. . . Providing the advice is put to good use.
At OutreachMama, we always provide a tailored approach to SEO as the foundation of everything we do for clients of every size.
Simple and effective link-building advice for a professional services firm that 2x Domain Rating (DR) and traffic in 2 months
Getting good, actionable advice as a small business owner is so valuable . . .
In this case study, we’ll show how a personalized backlink campaign more than doubled a client’s website DR in just a couple of months and increased their organic traffic by over 50%.
In this link-building case study, we demonstrate the value of quality over quantity, and show that you don’t always need to spend more — you need to work with an outreach partner who:
- Listens to your goals;
- Identifies the most cost and time-effective ways to achieve those;
- Recommends a solution that demonstrably meets those goals and needs.
Let’s take a look at how we’ve done this for a law firm . . .
Ready to Get Started? Let’s Talk.
PART 1
About the Client
Our client is a small law firm looking to expand its digital reach. It specializes in disability law and has an excellent track record with numerous success stories and testimonials.
What it needs is to boost its website domain authority (DA), as that will help to increase organic traffic and sales leads. A website with a low DA and not many backlinks won’t bring in much traffic, and without organic traffic, businesses have to pay for it.
The good news is, that we’ve had excellent results building links for law firms and other professional service firms.
Local SEO, including a targeted link building strategy, is a bare minimum essential for generating organic traffic and sales leads for law firms. For more information: Check out my guide to how search behavior works for professional services.
Importance of long-term planning in SEO
Making a positive impact with SEO is a long-term gain with long-term rewards, which is why the client chose OutreachMama.
He’s worked with us before on a separate project. He’s still enjoying the benefits.
He knows we’re all about long-term planning. An SEO strategist whose promises are all about short-term gains from high-quality backlinks is lying, plain and simple!
However, that’s not to say you can’t deliver short-term benefits with a targeted link building campaign. This case study proves that.
But the purpose of this study is to show that even a short-term achievement like 2x a website’s DR in 2 months (which helps enormously with increasing traffic and SERPs rankings) should be understood as a milestone in a longer-term strategy.
So — talking of milestones. Let’s take a quick look at the facts and figures.
KPIs in the First Two Months of an SEO Campaign
Our Client’s Key Stats on Jan 21, 2024:
- Referring domains: 164
- Domain rating: 15
- Organic traffic: 548 (per month)
All analytics are provided by Ahrefs.
Our Client’s Key Stats on March 27, 2024:
- Referring domains: 205
- Domain rating: 31
- Organic traffic: 847 (per month)
All analytics are provided by Ahrefs.
PART 2
Identifying The SEO Problem
Our client had been working with another agency to secure guest blog posts to acquire backlinks. However, he hadn’t been seeing the results he expected.
Sound familiar? Thousands of small businesses waste millions of dollars on guest posting — all because of poor professional advice and poor-quality links and guest posts.
I arranged a call with him to discuss his campaign so far.
You might not realize it, but that’s probably the single most important step in any client SEO project.
A long-term, high-quality, and conversion-focused link building strategy is built on getting a lot of small things right over a 6 to 18-month timescale. For that to happen, we need to understand a client’s current problems and their SEO goals.
Talking a project over via a video call rather than dashing off an email saying “Yes, we can do that” is the difference between an effective link building campaign and a waste of money. Too many agencies in this business neglect the personal touch and waste their client’s money on links that don’t make an impact.
During our call and in the subsequent analysis phase, I was looking for two things:
- A backlink profile that was either too narrow or completely untargeted
- An ineffective anchor text portfolio
So many small online businesses don’t realize that these are the hallmarks of their expensive, failing backlinking campaigns.
And if you’re already working with a link building agency, they’re probably not telling you this vital piece of information.
PART 3
Key SEO Challenges
On January 21, 2024, four days after our initial call, our client’s digital presence looked like this:
A domain authority (DA) of 15 isn’t going to get you much organic traffic. Sites with this domain rating just don’t appear at the top of SERPs.
See why DA matters so much to Google.
The challenge is that domain authority can take a long time to build. We wanted to quickly boost our client to a level where other SEO strategies, such as content marketing, would be made more effective by a higher domain rating.
