How To Rank In The Most Competitive Niche In SEO
Campaign Challenges:
Campaign Results:
+4237%
Organic Traffic
+76,000
Organic Visitors
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again-
SEO doesn’t have to be complicated.
And usually its the simplest strategies that are the most effective.
I have worked to improve search rankings & organic traffic for hundreds of clients all around the world with great success.
And honestly…. there’s no secret sauce to what we do!
The SEO process often boils down to-
So I wanted to show the results of that process from a client in the Gambling niche.
I am going to explain exactly what we did and reveal the link building strategy we used!
What Will I Learn?
Before I show you the “How”, I want to show you the “Why”.
We deployed the strategy you are about to learn in June 2018 which saw traffic grow from 506 to 21,946 visitors per month in a very short period of time-
That makes for a total of 76,000+ clicks from Google which converts into cold hard affiliate cash.
Now let me be clear – this is one of the most competitive niches in SEO period.
The affiliate payouts are huge and your competing against the most experienced SEO’s on the planet.
When my agency first started working on this site, traffic from Google had flatlined.
The problem with working on old sites like this is first of all you need to reverse engineer everything that past SEO companies have done to build a full picture.
That often brings up a host of problems we wouldn’t normally have to deal with if we were working on a newer site but its nothing we haven’t faced before.
Knowing we had an uphill challenge the first port of call was to complete a high level technical SEO audit.
Sites of this size and age almost always have a lot of legacy on-site and technical SEO problems due to numerous site redesigns, CMS changes and overall structural changes the site was go through as it grows.
This client was no exception, so we began the campaign by addressing the most pressing on-site issues that our comprehensive on-audit diagnosed. These included:
The site had mixed protocol issues, with both HTTP and HTTPS pages indexed and internal links across the site pointing at both protocols.
We took this opportunity to migrate the whole site to secure HTTPS, setting up URL rewrite rules in the htaccess to ensure that all pages automatically resolve to HTTPS, no matter what protocol a visitor/bot tries to access it through.
We then made sure that all internal links pointed directly at the HTTPS version, so that a consistent protocol was served to spiders and there were no unnecessary redirects.
The site had a number of superfluous sitemaps listing dozens of low quality pages that should not have been indexed in the first place.
We removed these sitemaps and replaced them with one definitive sitemap that solely listed the Google facing pages we wanted indexed.
The client had a large number of informational and review pages, however they were failing to take advantage of structured data and rich snippets.
so we marked these up with schema tags so that ratings and other content showed in the SERPs.
This delivered results pretty quickly as they gained new knowledge graph entries for a small number of long tail keywords.
Alongside technical on-site optimisations, we also did a full audit of important on-page elements such as title tags and headers.
We re-wrote 50+ title tags that were poorly keyword optimised, excessively long or missing.
We re-wrote or created 150+ H1 tags that were missing, poorly optimised or duplicated.
We also managed a content overhaul across 21 core pages to update the content and better optimise it for the target keywords.
At the same time we completed a full, manual backlink audit – a long process considering the 300k+ number of backlinks the site had.
As you’d expect from a site that had be actively working on link building for over a decade, there were a lot of risky links from old-fashioned techniques.
This is a common problem that we see but its nothing that can’t be fixed.
After creating a solid foundation to build on during the link audit, we moved onto link building.
We needed to be extremely strategic in the way that we built links to the site.
Due to the volume of powerful links going to the homepage and core internal pages, we knew that the number of links we were building would not make a big proportionate difference to the overall domain authority and link profile.
Instead, we spent a good amount of time studying the existing visibility and rankings of the site in order to identify very high volume keywords that the site had not yet achieved good visibility for.
So we concentrated all of our resources on a smaller number of internal pages, pushing them into first page positions which dramatically boosted traffic to the site.
Our link building strategy was simple-
“Build backlinks from authoritative website surrounded by relevant high quality content”
Now that might sound difficult but remember, SEO doesn’t have to be complicated.
And the easiest way to build these types of links is with LinksThatRank.com
Now I want to be clear with you.
My agency works in the most competitive niches in SEO – gambling, finance, loans, health to name a few and we have had great success after great success.
Because of that we know what it takes to rank in these niches and I wanted to share a little bit of insider knowledge with you.
You see normally if you wanted to rank in the Car Niche, you would get links from related sites and that is what we would normally do.
But in the gambling niche we took a different approach.
Instead of sourcing links from relevant domains, we source links from irrelevant domains but surrounded by relevant content.
So the site might be about cars, but now it has a page about gambling and links to us.
THAT HAS BEEN HIGHLY EFFECTIVE IN THE GAMBLING NICHE!
We are seeing much better results getting links from outside of the betting niche deliver much better results than gambling specific links.
Why?
