And those kind of results are common across this niche.
But if you pay close attention to the green boxes in the image above…
…you’ll see an opportunity!
Because many of the top 10 results are ranking purely out of domain authority rather than individual page level metrics.
That means we have a solid chance of competing with the big boys.
And I am sure you have seen results just like that in your niche right?
Remember: Any health-related content/website is part of the YMYL category, which means that they need to be treated as such and respect the YMYL guidelines.
Once we had a large list of keywords we started to filter them down-
First we removed duplicate/similar terms
Then we mapped out topic clusters of keywords with similar topics
And thought about the “type” of keywords to focus on
These were the types of keyword we were looking for-
Money keywords that drive traffic to key affiliate pages: [brand] review(s)
Generic keywords related to different forms of the products: best [product] / best [product] [supplement|brand|pills], most effective [XYZ], weight loss [XYZ]
Questions:does [XYZ] work, how to use [XYZ]
Strictly informational keywords:[XYZ] information, [XYZ] pros and cons, [XYZ] side effects.
We also paid close attention to search intent when selecting our final keywords.
It’s important to avoid keywords that return different user intent than the site can satisfy.
The final spreadsheet included additional data pulled from Google Keyword Planner and our rank tracker-
But:
There’s 1x part of keyword research people usually miss.
Whilst you’re doing keyword research, make sure to take a look at the SERPS for each one.
Pay attention to the sites that popup and make a list of common competitors.
We will be using that list to our advantage later in the case study!
Pro Tip: Quick & Easy Keyword Research
If your site has any level of existing search traffic…
…I have a great keyword research tip for you.
With this tip you’ll be able to find all of the low hanging easy to rank keywords in a couple of clicks with Ahrefs.
Just head over to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and paste in your domain and head to the Organic Keywords report-
Then use the filters to show the keywords currently ranking in positions 11-30-
This just returns a list of keywords that you already rank on page 2 & 3 for…
…which are super easy to bump to the top 10-
Targeting these keywords are a great starting point for any SEO strategy.
Type your domain – this will ensure you are looking at your internal links only.
Click on the URL you’d like to review
This is what the URL is currently.
This is what it should be.
In our case study site for example:
We could fix a lot of the errors by updating hardcoded links in the menus and sidebars.
But every site is different!
Issue #4 – Thin Content
Whilst conudcting the audit, we found a BIG issue
with thin content.
Over 50% of the website pages had under 500 words.
Every niche is different!
But after looking at search results and competitor sites…
…It was clear this is a content heavy niche.
Don’t forget:
Google rewards fresh, long form content that addresses user intent. So we adjusted our content strategy to support the main campaign goal.
With that in mind:
We increased the length of the homepage from 1,500 words to 10,911 words by answering over 20 of the most popular questions around the main affiliate product.
That helped increase visibility of the homepage which now ranks for over 11,200 keywords-
Following the same strategy:
We increased the average word count per page from ~500 words to 2,216 words per page.
In addition to expanding the website’s copy, we also reviewed and optimised-
All of which worked in harmony with each other to pull the sites pages up the search rankings.
Step #4 – Building A Healthy Site Structure
It’s important to create a healthy website architecture.
Why?
Because-
It helps user finds what they need
It helps Google understand the site
It helps to priortise the most important content
It helps distribute link equity throughout the site
The website should follow a logical structure (flat structure or silo structure) with a clear with your core pages located within 3x clicks from the homepage.
We can check this easily in Screaming Frog using the Crawl Depth report.
Here is an example of bad crawl depth–
And here is what it should look like-
If you wanted to dig deeper…
…You can also use Screaming Frogs Visualization tools-
But what are we looking for here?
Well this is an example of a bad site structure–
And when you do things right…
…it looks like this-
So with the case study site in mind, we overhauled the site structure so everything was within 3x clicks of the homepage.
We did this by-
Building out category pages
Linking to those category pages from menus
Internal linking between content (I’ll talk more about this later)
A lot of people don’t pay attention to site structure.
But trust me:
Building a healthy site structure from day #1 is critical to your growth.
Step #5 – Content Strategy
As soon as you have a keyword strategy and healthy site foundation to build on…
…It’s time to get your hands dirty with content!
You should start crafting the content as soon as possible because this is often a bottleneck for many businesses.
