How i made it From 920 to 13,503 Visitors Per Month

I am going to show you how i increased my client’s organic search traffic by 1,367%.

In real numbers that means we went from 920 to 13,503 visitors per month-

Not bad for a young affiliate site!

Which has shown consistent growth across the board this year-

𝗔 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗿 𝗟𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗔𝘁 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝗦𝗶𝘁𝗲

The site is in a very competitive affiliate category targeting terms with high commerical intent.

They post a mix of content including product roundups and product comparisons – it is a truly hardcore affiliate site through and through.

My Client main goal was to increase organic search traffic by:

✅Fortifying the clients most important pages
✅Building a healthy backlink profile (download the checklist)
✅ Fixing content issues
✅Building trust and authority with Google

All of which was much easier said than done because of the many challenges we faced…

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗪𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲

Every SEO strategy that i build has to overcome a different set of core challenges.

When i 14x search traffic in the health niche, i had to overcome big brands with big budgets. When i tripled ecommerce revenue, i had to navigate through a range of technical problems.

And despite my case study site being relatively young – i had to overcome both technical problems AND big brands with big budgets this time around.

After analyzing the site i realized that-

❌There was tons of outdated content even though the site was only a couple of years old and we all know how much Google loves “fresh content”.
❌We also found the client had built an super spammy unnatural link profile with keyword-heavy anchors to affiliate pages.
❌ And if that wasn’t enough the site was also missing key trust signals throughout so it looked like a spammy anonymous affiliate site, because it was.

So we built a custom strategy to build a foundation that both Google & humans love.

𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗔 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻 𝗢𝗳 𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸

It’s fair to say we had quite the battle ahead of us.

So we broke down our plan of attack into 6 key parts that would allow us to win the war-

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 #𝟭 – 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗣𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀
To help bolster the key affiliates pages, we built a new website silo dedicated to individually reviewing all products listed in the key roundup pages.

The purpose of this was to build satellite product review articles that we could use to internal link to the key product roundup pages with exact match anchor text.

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 #𝟮 – 𝗨𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗢𝗹𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁

Even though the site was relatively young, there was a ton of outdated content.

This can often be an expensive and lengthy process but in this case, we deployed a quick win solution

All i did was use the “site:” command in Google and quoted 2018 and 2019.

Then i just went through each result from the SERPs and did some brief updates like updating dates along with fixing broken images, links or product recommendations.

Simple!

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 #𝟯 – 𝗕𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀

In our inital assessment of the site i knew that the existing backlink profile was a problem because-

➡️The relevance of the pages linking to our client was poor
➡️ The quality of the linking sites was poor
➡️ They used exact match anchors aggressively
All of which are the exact kind of problems you do not want to find.

So first i disavowed (learn how to disavow backlinks) all links that were-

❌Coming from irrelevant content
❌ Sites that we deemed as spammy
❌Sites that Google had deindexed

Which also helped me to regain partial control of the anchor text breakdowns because most of these sites used exact match anchors.

Then i deployed a specific link building strategy to create new links which I will talk you through in a moment.

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 #𝟰 – 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 & 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁

One of the first things i do with client sites is to see if they have built authority and trust with Google.

Quite often i find affiliate sites that are struggling to rank but also don’t publish-

❌Company information
❌ An address
❌A phone number

Or anything about who is actually behind the site, despite the fact that an affiliate site is a real business just like an ecommerce site is a real business.

So for this client, i took care of all of that by-

✅ Creating an about page
✅Creating 2 topically relevant author profiles
✅Adding article and organization structured data with RankMath

i also noted that the site lacked any social presence which is a problem long term as Google is tending to rank more “brands” and less affiliate sites in the SERPs.

So i built out high-quality social profiles which we then incorporated into the site’s structured data.

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 #𝟱 – 𝗦𝗵𝗶𝗳𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗙𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀

The first few months of the campaign were purely focused on “increasing Google compatibility” through site structure, technical SEO, content and backlinks.

Now that the site had a solid foundation to build on, we decided to shift our focus.

So in month 5, we focused all resources on building as many high-quality links as possible to provide the best ROI moving forward.

That means we spent next to no time worrying about on-page SEO or content and put 100% of the budget into building high-quality links every single month.

𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 #𝟲 – 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴

link building strategiesEarlier in the campaign we took care of the bad links through disavow.

Now i shifted focus to link building, i started to build high quality branded links to the homepage.

i did this until there was 50/50 parity between the number of homepage links and links to the remainder of the site.

From there, i began building links to the core affiliate pages, however with a careful selection of branded anchors and mixed target anchors.

i made sure that i only built links from-

✅ Relevant sites
✅With current search traffic
✅ And high quality content
This was done with manual outreach to secure guest post placements where we could control the content and the anchor text.

The anchor text strategy leaned conservatively towards branded links, with a few mixed anchors and a few keyword anchors.

This was both to:

✅ Establish authority
✅ Offset potential risk in a rapid link building strategy

i also made sure i was building links to each of the “review” satellite pages along with the key pages themselves.

i sustained that balance throughout the campaign and continue to build links in line with the strategy above.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗜𝗻

That means i took them from 920 visitors per month to 13,503.

And that’s if you ignore the fact that search traffic continues to grow-

𝗪𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗜𝘁 𝗨𝗽

So there you have it…

…the challenges i faced, the strategy we built and the results i delivered.

It wasn’t that easy given that the website was young and the competition was strong but it’s not the first time i faced this problems nor will it be the last time.

To recap, in this case study we focused on-

✅ Giving Google what it wants
✅Establishing a solid SEO foundation
✅ Building trust and authority
✅ In combination with high quality relevant links

And if you’re struggling to increase your search traffic I suggest doing a full SEO audit and fixing those problems before anything else.

If you need help with your site, feel free to contact me now and i will do my best to help you!

Otherwise please feel free to check out some of my other SEO case studies (:

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