He had 164 referring domains, but his organic traffic was still at 548 visitors per month. What were these referring domains giving him?
Our SEO specialist took over at this point to audit the client’s backlinks and find out why these referrals weren’t converting into organic traffic and a higher DR.
Not all backlinks are created equal . . .
The fundamental goal of link building campaigns is to build authority and boost organic traffic with contextually placed backlinks.
This is why placement matters so much. Standard link builders for small businesses will offer you a wealth of sites to choose from and fully expect you to pick the cheapest options.
It’ll be cheap. And it’ll do nothing.
And then there’s the choice of anchor text and where the backlink goes. It seems easy, right? You know what a keyword is. You can handle that yourself.
And again: the agency will be happy to let you choose.
That way, you’re to blame when your link building efforts don’t see any results. Not them.
. . . so we match the backlink to the client.
When we work out a guest post or backlink strategy for any client, we ask:
- How is the host domain related to the client’s website?
- What guest blog post subject makes that relationship seem as organic as possible?
- Will search engines consider it meaningful for this site to link to a law firm’s website?
- Why would a reader follow the link?
- What other sites are linking to the client’s website already — do we need to diversify?
This onboarding and discovery process is important because we have a personal relationship with both our client and our host domains.
If your link building agency or freelancer with nothing but an Excel table of domains isn’t involving you in these questions, I have a secret for you:
Your link building agency doesn’t care about your success and they know what you buy from them won’t make much of a difference.
I made sure our client was aware and on board with our link-building strategy from the start. Here’s how we answered those questions and put his new website on the digital map with a 107% increase in domain authority in two months.
Put Your Website on the Map — Book a Call Now
We’re invested in our clients’ success stories. We’re ready to give you a bespoke link building strategy today.
PART 4
Implementing The Most Effective SEO Solution
So, here’s how our SEO link building and guest blog post solution works.
In January, we published:
- 4 links to blog pages with keyword anchors
- 5 branded anchors directing to the homepage
- 1 geo-targeted anchor link directing to the homepage
In February, we followed this with:
- 4 links to the client’s homepage with keyword anchors
- 3 geotargeted anchor links pointing to the homepage
- 3 links with keyword anchors pointing to blog pages
These were spread strategically across host domains with DRs of 20+ to 50+.
That’s it.
That’s what made the difference for this client! Just a few links in the right places. Yes, okay, there is a little more to it than that.
An SEO Backlink Audit
Our SEO specialist audited the client’s existing backlink profile carefully and saw that his law firm’s site needed to diversify. We also realized he’d exclusively been using keyword anchors.
This is an extremely common mistake if your goal is to increase organic search traffic.
Branded anchors (which use your business’s name as the anchor) are often dismissed in favor of keyword anchors, but they often generate more traffic and are a safe bet if you’re concerned about getting flagged for spam.
Blogger Outreach Link Building Campaign
Our blogger outreach team then helped the client devise an anchor text roadmap and got to work contacting webmasters to put the campaign into action.
Besides the homepage, we focused on building high-quality links back to a relevant blog post. The content choices were strategic and closely related to the domains we chose. The keyword anchors used natural language and were diversified to avoid being flagged for spam.
This is another frequent problem with DIY link building strategies: exact match anchor keywords sound good in theory, but search engines quickly realize what you’re doing. Then you’ve wasted hundreds or even thousands of dollars on links that have done more harm than good.
We ensure our clients don’t look like they’re trying to blackhat Google with what Google considers a spam approach.
Targeting a Client’s Homepage with Branded Anchors
I’ve found that clients often hold one of two extreme and unrealistic views on how anchor keywords actually work. It’s either:
- People will only click the link if they think it’s an authoritative resource and not a brand promotion, or
- Nobody actually reads guest posts — this link is only for search engines, which is why keyword anchors are the way to go.
Branded anchors assign authority and increase traffic through organic clicks and how search engines index and rank them.
A branded anchor targeting the company’s homepage is so straightforward, and so often overlooked: yes, it’s an advert.
But that’s fine! Search engines are fine with honest adverts as long as they’re relevant and transparent — and so are readers!