This is how we approached it-
First we selected our primary target keywords
Then we reviewed our competitors in Google for each keyword
That allowed us to create a “content specification”
Which was then sent to our writing team
Based on what we had learned about the thin content issues during the SEO audit…
…we made sure that all new pieces of content were at least 2,500 words.
We continued to produce 2x new pieces of content per month throughout the campaign.
Step #6 – Internal Linking
Once we developed our killer content and restructure strategy…
We needed to help Google navigate the website easier to discover all the pages we updated/created.
The goal of our internal link building strategy was to distribute link value throughout the site, from pages with authority to others with less authority.
We used a balanced combination of targeted, branded and generic anchors to help Google determine the relationship between them-
Along with links we placed manually, we also installed and tested a number of plugins to help place internal links-
We chose this because it helped us customise the display on the front end of the site-
This meant we could cross-link key pages across the site structure automatically.
Very handy!
Need help fixing your SEO issues? Check out my 45+ steps SEO checklist to get rid of your most important SEO issues.
Step #7 – Link Building
There is no doubt about it:
Backlinks are the most important ranking factor in Google.
But that is amplified 10x when you have built a good site structure backed with solid content.
With all of that in place we started to build the overall domain authority using links from relevant websites in the fitness, health and lifestyle niche.
We took the backlink profilefrom 27x referring domains to 374x referring domains–
How did we do that?
By keeping things simple!
First we scraped a huge list of relevant websites with SEO value, traffic & authority.
Then we published high quality content targeted at their audience to secure a backlink where possible.
We didn’t do anything beyond that.
This is the exact link building strategy and schedule we used to meet the clients budget-
Month 1
12x PBN Links
1x Outreach
Month 2
10x PBN Links
3x Outreach Links
15x Quora Links
Month 3
12x PBN Links
3x Outreach
Month 4
10x PBN Links
3x Outreach
Month 5
4x Outreach Links
Month 6
3x Outreach Links
The strategy was simple-
First build authority and topical relevancy as quickly as possible with PBN links
Once established (month 4), we switched to outreach only
In month 5+ the site starts ranking & picking up links naturally to fuel growth
And that’s all we did.
In month 7+ we didn’t build any additional links to the site.
Once the site started to rank it was picking up links naturally and rankings have continued to improve.
Do You Struggle With Link Building?
Take a look at some of these free resources to help you build awesome links-
Hi Matthew, Great post! I’ve already gone through and deleted some thin content pages from my own blog as well as purchased WP Rocket. Can’t believe how much faster my site is! Can you tell us what ratio you used for homeage vs. internal pages when building the PBN links? Thanks.
it’s interesting how many time PBN showed up in your Link Building Strategy for your client.that is very different from what other people are saying about PBN’s.Great post.
Hi Matthew,quick question (and valuable for others as well). Have you noticed that leaving comments open benefits SEO for that particular post/site?I have noticed my competitors doing ranking much better (no obvious reason) and the only difference I notice is they they all have WordPress comments enabled and I don’t. Isn’t a new comment the same as updating the content each time? (In the eyes of Google)Thanks!
How much of that traffic comes from the homepage vs internal pages?If it’s ranking for 11,200 keywords. Wouldn’t the bulk of the website traffic be coming from this single page?
Amazing case study for search traffic.Really appreciate the way you have written and explained.I am really gonna apply this for the future. Worth reading it.Thanks for sharing it with us.Good work..!!
Search Engine Optimization is an major tool for Digital Marketing , in this great article says about SEO , that type of things are very helpful for me and thanks for sharing.
Great bump in DR. How did you make that happen? I’ve been stuck in the DR mid-40s for a couple of years.Not obsessed with DR but it’s a fun numbers game.What were the DRs or URs of the links from your PBNs to your site?What were the URs of the guest posts you secured?Do they all point to the homepage, internal pages or a mix?Gratsi!
Off the top of my head I don’t know but we drove all the links to the homepage as this was the primary ranking target, and it was also the page that picked up a ton of natural links once we were ranking
The content of this blog is really useful and very much informatic.Thanks for sharing this content with us . Carry on posting such blogs which will be helpful to the public.
great case study Matt. I put in a request for you to check out my site and tell me the cost to rank. But as usual you provided awesome information about the case study.
