Building backlinks is hard, there’s no doubt about it, but most people assume you need a lot more links than you perhaps actually need.
In 2017-2018 we worked with a client on a 6 month basis on our smallest link building service package. As many clients know we focus on 2 areas when building links:
Contents
What Inner Page/Post Is The Link Pointing To
What this means is if we can determine the pages that are already ranking on page 2 or 3 for extremely powerful keywords, we can build links directly to these pages and have an incredible ROI for the links built. Which is exactly what happened with this client.
Quality Over Quantity (And Relevance Obviously)
10 good links over 100 average links every single day. There are multiple reasons for this, one of the most important being amazing links cannot be replicated by your competition. If you get a link from the top sites in your industry, you’re competitors simply cannot replicate these and hence will never be able to outrank you even if they know where all the links are coming from.
What these links say (the anchor text) is also incredibly important. Having keyword rich anchors is essential but avoiding over-optimisation is also a very real and important. The anchors should be the most relevant and profitable keywords you’re looking to rank for. You can see how we establish these link targets for the highest ROI in this post.
The best part of the process is now we can build larger link building campaigns and target more competitive keywords as the campaign has already generated a 1000% ROI each and every month. Below I’ll explain how we achieved this and the details of the client without revealing the exact site for obvious reasons.
The Details
The client in question is a B2B Service provider where each new link is worth about $500 with the first sale of the business being between £1,500-£6,000. As a result obviously each lead was extremely valuable so even an increase of 3-4 leads a month could potentially result in £20,000+ in revenue. After 6 months they were up to 30 leads a month and an additional £12,000-£18,000+ in revenue. All through only 18 links!
Quality is always better than quantity, but for this client relevancy was very important. They had a very specific offering and as a result ranking for variations, synonyms and other terms (to pick up all organic traffic) could result in a tripling in organic revenue even though the keyword search volumes were between 10-200 searches a month in most cases (see serpbook screenshot below.)
The process we used for this client was to find the top 100 industrial blogs in their bridged-niche and request to build in-depth guides on each one of these with links back to our client’s HOMEPAGE.
In this campaign we did something that’s not actually common, that was to focus on building links to the homepage and focus on building the brand (which was also the primary keyword) and the variations of this.
Think about how someone might search for an “agency”, “company” “consultant” “service” “expert” etc but realistically they mean the same thing when the prospect is searching. It’s very similar in this example and we wanted to rank for all variations to ensure we weren’t leaving any potential rankings on the table.
In total we built 14 links to the homepage and 4 links to the inner post pages that then internally linked back to the homepage with the target anchor text we wanted.
The strategy really was as simple as finding the most popular, relevant sites in the industry and getting in front of the editors and becoming a contributor, this honestly is a very drawn out time consuming process which is why the majority of companies (and competitors) don’t and won’t do it. If you do invest the time you can get some extremely powerful and relevant links.
18 links total within a 6 month period is only 3 links per month! But as we mentioned every action we take is based on ROI and the ROI for this campaign per link worked out at over £1,000 per link, which is over £12,000+ a year. Pretty incredible figures from a purely link volume point of view. This emphasises the point once again that link quality is that much more important that link volume.
The Results
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the leading backlink analysis and organic traffic tool on the market currently. It’s a tool we use on a daily basis and one I love for many many reasons. One of the features Ahrefs has is the organic search feature, this estimates the total number of visitors a website will get based on the keyword positions it ranks for and the search volumes associated with those keywords. The organic traffic estimates aren’t incredibly accurate, yet they are a good third party gauge.
Below is a screenshot of the client, as you can see from the graph they’d struggled to generate links and rankings in the past having a slight increase in Jan 2017 but then dropping off completely until January 2018 when results from our link building began to come in and take effect. Link building campaigns do take a couple of months to show results but as we focus on quality the results come very quickly once the ball starts rolling.
Google Analytics
Google analytics organic search is the core KPI we have for our services, although this is obviously very closely associated with the quality of the technicals and the on-page optimisation. We started our campaigns on the 17th November 2017. Increasing organic traffic and more importantly organic leads by 550% within 6 months.
Serpbook
As well as tracking through Ahrefs and Google analytics we also track multiple single keyword terms in serpbook’s tracker. Which show the results based on our highly profitable keywords (top section) and then the variations and everything we want to rank (second grouping.)
Conclusion
This is what the average client looks like after working with us for 6 months even on our smallest packages. Smart link building and relevant guest posting and only 18 links can be the difference between ranking 1st and on page 2-3 for your primary keywords. The difference between that is obviously mammoth.
For more information on how we build links feel free to read our link building process page and request a proposal.
Thanks for reading
Tom.