We helped this Nordic B2B eCommerce company regain its lost traffic and visibility on Google in just 3 weeks. Before I tell you what let's how exactly we helped them double their traffic, let's first cover what the situation was before.
Main customer results:
This B2B eCommerce company operates in the Nordics as a wholesale supplier connecting manufacturers and end customers. The customer had previously gained a lot of great PR but that slowed down over time and there was a need to improve sales through other means.
Most purchases are done online nowadays in this industry, so increasing website traffic is a key method for consistent sales improvement. The more website traffic, the more opportunities for online sales. Based on this, it makes a lot of sense to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to boost the company's site traffic.
The core idea here is that by making the website appear higher up in Google search prompts, more people have a chance to visit it. Combined with quality content, this approach interested buyers to the website, which can then be converted to sales further down the road.
Prior to starting, the customer already had a lot of great content on their website, covering niche product categories but also broader supply chain and procurement-related topics. However, even great content is unlikely to perform all too well if they don't have enough authority (ie. backlinks from other websites) for Google to trust their site and promote it as the top resource in various search prompts. The more authority, the more likely the website's content is to show up early in Google searches. And the more early positions, the more people view and potentially visit the website.
So to recap: link building drives online sales in the following way:
The whole collaboration started with educating the customer about our previous success cases and how we have grown several websites (including our own) to 10,000+ visitors in less than 6 months.
We educated the customer about the value of backlinks and website authority, and how high-quality links can be built without getting penalized by Google. In fact, outsourcing link building, for example by hiring a link-building agency, is a common practice that is used by over 60% of businesses.
We got to work immediately and established the criteria for the links that we were going to build. These requirements ensure that the links have the intended impact on improving the website's authority and traffic.
We used the following criteria for the client:
We also mapped out the highest priority pages for the customer to get links on. While links to any page of your website are helpful, certain pages are better targets than others. Usually, those are:
We built around 20 high-quality backlinks in 3 weeks to increase the website's authority (Domain Rating from 25 to 33). This both improved the visibility of their content in Google and made the website a more interesting trade candidate for other link builders.
We used a variety of different channels to build links (email, Slack, Linkedin, etc.) and always ABC exchanges so the customer doesn't link directly to the website that gave them a link. ABC (aka three-way exchanges) is a link exchange format involving three websites:
Google's ranking algorithm mainly favors ABC over one-to-one exchanges, so using this format gets more search engine benefits per link.
We do weekly reporting on the links we have built in a collaborative Notion page and a private Slack community group where we can discuss the customer's project. Weekly reporting also allows us to take a peek at how their traffic is doing.
The customer always has the opportunity to reject a link if they find it doesn't fit the requirements agreed on previously.
The website quickly started to show results and it is back to all-time high levels after increasing the traffic by 100% and impressions by 200%.
Now the traffic is more sustainable than the traffic gained from the PR campaigns or paid ads.
We'll likely do a follow-up case study later on but had to share the quick results because they were so great in our opinion.
The SEO industry keeps repeating this mantra of "don't buy links". However, there's a big difference between buying low-quality links that someone is only going to put on a link farm site and hiring a link building agency that exchanges natural links with high-quality websites. The first is likely to result in SEO penalties by Google, while the latter is a common and effective practice.
Sites like ActiveCampaign, G2, Profitwell, Hubspot and a ton more great businesses actively do link building to make their content perform better. Active link building is a strategic component of your digital marketing efforts that can propel your website's traffic to new heights.
Want to see similar results on your website? Email us at sales@aicontentfy.com or book a meeting through the pricing page.