How we took a Women’s Beauty Shop to 50k organic users with content creation and backlinks

Case study

How we took a women's beauty shop and gave it a 50k organic traffic lift

Published 3/19/2020

Reading Time: 4 minutes

For most people it is hard to think about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and define what the true meaning is.

Many have their own definitions, such as:

Optimize on page content, and hope for the best.
Buy a bunch of backlinks from “the guy on that forum” promising 100k backlinks in a day.
Creating fresh content people want to read, while including your target keywords.

While these may work for some, they are not a complete strategy for generating traffic to your business.

In this article we have compiled a documentation of specific strategies we used to achieve an increase in organic traffic.

Quick note: Please don’t go buy 100k backlinks from a guy on a forum; it’s a good way to be blacklisted in Google.

How we generated 50k new organic users

Research

The first thing required for this project was to get a good feeling on the industry, and what keywords customers were converting on (i.e. making the purchase).

Using the domain analyzer on Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest tool we are able to view the current ranking of each keyword, and see the closest competitors. Then we run the same report for competitor’s domains to see the highest traffic keywords they were ranking for.

Now we have compiled a decent size list of keywords.

Next, we ran all the keywords through LSi Graph to check search volume and get “like” keywords. A “like” keyword is a similar keyword with the same ranking potential. For example the search terms “where to buy a wig for women” and “best place to buy womens wigs” both have different monthly search volumes. However, in Google’s eyes these are “like” keywords which can potentially be found together in the same page content.

Quick Note: Another easy way to find “like” keywords is using Google. Type in your keyword and at the bottom on the first page you’ll find “Similar Searches”.

Method Part 1

We began to write our on-page content which included the keywords and “like” keywords we aimed to rank for. The finished article ended with about ~2200 words, and each keyword and “like” keyword were added 1 time each. Since the site being ranked is an eCommerce site, we added the content article to one of the top level category pages.

Method Part 2

The domain we used was more than 20 years old, which allowed us to add a higher number of backlinks each month without disruption from Google. We decided to collect a list of industry related blog articles on external domains, which allowed comments with hyperlinks to be added.

We added 4 to 5 backlinks every day for 45 days. Each backlink we used a combination of our keywords, “like” keywords, and URL, as anchor text. Each keyword was used as an anchor text the same amount of times, but every 3rd backlink anchor text was just the domain URL.

In addition to this, we were able to create an editor account on Wikipedia. We then found similar published topics which we were able to contribute to. A quick sentence of info was added and dropped in the domain URL as a reference link. This was done a total of 3 times using the same anchor logic as above.

Result Month 1

The above image shows the first month (November 2019) without backlinks or acceptable on page content. The traffic was very low; however, the customers who did come to this page from this specific keyword were entirely engaged with the site!

For the specific keywords we were averaging a Google position rank of 39. Basically the end of the 3rd page or the start of the 4 page on Google.

Result Month 3

The above image shows the 3rd month (January 2020). As you can see, the traffic really jumped. Our keyword positioning average went to 5, with many in the 1-3 position. While our new users dramatically increased our pages per session didn’t as much. Nonetheless, the eCommerce conversion rate was quite high for this page and remained steady, so the order count went up with the amount of visitors.

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