6-Month SEO Case Study (What's Working Now)
So what you guys see right here is the last 6 months of a new client that I've taken on. Even though it's not a lot of clicks, this is a client in the SAS business for the fitness niche, so they're hovering at around 150 to 200 clicks a day, which is actually quite valuable for them.
Now let's talk about what's working for this client and hopefully you guys can take some learnings and apply it to your websites back home. If we actually check this site on clicks, we're going to see the actual traffic over time is a bit more intense, just because taking a look at the most recent traffic growth.
The main thing that sticks out for me is this domain power of 22 with only 16 referring domains. What that means is that there are a few high authority websites that are linking to this client, and as a result, it's starting out with some significant domain power.
Now we're going to talk about how we've gotten those referring domains and those backlinks in a second, but first I want to talk about the content, because that's what's blowing up right now. We've basically focused on creating really high quality content with a specific formula, and this is exactly how we're doing it.
To start off, we basically hired one of the best writers in the space from Upwork to create content for us. The good thing about that, and this is actually a tip that I got from James Douley (which by the way, if you guys want to watch that insane podcast, you can click that link right here), is that you want to find an author for your content that has already been featured on a bunch of other relevant websites for your space. That will automatically give your website a bit more credibility and help with your E-A-T.
To find out if they're a relevant author, just quickly Google their name and see if they've been mentioned on other websites. I guess you could actually fake this, but we've done it for real, and it seems to be working for us right now.
Now let's talk about the content itself. I can't show you guys the actual pieces of content that we're creating, but here's one of the articles I'm going to try to blur as little as I can just to show you guys the formatting and the outlining of this content.
If we actually scroll down to this table of contents, which I like to include in basically all of the content I write or am involved in, we're going to see that this is a pretty long article. There are around 3,600+ words that have been included in this article, so we're not skimping out on the words either – we're going absolutely ham on content quality and including everything possible.
Some more things: out of the 3,600+ words, there are 12 H2s, so basically we're adding an H2 every 300 or so words. Now out of the 12 H2s, there are 29 H3s, so every H2 will have at least a couple of H3s. This makes for really well-structured and in-depth content, and of course, all of those subheadings will have some type of keyword variation in there.
The added benefit of just slamming your content full of optimized subheadings is that there's a higher likelihood of coming up for Featured Snippets, which many of these articles are now starting to get. Now, these aren't massive keywords, but again, they're hyper relevant for the business, which is ideal in this scenario.
So here's an example of one of the pages. We see the average positioning basically flattening out to position number one, and now we're taking over that Featured Snippet. So again, not a lot of clicks, but hyper relevant for this business.
Now let's talk about the links inside of the content, both internal and external. I'm a big fan of adding external links whenever relevant, especially if it fits within the flow of the article or if the article mentions something that may not be super relevant to the website. The same goes for internal links; I try to have one internal link back to the homepage and another internal link to another relevant article, always making sure that it fits within the flow of the content.
All right, now let's talk about those backlinks. As we said before, we only have around 16 referring domains coming in, but some of these are quite high authority. So we can just take a look at how the referring domains for this website have been growing over the last few months.
Unfortunately, I can't show you the top pages, but we can go into the backlinks here. I'll have to blur most things, but I'm going to keep the domain power here so you guys can see that the domain power for some of these is quite decent. We have a 51, 33, 31, 27, 26, and a few more down here.
Now let's talk about the three things that we focused on to start getting some of these high-quality backlinks. First, I did get a little bit lucky because this company had been pushing social media quite hard. They've been building affiliate partnerships and deals with influencers, and as a result, there were a few high-quality relevant domains that were already linking before we started creating content for them.
Just a reminder that affiliates and affiliate programs can be really solid for SEO and link building. It's quite a way of just getting backlinks, especially if you have margin on your business that you can share with influencers or other people in the business.
The second thing is because they had some influence on social media, we were able to do a launch on Product Hunt and do extremely well. Just that on its own already led to a few extra relevant backlinks, resulting in a lot of people mentioning the brand, even though most of these links are nofollow.
The icing on the cake is that we used the success from Product Hunt as the main pitch for a small digital PR campaign. We reached out to a few niche-specific health and fitness-focused journalists. Personally, I think that's the key for something like this: make sure that you find the right person for your pitch; don't just send it to everybody and anybody, you know, that’s a journalist.
We got first or second in the day for Product Hunt, which is rare for a SAS in the fitness niche. We added some other reasons why we were changing the space and why it was such a great product, and that actually did decently well.
We were able to get one new mention from a journalist from a domain power 30 and a similar one from a related fitness blog with also a similar domain power also in the mid-30s.
The last thing we did is as soon as we started seeing those backlinks come into the homepage, we added links to some of those new articles, and that seemed to do the trick for some of these initial articles to start seeing some traffic.
We're going to be doubling down on this strategy, seeing how far we can push it with just high quality content and minimal link building. We'll be keeping you guys updated on this one as well. There's a lot more AI case studies coming in the next few weeks, and I'll be seeing you guys in the next one.
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