What they don’t like is when they think you’re trying to be sneaky and cheat the system with black-hat search engine optimization techniques. That’s why exact match keyword anchors perform poorly, and we optimized the client’s keyword anchors to read as natural language.
In summary . . . the game-changer for this law sector client was literally just good advice.
Working with a knowledgeable link building partner saves you thousands of dollars and means your link-building campaigns actually get results. It’s a proven fact. Ready for some good advice?
PART 5
Results: ROI from Link Building Campaign
On March 27, 2024, our client’s profile looked like this.
We’ve crossed the hurdle that so many websites never achieve — building a platform for consistent growth.
Let’s take a look at these results in depth.
Organic traffic: increased from 548 to 847 per month
Organic traffic describes visitors who arrive at your page through unpaid links.
Of course, links acquired through guest posts are technically “paid,” but they’re considered organic by search engines. They’re differentiated from inorganic traffic acquired through PPC (pay-per-click) ads and other paid ads.
See that the percentage increase in organic traffic is over double the percentage increase in referring domains.
While there are numerous factors affecting organic traffic volume (including the increased domain rating and more keyword ranking), this suggests that the newer referring domains are contributing more in terms of organic traffic than the old ones.
We can attribute this to our strategy of using natural language and branded anchors rather than exact-match keyword anchors. These anchors tend to yield a higher number of clicks — and are also perceived favorably by crawling search engines.
Domain rating: increased from 15 to 31
Domain rating is a vital measure of performance — but requires context.
Aiming for the 70s, 80s, and 90s is unrealistic for most businesses — how could a local law firm rank as highly as an international news organization? The scale is completely different.
What’s important is that your domain rating is greater than your competitors.
A study in October 2021 focused on the top-ranking law firms in Austin found that among these high-performing websites, the average domain rating was 35. We can use this as relevant context.
During a two-month campaign, the client’s domain rating grew from 15 to 31. A domain authority of 15 is low-performing — the site wouldn’t rank highly in search engines.
In contrast, a domain authority of 31 is pushing towards the highest-ranking local law firm websites used in the study mentioned above.
That gives blog posts, landing pages, and other local SEO content a far greater chance of appearing at the top of SERPs. It enables a huge range of SEO marketing strategies that would be pointless with a lower DR.
Referring domains: increased from 164 to 205
Over the course of two months, we increased the number of referring domains (websites linking back to the client’s website) by 41.
These backlinks confer authority when they’re crawled by search engines. Referring domains that point toward the client’s homepage through branded anchors was especially valuable for contributing to the site’s domain authority in this case.
However, referring domains must be understood qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The qualitative difference can be observed by comparing the percentage increase in referring domains (25%) to the percentage increase in organic traffic (55%).
Short-Term and Long-Term Benefits
SEO is a long and exhausting game. It rarely delivers short-term benefits.
However, these results represent what an impact a small change of strategy can have compared to simply throwing money at a problem.
And speaking of money.
Besides the improved website performance, the greatest long-term benefit to the client in this case is a huge saving on ad spending. With results like these, the need for PPC campaigns is vastly reduced.
Plus, the client can be confident that he isn’t wasting money on ineffective link building strategies. We can show our clients the proof of our services’ success.
These gains only represent one small success in a longer-term SEO strategy that we are continuing to implement for this client.
Which brings us to — what comes next?
PART 6
A Plan For Continued Accelerated Organic Growth
Our mantra is that a consistent campaign delivers consistent results.
We continue to analyze and identify the best outreach opportunities for this client each month. We regularly review and expand his website’s backlink profile to ensure it remains diverse and healthy.
We identify opportunities for contextually relevant backlinks when we acquire new hosting partners. We continue to work closely with the client and with our webmaster partners to deliver strong results through personal service.
Watch this space — if this account yields more teachable moments, I may well post an update on this study in the coming months.
Key Takeaways
The difference between this client’s website and tens of thousands of underperforming small business websites is that our client had access to professional advice.
However large their networks, however low their prices, this is something you just won’t get from most small business link-building agencies.
Come and talk to us!
Literally waiting for your call. And I can promise you the same things we deliver to all our clients:
Honest advice
Personal service
Full transparency
A comprehensive blogger outreach program
A website pre-approval option
Competitive prices