Hello, Matthew. With regard to adding text to the homepage and pages, is there a plugin to do this to make it look aesthetically good and not sloppy? In categories is it also recommended to add text to help SEO? Congratulations on this brilliant article.
Great article Matthew, A few questions regarding keyword selection and site structure. How do you determine what theme and category keywords to use when it comes to site structure? The article didn’t really make that clear.I tend to find it particularly difficult to finalise the categories for a new site especially if the market i’m targeting is broad,
So when you update content, do you just add content (update) or you change its publish date also.One SEO suggest to change publish date to current date if I am changing / updating more than 50% content of that page.You recommend this?
Hi Matt and great post as always.Just a quick one about Screaming Frog.I never used it before and tried the visualisations tab which is a handy feature.In your screenshot you highlighted “Crawl Tree Graph” and it looks like the screenshots below are from “Force Directed Crawl Diagram” if I am not mistaken?Thanks for all your good (free) work, we all really appreciate your efforts
Wow Matt, I’m blow away by this post. There is so much actionable content here. 1.) I took a leap of faith on your WP Rocket recommendation and can’t believe how much faster my site loads. So worth it!! (I was previously using one of the popular free cache plugins and my site was always so slow and I could never figure out why.) 2.) Then I went through and deleted a bunch of thin content. Now I’m going to check out the free version of screaming frog. 4.) My internal linking, site structure, and seo settings are pretty good but I’ll definitely look over them again for little tweeks (thanks for the Yoast setting post too!). Can’t believe you got those results with so few backlinks. That gives me some hope for my little blog! 😉
Was easy reading for 1 AM, cheers Matt.When it comes to redirects, How would you approach a product page where the product is sold out and the business has no intent on replenishing stocks?
Hahah thans!With no intent of replenishing stock, if the page has traffic/backlinks – redirect to a relevant category page.If zero traffic/backlinks – 404
Superb case study! Thanks Matt. Think you could dig a little deeper on the link building portion? There’s a couple of points that could have been clarified a little better. 1. Of the links you built, how many went to your money page, and how many went to supporting pages / blog posts?2. Did you reserve the big gunz (pbns) for your target page using variations of money keywords, or did you also use them going to your inner pages?- I’d assume it wiser to use pbn’s to move the needle for your money page with some keyword anchors rather than waste that power on inner pages.Still learning the ropes here, so this would be a great help :)Thanks,Sean
Matt, any chance you can link to the spreadsheet from the keyword tracking section? Seems proprietary but thought I’d ask anyway incredible piece. Going to try this myself!
Outreach is just a numbers game backed up by a great script. Use a tool like NinjaOutreach and make sure you script was written by a native skilled (not cheap) copywriter
What would the results have looked like without the PBN links do you figure? Same results but longer time to get there or no way to get that traffic increase?
In the niche we are competing in, there are 2x types of competitor.1) Big huge established brands2) Smaller sites powered by PBN’sWith that said:If we hadn’t have used PBN’s in this instance, we would be eating dust.What we could have done is to use guest posts instead of PBN’s – but given that 90% of guest posting is now paid for (and more expensive) there isn’t any difference between a PBN link and a guest post any more.
Excellent case study. Question: the new content that was created was what kind of content? Was it reviews? supporting content to the affiliate offers?Thanks
Wow!! moving the page length from 1500 to over 10,000 words for the homepage actually did the trick but I believe it’s the question and answer method that was applied that ranked the homepage for more traffic. There were obviously search intent keywords that were put out to play here and the first few hundred visitors clicking on the link from the search results were spending more time reading through the content than longer than the time that were spent on the pages that ranked above for those keywords they were ranking for previous to the homepage update.People are hung on backlinks because most of the top ranking sites show just that – a galore of backlinks besides that’s what they’re sold on average by the high priced SEO “specialists” hungry to take their money as this is the only hard evidence that they can show their clients…
Yes this helps a lot and I’ve seen similar results on the blog where I have added Q&A style content.Perhaps where we could have improved is to embed to the new Q&A structured markup data but perhaps we will do that in the future as I’m yet to experiment with it personally.
I see there are a lot of SEO pros here can you give me in depth input on which keywords to use on this site valuecarepharmacy.net specializing in providing free prescriptions to personal injury clients. It is a unique situation since we are not attorneys but looking for the same clientele. Thank you in advance.
