Hey, I’m Elis, and this article serves as documentation of my first SEO campaign. I’ll be sharing the wins, losses, challenges, and lessons learned.
I hope you find this insightful or useful in any way.
The First 3 Months.
In the first 3 months, my thought process was to do keyword research, publish blogs, and gain backlinks. It seemed simple. Turns out SEO is a bit more complicated than that.
After publishing content weekly, I realized that the posts weren’t getting indexed. On top of that, I got no replies to my backlink pitches.
I knew I had to mix things up. During month 4, things started to click.
The Winning Strategy.
I realized the mistake I was making. While creating content, I failed to factor in search intent. In other words, I was publishing informational content for keywords that had transactional intent.
How did I solve this?
I built service pages. A lot of them.
Service Pages
During months 4 to 5, I wrote copy for dozens and dozens of service pages. With the help of my amazing colleagues, we were able to publish high-quality, engaging pages built to convert.
It took a while to develop them but after we published them I ran into the same issue as before. Google wasn’t indexing them.
I searched for ways to get pages indexed faster, and I discovered Google’s URL inspection tool. By manually plugging in the URL of each page into this tool, I was able to get the new service pages indexed within a week.
Once they were indexed, we saw a big increase in impressions.
An Innovative Approach to Backlinks
I knew that despite, the increase in impressions and traffic, the main factor holding back our rankings was domain authority. Domain authority is determined primarily through a website’s backlink profile.
Now, seeing as this was a relatively new website, there were virtually no backlinks. On top of that, my cold emailing approach had not returned a single prospect over the course of 4 months.
Luckily, a colleague of mine suggested a unique strategy. Utilize existing business relationships.
In other words, by reaching out to people or organizations that already have a connection with the company, you can simply skip the cold outreach process.
I looked through a list of my company’s current clients and identified the ones that had a website with a blog.
Then I wrote out a guest post that included a link back to our site and pitched the client on the idea. Seeing as the blog post promoted our client as well as our company, it was a win-win, and we closed the deal.
My Results So Far.
Here are the website traffic statistics comparing this past month with the period before the start of this SEO campaign.
- +66% clicks
- +258% impressions
- 168 external links
Going Forward
This following month, I will publish more pages, optimize the existing pages to increase the click-through rate, and replicate the backlink strategy.
My goal is to reach a 100% increase in website clicks in the next couple of months.