We suspect that is due to the inherent lack of trust from Google in this sector which is seen across all domains in this niche.
Essentially the trust is so low, that relevance becomes irrelevant and you can power through purely focused on authority links.
Want to read more gambling case studies? Check out my gambling seo case study & my casino seo case study.
If you want to take your SEO to the next level you really only have 2 options.
The first is to let my team do all the hard work for you like the client featured in this post – who knows, you might become our next success story!
Either way, the sooner you decide to take full control of your search rankings – the better!
148 Responses
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Campaign Results:
+4237%
Organic Traffic
+76,000
Organic Visitors
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+369.43%
Organic Revenue
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Organic Traffic
+4,051
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Hi,Good analysis.What tool do you use to get image like on Step #1 – The Audit?Thanks,Alexanderthinkmobiles.com
Thanks, that is DeepCrawl
really helpful article
Thanks Muntazir 🙂
🙂
So excited for this training on the seo behind the websites that are winning in 2017 in popular niches with very competitive environment
You are going to love it!
We have been using different audit reporting site, DeepCrawl seems better when clarity of details matter. Nice post as always.
Yeah its a great tool!
I wonder you said you implemented this strategy on a certain day but the scope of work implies that it would take months to fix all these issues, etc. How was it possible?Thank you!
Rome wasn’t built in a day but its only a couple of days of fixes
Thanks Matthew
Great stuffs here with resourceful guide-lines, pls am having issues trying to migrate my blog from http to https .Do you have a step by step guide on how to implement this as my blog is a wp blog??
I dont know I use Kinsta and you just press a button in the dashboard
Nice Post!!! Thanks for sharing!!!
No problem Mani!
Bro this is some advance stuff, great content have been following you and reading your emails about SEO. Learning a lot hope to get results like yours. Cheers.
I’ve got a lot to share with you Rene 🙂
I am looking forward to that, which host do you recommend? An affordable one
On days when you see you are not getting anywhere with your rankings, there appears a link from your newsletter (of which i am a subscriber) to give one that much needed guidance to continue working harder.Thank you for the great advise in the article above.
Hahaha ping!
Great article, one question..like I have a fashion eccommrce site and I am guest author in many tech blog, startup blogs and business blogs. I placed my fashion store URL in author box with my bio. Is that something google will consider irrelevant?
I dont build links from author bios because it leaves a very detectable footprint and an editorial link is worth far more
I like it Matthew, would you agree that SEO is actually more like Web Development these days, it seems to me by focusing on getting your site tightened up, and resolving to present great content you are going to build great SEO?
It’s the convergence of development, marketing and writing
I never thought about not getting relevant links because they don’t have enough thrust. I would still say that you need relevance even if it is low authority. What tool do you use to measure trust?
Well its more about the “page” the link is coming from being relevant rather than the domain as a whole, but in gambling it seems that google distrusts all domains in the gambling niche so much – that links from irrelevant domains are actually stronger like for like.
Cheers for the article Matthew, Just signed up to the 4-day video seo course, Just out of curiosity, Which tool do you use to audit websites, please? Thanks in advance
Awesome, I use DeepCrawl
This is very interesting. I blog on blogger platform.I installed a powerful blogger seo script on my blogger blog which helps me to get traffic to my blog. I will give you the script if you need it. This is for those that blog on blogger.
Honestly you are wasting your time with blogger, if you are serious about growing your business migrate to a self hosted Wordpress install ASAP.
This is one of the best articles . great work leep it up
Thanks Mazhar!
Hey Matt, How you doing?Was just wondering what gambling keywords have cpc less than $1, that too even in UK having such huge volumes?
This is in the Gambling TIPS niche which is the biggest TIP I can give youIt could be gambling in general or a very specific area of gambling…Who knows 🙂
Small Business Owners need SEO gurus like you Mathew. I read your article it rocks.
No problem I hope it makes a difference for you
I’m glad to have read such an awesome article Mathew.I’m heading back to my site to audit it with this tools you recommended, deepcrawl.Thanks for sharing, looking forward to your new post.**subscribed***
Thanks glad to have you on board 🙂
I have never seen post like thi.. very nyc . Thanks for sharing
No problem 🙂
wow its an eye opening post, i am amazed with your traffic in that short amount of time, i have a blog but didn’t generate traffic , but i dont know why. Good work!
Well just follow the steps in this post 🙂
I haven’t read your posts in a while but you are still rocking it. Solid insights and confirmations ; ) Thank you!!
No problem glad you enjoyed it!
Hello Matthew, this happens to one of the post I have read on the internet concerning seo. Well detailed, informative and useful blog post.Thanks for sharing this with us, very appealing
No problem I hope it helps makes a difference to your efforts
Can you please share some good link building websites with us like content posting, listing and syndication, etc.