This case study is amazing, I see so many search engine experts overlook the basics, proper on-page SEO and structure can dramatically improve any link building stratehy. Haven’t tried ahrefs yet, think i will be checking this out
Awesome blog thanks for sharing your case study. I read also 12x link building way. I want to ask a question What PBN technique is good for SEO? how to create? Plz let me know And share continues with me.
WOW! Thanks for the amazing case study matt. I will definitely apply this to my SEO strategy. By the way, how does the keyword shitter work? I can’t seem to understand it.Thanks.
The first thing I suspect you had here was client commitment. Which is vital.But 8 months work and at what cost to the client for the service you delivered? And much did their turnover go up by if you are able to share that..
Lovely case study, Matt! More and more we’re turning to Ahrefs above other options for their Top Pages by % data and organic keywords data for initial pitches and strategy – just makes sense! Lots of other gems here also. Cheers!
In this case study, we show how combining genuinely helpful content with structured data and a proven link building strategy led to measurable gains in traffic for our client.
Learn how we increased our clients’ new leads by 50%, overhauling their service pages, optimizing their Google Business Profile, and growing their domain authority.
This site was hit with a manual penalty from Google so we had to act fast. We cleaned up the site and had our reconsideration request accepted first time.
If you need help increasing your search & sales or recovering from a penalty please fill out\ the form below and one of our search specialists will review your site-
Great case study. To build domain authority, did you send links to the homepage only or did you send links to inner pages too?
The homepage was the primary ranking page
Thank you for sharing a great blog for reader
No problem! Hope there were some valuable tactics you can action on your site.
Hi Matthew, Great post! I’ve already gone through and deleted some thin content pages from my own blog as well as purchased WP Rocket. Can’t believe how much faster my site is! Can you tell us what ratio you used for homeage vs. internal pages when building the PBN links? Thanks.
Glad you enjoyed it!All homepage baby!
it’s interesting how many time PBN showed up in your Link Building Strategy for your client.that is very different from what other people are saying about PBN’s.Great post.
If executed correctly PBN’s can be extremely powerful!
it is really nice article I love it
Thanks!
THANKS FOR SHARING THE ARTICLES AND AWESOME ARTICLES ON INTERNET.
No problem, happy to help 🙂
Very Good Case Study. it’s very useful for me and I am working on it, Thanks
Great news! Keep hustling
Hi Matthew,quick question (and valuable for others as well). Have you noticed that leaving comments open benefits SEO for that particular post/site?I have noticed my competitors doing ranking much better (no obvious reason) and the only difference I notice is they they all have WordPress comments enabled and I don’t. Isn’t a new comment the same as updating the content each time? (In the eyes of Google)Thanks!
Why wouldnt you have comments enabled?
Nice Article
Hope it helps build your traffic 🙂
Great list of SEO tactics to use and double your traffic in a quick period. SEO will have huge changes in 2019 and these are very effective
Thanks, we certainly find these tactics helpful, as shown 🙂
How much of that traffic comes from the homepage vs internal pages?If it’s ranking for 11,200 keywords. Wouldn’t the bulk of the website traffic be coming from this single page?
That is correct, the homepage was the driving force – great observation 😉
GOOD INFORMATION THANK FOR SHARING A WONDERFUL INFORMATION
No worries Harimanti. Hope this article helps improve your search traffic.
Amazing case study for search traffic.Really appreciate the way you have written and explained.I am really gonna apply this for the future. Worth reading it.Thanks for sharing it with us.Good work..!!
Hey Lisa, thanks! I hope you have a lot of future success with this article for reference.
Search Engine Optimization is an major tool for Digital Marketing , in this great article says about SEO , that type of things are very helpful for me and thanks for sharing.
Happy to help!
Great bump in DR. How did you make that happen? I’ve been stuck in the DR mid-40s for a couple of years.Not obsessed with DR but it’s a fun numbers game.What were the DRs or URs of the links from your PBNs to your site?What were the URs of the guest posts you secured?Do they all point to the homepage, internal pages or a mix?Gratsi!
