Link Building Case Study – From 453 to 13,309 Organic Keywords – Fitness Industry

Let’s have a look at how we helped grow a site in the fitness industry from a total of 453 keywords to 13,309. 

This number represents an increase of 2,937.97%. 

This shows some great growth for a new affiliate site promoting gym equipment.

You can see consistent growth over a 4-5 month period!

The monthly organic traffic went from 1,600 to over 4,800 in three months. This represents an increase of 297.37%.

We will break down the full link building strategy later…

But let’s first look at the fitness affiliate site in a bit more detail.  

Link Building in The Fitness Industry – A Closer Look At The Site

The case study site is in the fitness niche, with the aim to rank fitness equipment reviews.

This site includes a mix of informational and affiliate pages with monetary purposes.

As well as improving existing pages with SEO optimised content, it was important for our client to get a nice blend of relevant high-quality links.

The Process: Approach and Analysis

First, we analyse the condition of the fitness equipment website by examining a multitude of factors on Ahrefs, including the following:

• Domain rating
• Organic Traffic
• Organic Keywords
• Referring Domains
• Traffic Value

Our team of experts use this information to put a bespoke link plan in place. Our link plans are influenced by the age of your domain, the level of competition for your chosen keywords, the existing link profile of you site and your competitors site, and which areas of your website need links the most.

Keyword Analysis: Low Hanging Fruits

We evaluated the best-performing pages in terms of organic traffic and the keywords that were already ranking on pages 2 to 3 or positions 4 to 10 on page one for fitness-related terms.

After that, we determine if there is good traffic potential for the keywords we spotted.

If it is achievable for our clients, we will include them in our list.

SERP Analysis

We carried out a comparison between our client’s website and its organic competitors in the fitness niche.

Once we know what content and pages we can optimise, we narrow down the options and analyse the searchers’ intent behind the queries for the particular set of keywords already identified.

Choice of Links & Why?

So with this, we recommended the client in this instance go for 4 link packages spread over a 3 month period. Because a lot of the competition had a good amount of links we figured it was safe enough to hit the website with 20 links or so a month for a 3-4 month period.

The initial month has seen some slight movement for branded terms solidifying its positions. Then in months, 2-3 things started moving nicely on the main keywords. Which led to the results you see below.

If you’re interested in working with our team and seeing something similar happen to your website then check out our backlink packages.

Anchor Text Diversity and Keyword Variations

We paid special attention to the anchors used, focusing on achieving a natural and balanced anchor text profile and replicating the anchor ratios that the highest-ranking competitors have in the fitness niche.

In terms of anchors with our links, we focused primarily on the following distribution:

1. Branded Anchors (20%) primarily to the homepage of the site
2. Branded anchors with some target blended in (10%) mainly to money pages
3. URL anchors (10%) are used on multiple pages. Referencing the main domain is not always direct to the URL
4. Topical and long-tail targeted anchors – 20% of the SERP (Utilising Webmaster Tool Impression Exports)
5. Mirroring competitors anchors (40%)

With the mirroring of anchors the team took a look at the top 3 competitors utilising our “Statistical Ranking Blueprint”. With this analysis done, we knew exactly what anchors and links the competition had been building and it allowed us to emulate a similar strategy.

Highest DR Backlinks To Your Home Page

Ensuring your highest DR backlinks are pointing to the homepage is the easiest way to spread power to your whole domain,  and in turn lift rankings across your entire site.

We spoke to the client and agreed to create 5 x DR60 topically relevant backlinks from here https://searcharoo.com/topically-relevant-outreach-links/

This was one of the first things we did for this client, and it really helped to lift the authority of the entire site as well as a good number of their targeted keywords.

All five high DR backlinks received 3 x tier backlinks and all were branded anchors to strengthen the overall domain rank of the site (as compared to competitors they was lacking in authority).

At searcharoo we see too many clients order the lowest DR links and feel the most authoritative links to the homepage really set the foundations to a healthy SEO campaign.

This technique can be applied to almost every website that has some good existing links, and we’ve seen some really big jumps from carrying out these techniques for our clients.

Tier Two Backlinks

We take it upon ourselves to analyse this clients existing link profile to find the best places for tier 2 links to be built. We did this by locating all of their high DR, niche relevant dofollow backlinks with low outbound links, which are the best type to build tier 2s to.

This is because these link types have almost everything a link needs, relevance, a high DR, and dofollow anchors, they just need that push of extra power to lift your entire site.

We found the client had 19 relevant dofollow backlinks, all with DR40+ and less than 15 out bound links.

These 19 existing backlinks were perfect to send some tier two backlink power at. At searcharoo we feel powering up existing quality backlinks with tier two links is an under-utilised advanced SEO strategy.

The Results

Our clients traffic value went from $1,200 to $3,300.

That is an increase of 272.01%.

According to this, we can assume that our clients recovered a portion of the money invested on link building.

By comparing the numbers at the beginning, when we started building the links, and at the end, you can see the continual growth.

Final Thoughts

The bespoke link building packages we offer can provide an unbelievable ROI.

And all this in such a short space of time!

How fast you grow will all depend on how much you are willing to invest on your site. Sometimes it is better to start off small and work up to larger orders once you start to see the needle moving.