Did you read the article… ?
Hey matthew,I have a question you said “Instead of sourcing links from relevant domains, we source links from irrelevant domains but surrounded by relevant content.So the site might be about cars, but now it has a page about gambling and links to us.” How the car website has content about gambling can you share one backlink for reference.Thank you
Because you can show off the luxury car playboy lifestyle of profession gamblers
Hithanks for sharing this Case study with us.i will be using the link building techniques that you have shared.
I hope it makes a difference for you!
my website has a drop of visitor from 4000 to 1000 visitor only , that was because of some low quality pages like search and tag pages and more than 5000 link from one site .. So, how could i bring my site back again to life ?
You should start with step 1 in this post that will reveal any problems like that
Boomarked!!! Thanks Mat!
No problem Louis 🙂
So backlinks do not need to come from the same niche/topic – any random qualityw ebsite?
In the gambling niche – yes.
Hi Matthew, Great work. I was searching this kind of work for my bussiness because as you have explained, I also brought a old one and to deal with all these issues are not possible for me. Thanks for your article. I hope your company will help us near future. Regards…Roky
No worrys Roky I am happy to help!
MattThanks for this, as informative as ever!Quick question, is there an easy way to migrate a Wordpress site to HTTPS?
Yeah with Kinsta you just press a button in the control panel
thank you for the article .. this is very help me in increasing traffic to my website .. i will wait for the next articles about this ..
Don’t wait for info, take action!
Useful tips Matthew, especially the link source.I actually contacted your agency as I have a small gambling site but couldn’t afford the quoted price so this post is more than useful.Keep up the good work, always look forward to reading your tips and advice.
No problem Leon – yeah we might not be the cheapest, but as your in a similar niche you probably have a good idea of how much its making
What is the SEO Audit Tool do you use to find issues in the website?
I like DeepCrawl myself
sir,you are the best! can please! let me how many type of back links I can build for Google ranking.please give me info with type of back links!
I already explained all of that above?
Hi Matt.I would like to add to your “irrelevant domains but surrounded by relevant content” point.When it comes to building backlinks, one must also look at getting links from complementary sites.Say for example, if I have a holiday resort near beach in Spain then I can reach out to for links to those websites that are selling beach wear or surfing boards etc. One can even do a guest post for those sites and get more eyeballs.I feel Google will see it in a positive light if there is any back link from these sites to a resort website.
Yes that is correct you can always bridge niche gaps with content
Hi Matthew, This is a very informative post, it helps me more.
No problem David 🙂
This post is really good and informative. I learned many new things which I will be implementing in my webbsitethanks
Glad you liked it 🙂
Hi Matthew. This is a great article and case study. We have one question please. I have a lot of WordPress reviews and informational content. How can I get the gold 5 star ratings to appear in the search engines? Is there a particular plugin which will perform this for me? Thank you.
Yes just add rich snippet data, there are many Wordpress plugins for that, search the plugin box 🙂
If you find someone let me know!
Sir, you are the best. I never got inspired like this before. Whenever I read your posts, I feel the possibilities in this. Thank you
No worrys let me know if you have any questions!
Hi Matthew,This post is really good and informative. I learned many new things which I will be implementing in my SEO stratgey like removing the bad backlinks.Thanks for sharing.Have a good week ahead.
No problem Robin glad to share with you 🙂
Great insight Matt.Just asking: When are opening up slots for SEP training again? I’m interested.
Keep your eyes out in October 🙂
But it’s not impossible 😉
Hi Matthew,Which tool did you use for finding the on-page issues..?Thanks
I like DeepCrawl
I don’t want to be rude or disrespectful but this article makes me wonder if the charts and the video you show is real or not… Don’t get me wrong, but any of us could get temporary access to somebody else’s website analytics and search console and take credit for that site’s SEO.You don’t give a URL that we could check for ourselves, we only have to believe what you say… Now, I don’t say it’s not true, but it doesn’t make me believe you either…
Unfortunately finding anyone that is willing to share the URL of a business thats making mid 5 figures per month is next to impossible – we’ve seen time and time again what happens when people do that!
Hi Matthew,Thanks for the detailed guide to skyrocket the SEO. I’ll do the site audit as you suggested. Do you recommend any free tool to audit the site? Sure, I’ll follow the link building strategies that you have mentioned. I’m heading to your other post about removing bad backlinks, thanks!
You could use Screaming Frog but its not going to flag a lot of the things a more comprehensive crawler like DeepCrawl would
Matthew, coll as usually! So you are telling that anyone can repeat you success. Am I right to understand?Do you have an On Site Audit Checklist? Thanks for help!
Just run your site through something like DeepCrawl and that will find the vast majority of on site problems for you
I want tobe an SEO expert, show me the way To learn from U. Can U teach me online