Off the top of my head I don’t know but we drove all the links to the homepage as this was the primary ranking target, and it was also the page that picked up a ton of natural links once we were ranking
Hi dear sir. Sir i know many Seo tools but i do not have experience in SEO. What should i do?
Learn the basics then get stuck in.
The content of this blog is really useful and very much informatic.Thanks for sharing this content with us . Carry on posting such blogs which will be helpful to the public.
I certainly will do, as they say… watch this space.
nice article it’s a very usefull article
Thanks a lot!
great case study Matt. I put in a request for you to check out my site and tell me the cost to rank. But as usual you provided awesome information about the case study.
Thanks Steve my team will get back to you asap!
Hello, Matthew. With regard to adding text to the homepage and pages, is there a plugin to do this to make it look aesthetically good and not sloppy? In categories is it also recommended to add text to help SEO? Congratulations on this brilliant article.
Every site is different but you could use WPShortcode plugin to add collapisble texts easily
Thanks! Great case study, got all answers from creating a good site structure to link building strategy. Will implement
Fantastic news – glad you were able to get the info you needed Deepak!
Wow this is very good helpful post about seo.I get more knowledge to read this.can i get more updates from you about seo
Thanks Namira, I’ve got lots more in the pipeline so check back in soon 🙂
Thanks for this great post i love post ,
Awesome, glad to hear it Dave 🙂
Great article Matthew, A few questions regarding keyword selection and site structure. How do you determine what theme and category keywords to use when it comes to site structure? The article didn’t really make that clear.I tend to find it particularly difficult to finalise the categories for a new site especially if the market i’m targeting is broad,
Thats a manual process but if you have Ahrefs you can look at the “Parent Topic” of a keyword to help group them
You are doing Great Work. I like the way you write and always follow your valuable tips in my daily life.
Thanks very much – keep hustling 🙂
Very Very Nice Article
Hope you have picked up some good SEO tips to implement.
So when you update content, do you just add content (update) or you change its publish date also.One SEO suggest to change publish date to current date if I am changing / updating more than 50% content of that page.You recommend this?
Please see https://i.imgur.com/4Ib1hGr.jpg from the Facbook group
Hi Matt and great post as always.Just a quick one about Screaming Frog.I never used it before and tried the visualisations tab which is a handy feature.In your screenshot you highlighted “Crawl Tree Graph” and it looks like the screenshots below are from “Force Directed Crawl Diagram” if I am not mistaken?Thanks for all your good (free) work, we all really appreciate your efforts
Oooops my bad! Good spot!
Wow Matt, I’m blow away by this post. There is so much actionable content here. 1.) I took a leap of faith on your WP Rocket recommendation and can’t believe how much faster my site loads. So worth it!! (I was previously using one of the popular free cache plugins and my site was always so slow and I could never figure out why.) 2.) Then I went through and deleted a bunch of thin content. Now I’m going to check out the free version of screaming frog. 4.) My internal linking, site structure, and seo settings are pretty good but I’ll definitely look over them again for little tweeks (thanks for the Yoast setting post too!). Can’t believe you got those results with so few backlinks. That gives me some hope for my little blog! 😉
Hey Lisa,You are making all of the right moves, please keep me updated on how you progress!
Was easy reading for 1 AM, cheers Matt.When it comes to redirects, How would you approach a product page where the product is sold out and the business has no intent on replenishing stocks?
Hahah thans!With no intent of replenishing stock, if the page has traffic/backlinks – redirect to a relevant category page.If zero traffic/backlinks – 404
Superb case study! Thanks Matt. Think you could dig a little deeper on the link building portion? There’s a couple of points that could have been clarified a little better. 1. Of the links you built, how many went to your money page, and how many went to supporting pages / blog posts?2. Did you reserve the big gunz (pbns) for your target page using variations of money keywords, or did you also use them going to your inner pages?- I’d assume it wiser to use pbn’s to move the needle for your money page with some keyword anchors rather than waste that power on inner pages.Still learning the ropes here, so this would be a great help :)Thanks,Sean
Hi,1) All efforts were focused on the hompage2) See above 😛
Matt, any chance you can link to the spreadsheet from the keyword tracking section? Seems proprietary but thought I’d ask anyway incredible piece. Going to try this myself!
Which one? I’m not sure which your referring to
Impressive case study matthew: Can you tell us how to do best outreach to make sure we get publish our contemt on the sites. Cheap way to do this.?
