
While conducting the audit for this client, we figured out that much of their content wasn’t optimized with search intent.
So, we went ahead and got to work on some of their top pages to fix the search intent. Additionally, we also created a search intent optimization strategy for the new content in the pipeline.
Result? Well, a couple of thousand new visitors headed to the client website in the next 2 following months without any backlinks!
6. Improving Website Silo
Siloing involves grouping your website pages by theme, category, or type. Proper website silo makes it easy for the search engines to crawl your site and rank your pages accordingly.
This enhances search engine crawlability and also leads to a better user experience for website visitors.
By now, we were pretty much done with on-page optimization.
The next thing was to work on off-page optimization.
Problem #3: Poor Off-page (backlink) Optimization:
We set out to rank keywords with super hard Keyword Difficulty (KD). One of the hardest ones was had 67 KD. After we were done with competitor analysis and on-page optimization, we needed a robust off-page optimization strategy in place.
We already found some excellent prospects for backlinks while doing competitor analysis. Now, it was time for us to dig further to secure niche-relevant high-authority and contextual backlinks.
Let’s dive deep into the details on how we did this!
The Solution to Problem #3
1. Putting Together Link-able Content
We started off by creating content that was powerful enough to help us drive the backlinks we needed.
First off, we pulled the low-hanging fruits, i.e., the existing content, and optimized it. Next, we created new content for the new keywords we discovered earlier.
Now that we knew our target contents and keywords – we set out to get backlinks from niche-relevant websites with good traffic.
2. Securing 50+ High-quality In-content Backlinks
Our strategic guest post link-building strategy based on blogger outreach has been the game-changer for this client’s success!
What sets up apart from others is the fact that we never get backlinks from link-farms or PBNs. We don’t even rely on listed websites on a database.
We followed a hand-picked blogger outreach approach to secure guest post backlinks for this particular client.
Niche relevance and good referring domain traffic were 2 of our significant agendas before securing backlinks.
Take a look at the breakdown of the backlinks secured:
Plan | Number of Backlinks | Avg. Referring domain Traffic |
DA50+ | 17 | 30000+ |
DA40+ | 21 | 10000+ |
DA30+ | 9 | 8000+ |
DA20+ | 9 | 3000+ |
Out of 56 backlinks secured in total, 37% of the backlinks are from DA 50+ websites, 30% are from DA 40+ websites, and the rest are from DA 30 and lower ones.
As we mentioned earlier, we focused on referring domains with traffic. Take a good look at the graph below – all DA 50+ referring domains (backlinks) had an average of 30K+ traffic. DA 40+, DA 30+, and DA 20+ also had significant average traffic.
Now It’s Your Turn
It’s crucial to secure quality backlinks for your site if you want to rank higher on Google.
However, if you do not know your competition and the number of links you’ll have to build to get your website to the top, you aren’t even in the game.
We have met so many clients who have no idea what their competitors are up to, and that’s just sad.
While this project was nothing short of an exhilarating roller-coaster, it was also an eye-opener about data-backed backlinking campaigns and what they can do for a website.
But if you aren’t sure how you will achieve your desired ranking on the SERP, we have your back.
Don’t believe what you read here? Try us out with our welcome offer and see the results yourself.
Sujan Sarkar is one of the co-founders of OneLittleWeb. He leads the agency with over a decade of experience.
In 2018, he founded OneLittleWeb, driven by a vision to fill a void in the industry, providing top-quality SEO and backlink services.
His impressive track record includes crafting over 25,000 backlinks for more than 1100 clients, generating over 1 billion in traffic. This has earned him a significant presence in the SEO realm.
He successfully leads a dedicated team of 65+ SEO professionals, focused on helping SaaS and Enterprises scale their organic traffic.
Sujan firmly believes that the best backlinks are not paid for but earned through high-quality content and strategic relationships.
Every day, he works tirelessly to position your business at the forefront of your customers’ minds, striving to elevate your brand’s visibility and authority.
His daily inspiration centers around securing client features on top-tier publications like Forbes, MSN, BBC, Yahoo, and many more. He leverages the right SEO strategies to achieve this mission.