From Zero to Hero: How We Use White Hat Link Building Strategy to Grow a Startup’s Ranking to 327% in less than 6 Months

Last year, a medium-sized Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that helps people to find and reconnect with others contracted our white hat link building service. Based in Prague, the SaaS business was doing great in a number of ways:

Their online branding is stellar. Not only that the company has catchy domain name, but its domain has also been in existence for years.
Its website is beautifully designed. The company’s logo matches the brand and the overall value proposition of the business.
More importantly, the company is killing it on social media, particularly on Twitter. But all these are beside the point. For four years that the company has been in operation, they haven’t seen a spike in their traffic, lead generation, or rank on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

The specific problems the company was facing are as follows:

Poor traffic.
Low page ranking (as low as position 94 on Google).
They were not ranking on any of their desired keyword.

This is not to say that the company was not trying their best to hire professional SEO consultants or blogger outreach agencies to help them out. As we all know, it’s easy for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to label themselves “professional digital marketing company” but it’s very hard to prove their claims. So all the so-called blogger outreach agencies and professional SEO companies they hired have failed them. “We hired a couple of Internet marketing companies to help us with white label link building and blogger outreach services,” the company’s Chief Operation Officer Mike told us. “But the results are actually poor. We never ranked for any of our favorite keyword.” After a number of trial and error, they finally gave up. The company’s marketing managers also decided that it’s time to try another company. Perhaps, this time, they could be lucky enough to get a reputable agency that knows what they are doing. So on a Tuesday morning in January last year, we received an email from the marketing department of the company. They wanted to hire us. The company’s content marketing team was very clear on the problems that they were facing—a plummeting traffic on one hand. On the other, they were very clear on their desired goals—to increase their traffic and visibility on Google and rank for the following keyword: “Phone number lookup.” After multiple email exchanges and phone calls, the negotiations were over; a deal was sealed. And immediately our team—the Outreach Expert team—get to work. As usual, we started by doing the essential tasks: SEO audit—to diagnose the problems…

Diagnosing the problem(s)

What’s the company doing wrong?

That was the central question that we wanted to examine. We reasoned that something was definitely not right for the company to have had these bad experiences for four consecutive years. After we SEO audited the company, we discovered the following issues:

Poor content. Their content marketing sucks. In fact, the few posts that the company has on their blog were low in quality. They were within the 400-500-words range, are affected by keyword stuffing, contain some grammar goofs.
Poor on-page SEO. To begin with, all the posts published on the company blog were poorly written: The blog posts were not informative and conversational. Plus, they were not fully optimized. Secondly, most of the posts don’t have good meta descriptions. Thirdly, the posts have poor URL structure and the internal links were poorly placed.
Poor off-page SEO. We noticed that the blogging strategy the company adopted was really ineffective. For example, when we asked the chief content director of the company which of their post is a pillar content, he answered, “All the posts are pillar content.” And as you probably know, if you want to rank for no. 1 on Google, for example, using blogging, you have to have a pillar page and a number of posts that link to it. Also, the company’s link building, as we have established earlier, was a complete failure. So, they needed a white hat link building strategy to get them more traffic and higher ranking for their desired keyword.

These were some of the problems we uncovered. And they were the reasons why the company was not ranking higher on SERPs, especially on Google. With that said, we started discussing on how to solve all those issues, and come up with final decision: We agreed to follow a simple, but workable strategy that will get the company the visibility it deserves.

Our Simple, Smart Strategy

To solve these issues, our experts devised a four-step strategy that will turn things around.

In-depth, compelling visual content.
Powerful on-page SEO.
Epic blogging strategy (a.k.a. the content cluster strategy).
Result-oriented white hat link building strategy.

Getting to Work

We started the project on January 6th 2018. Unanimously, we agreed to start by writing in-depth, long-form posts. Through our personal experiences, we learned that long-form posts do more on search engines than short-form posts. In addition, we realized that when visual assets are included in a long post, they become more powerful and do great in search engine result pages. So we wrote a long pillar post with the keyword “phone number lookup” in the title. Next, we wrote other blog posts in similar topic—“phone number lookup”—and linked them all together. We also link all the blog posts to the pillar post. That way, we are telling Google that the pillar post is important, which will help our client’s ranking and improve their authority on the topic. Talking about killing two birds with one stone!
Again, we shortened all the URL structure of the posts, and wrote simple and catchy meta descriptions to help search engines crawl our target keyword.
Then we moved on to do off-page SEO.
This line of work comes handy because we have a long-term collaboration with top online publications. We used two strategies to secure about 28 links for the site:

Guest posting. We guest post the company on business and entrepreneurship sites making sure that we secure placement to the pillar post on every article.
Blogger outreach service. We did blogger outreach, pitching A-list bloggers and editors at authority websites, and getting links back to the pillar post.

The Results

As we have earlier established, we started writing the blog posts, the content cluster technique, the blogger outreach, the white hat link building and all the SEO strategy in January last year. And in less than 4 months, the results have started to show. The pillar content has started ranking higher on Google. Meanwhile, the client’s keyword “phone number lookup” has started generating high volume of traffic, as you can see from the data below:

Here is another chat to drive our point home:

Do You Want Similar Results?

You’re a passionate trainer. Out of the love you have for the craft, you launched your first website 2-4 years ago. You know you have all what it takes to reach out to your market, get found by your audience, be visible online and all… But here’s the problem: With too many trainers online, your audience can’t find you on Google. Your traffic sucks. You are not ranking for any of your favorite keywords yet. The good news? You don’t have to spend your savings hiring all these SEO companies that won’t get results. You can save yourself some time and hire us—the OutreachXpert—to get you similar results as the SaaS company we helped. We’ll never promise you what we can’t deliver. But be rest assured: We will do what we say we can do. When we agree to work on your website, we can:

Get you traffic to your unpopular site.
Publish in-depth, SEO optimized blog posts on your site.
Offer you great on-page and off-page SEO strategy.
Get you found online by securing you awesome backlinks so your audience can see you and do business with you.

So what?
Trust us with your business! Order our link building services today.