Outreach is just a numbers game backed up by a great script. Use a tool like NinjaOutreach and make sure you script was written by a native skilled (not cheap) copywriter
What would the results have looked like without the PBN links do you figure? Same results but longer time to get there or no way to get that traffic increase?
In the niche we are competing in, there are 2x types of competitor.1) Big huge established brands2) Smaller sites powered by PBN’sWith that said:If we hadn’t have used PBN’s in this instance, we would be eating dust.What we could have done is to use guest posts instead of PBN’s – but given that 90% of guest posting is now paid for (and more expensive) there isn’t any difference between a PBN link and a guest post any more.
Excellent case study. Question: the new content that was created was what kind of content? Was it reviews? supporting content to the affiliate offers?Thanks
Question based content relevant to the main keyword we were trying to rank for
Amazing case study! It also proves that PBN really works if done right.
Hey Bryan. Yes they sure do 🙂
Wow!! moving the page length from 1500 to over 10,000 words for the homepage actually did the trick but I believe it’s the question and answer method that was applied that ranked the homepage for more traffic. There were obviously search intent keywords that were put out to play here and the first few hundred visitors clicking on the link from the search results were spending more time reading through the content than longer than the time that were spent on the pages that ranked above for those keywords they were ranking for previous to the homepage update.People are hung on backlinks because most of the top ranking sites show just that – a galore of backlinks besides that’s what they’re sold on average by the high priced SEO “specialists” hungry to take their money as this is the only hard evidence that they can show their clients…
Yes this helps a lot and I’ve seen similar results on the blog where I have added Q&A style content.Perhaps where we could have improved is to embed to the new Q&A structured markup data but perhaps we will do that in the future as I’m yet to experiment with it personally.
HI Matthew. Love your work.In regards to the PBN links, what was the spread ie Links to money pages, links to root domain?
Root domain was our focus
I see there are a lot of SEO pros here can you give me in depth input on which keywords to use on this site valuecarepharmacy.net specializing in providing free prescriptions to personal injury clients. It is a unique situation since we are not attorneys but looking for the same clientele. Thank you in advance.
Find your top 3 competitors and bang them into Ahrefs
Impressive case study! Matt. But I would like to ask. Are your sure that PBN Links won’t hurt the ranking of the site in future?
The site is gaining natural links rapidly now which far outweighs any risk of the PBN (which there is none because we built the PBN right)
Awesome case study Matt! I like how it’s laid out and explained, start to finish, it’s a great for a starter blueprint process to follow.
No problem Brad glad you enjoyed it!
This case study is amazing, I see so many search engine experts overlook the basics, proper on-page SEO and structure can dramatically improve any link building stratehy. Haven’t tried ahrefs yet, think i will be checking this out
Yes you have to get the basics right before jumping into content production and link building
Awesome blog thanks for sharing your case study. I read also 12x link building way. I want to ask a question What PBN technique is good for SEO? how to create? Plz let me know And share continues with me.
Take a look @ https://marketerseal.com/
Great post, most seo professional start with link building , amazing and thanks for sharing.
No problem, glad to help 🙂
Another Great Case Study from Matthew. How even you can manage to write this quality of Case Study..TEACH ME PLEASE
I don’t know, first you need the results – then just sit and write 🙂
Really good strategy, I use one which is really similar Matthew 😉
Sure you do 😛
WOW! Thanks for the amazing case study matt. I will definitely apply this to my SEO strategy. By the way, how does the keyword shitter work? I can’t seem to understand it.Thanks.
No problem!Just enter a seed keyword and hit go!
The first thing I suspect you had here was client commitment. Which is vital.But 8 months work and at what cost to the client for the service you delivered? And much did their turnover go up by if you are able to share that..
I can’t give exact numbers sorry as every niche and SEO strategy is different based on competition and individual business goals
Great insight articles. I agreed with your all points you mentioned in article. I definitely try this and audit again all website.
Please let me know how you get on!
Lovely case study, Matt! More and more we’re turning to Ahrefs above other options for their Top Pages by % data and organic keywords data for initial pitches and strategy – just makes sense! Lots of other gems here also. Cheers!
Thanks Joe!Yes their data is second to none right now!