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Link Building

Find out how to get quality backlinks and boost your site’s Google rankings with our tested and proven backlinking strategies.

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How to Grow Organic Traffic by 131% With Cold Email (Case Study)

Cold email outreach is still widely used for link building. However, the conversion rates have decreased drastically as many link builders utilized cold outreach the wrong way. Spending time on prospecting, finding email addresses, crafting email copy, and sending emails just to receive a couple of responses is very frustrating. So, what can you do to increase response rates, and get those high DR links? Below, you’ll find out the cold email outreach strategy that landed us more than 1,500 backlinks with an average domain rating (DR) of 68. Discover the tactics you can replicate and get featured in HubSpot, Ahrefs, G2, Zapier, and many other high-authority websites. The goal of this case study is to share tips that you can use in your cold email campaigns to get higher conversion rates. Read More

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SEO for Online Reputation Management: 2023’s Best Strategies

In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how to take control of the SERP for brand searches, with super easy (and cheap!) techniques that my grandma could do in a spare Sunday afternoon. We’re talking about online reputation management (ORM): the process of pushing negative search results down off page 1. Imagine this scenario: You’re a politician that recently got smeared for a big mess up.  You want that negative online reputation to go away.  This is where a company’s online reputation management SEO comes into play. Over the years, my agency The Search Initiative, has performed dozens of Online Reputation Management campaigns for our clients. I’m about to share the key essentials from these campaigns. You’re about to learn: Read More

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How To Do a Backlink Audit (And Link Building Plan) In 2023

If you want to know whether your website is in good SEO shape or not, you need to check your backlinks. I’ve been doing SEO since 2009. I have played around with both white hat and black hat SEO techniques, and I can tell you from my own experience that your backlink profile health can make or break your SEO efforts.. That’s why a backlink audit is crucial for your website’s search engine ranking. In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to do a backlink audit using Ahrefs backlink audit tool. I personally found this tool to be the most helpful. You’ll also learn how to analyze such links on your backlink profile so that you can identify any bad backlinks to your site that may prevent it from ranking to its potential. Once you’ve done a complete link audit, the next step is to continue to build websites link acquisition authority. Therefore, in the final chapter, you’ll find out how to create a Link Requirement Estimate Plan for your site – it’s a report that looks at how many backlinks/referring domains you’ll need to outrank your competitors. Read More

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E-Commerce SEO Case Study: How we 4x’d Traffic and Doubled Revenue

Whether you’re an e-commerce manager or an SEO specialist, you’ve invested a considerable amount of time and energy into working out the best practice approach for tackling organic search for online stores. An E-Commerce SEO Strategy Walk-Through In this case study, I’ll be showing you my agency The Search Initiative was able to double revenue by building a custom strategy for one of our e-commerce clients who operates within a small b2b furniture niche. My goal with this case study is to introduce you to a wide range of new ideas that will help you to expand and improve your e-commerce SEO game and better serve your customers. You’ll learn the strategies we used to improve UX, technical stability, onsite optimization, content, and of course backlinks. The approach that I will detail saw our e-commerce client grow their traffic by a massive 417% in 8 months. Read More

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Case Study: A 4.5x Organic Traffic Increase Using (What?) Page Rank

Introduction I’ve been a director at The Search Initiative a while now. We’ve had some crazy results for a whole bunch of clients – all in very different niches. I’m going to share with you how my team and I took a low-authority website and put our foot on the gas to get it moving – fast! I truly believe there was a key ingredient that accelerated this website, but I’m going to share the whole process from the start. Why? Each website is going to be different, so you need to figure out what your site needs. You need to go through the process. Here’s a sneak peek of the growth. Now learn how we did it… Read More

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How to Build a Scalable White Hat Agency [Case Study from TSI]

Introduction A few years ago, my agency The Search Initiative (TSI) decided to remove PBNs as a part of our link building strategy and move over completely to a white hat link building model. While PBNs only made up a small portion of our strategy, we knew this would be a fairly big undertaking. This would involve the re-design of the overall process and our approach to campaigns. Every decision that we make at the agency is data-driven. We constantly test, experiment and analyze. Our aim is to always put our clients first and to give them the best ROI for their campaign. We needed a sustainable and powerful link building strategy that is not only extremely safe but also moves the needle. In this article, you’ll learn our entire outreach strategy. We’ll discuss the role content quality plays in an effective outreach campaign, how to research and create fine pieces, how to prospect link opportunities, and how to pitch with a high success rate. Bonus: I’ve brought in Rad Paluszak (TSI Director and Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2018 speaker) to chime in with some knowledge bombs. Read More

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7 “White Hat” Link Types that Can Get you Penalized in 2023

Foreword by Matt Diggity: Very shortly, I’m going to be turning things over to Rick Lomas. Rick is an expert in manual penalty removal. I’ve been working with him for quite some time, helping folks recover from manual actions, whether they be “unnatural links”, “thin content”, etc. Starting last year with a Christmas Day spree of manual actions going after scholarship link building, we’ve seen an uncanny amount of manual penalties being triggered by supposedly whitehat seo techniques. This is kicked up significantly in 2018 as we’ve had 3 waves of manual penalty sprees already, compared to typically one-per-year. Rick has kept track of all the “white hat” link types that Google themselves has pointed out problems with. You’re about to learn all of them. Read More

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A Complete SEO Guide to Anchor Text Optimization for 2023

Undoubtedly, the most crucial expertise in offsite SEO lies in mastering the art of anchor text selection. Achieving the ideal anchor text distribution can propel you to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) with fewer links compared to your competitors. Conversely, poor anchor text selection could result in a dreaded Penguin penalty. As an SEO expert, the most frequent question I receive from clients is: “Which anchor text should I use?” While I’d be thrilled to provide a straightforward answer, the truth is that it requires more than just a five-minute explanation. Choosing the perfect anchor text involves thorough analysis and practice. However, there is a systematic and consistent approach you can adopt to optimize your site effectively. It’s crucial to develop this skill independently, rather than relying on others, to truly excel in SEO. Once you’ve mastered this technique, it’s akin to advancing to the next echelon of SEO expertise. In this guide, you will discover the method to determine the optimal anchor text ratio tailored to your specific website, 13 innovative anchor text selection strategies to outperform your competitors, and techniques for maintaining a well-balanced internal anchor text ratio. Read More

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The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites

Foreword by Matt Diggity: Impressive.  Knowledgeable. Underrated. These are a few words that I would use to describe Brendan Tully. B.T. is one of the first SEOs I ever met in Chiang Mai.  He’s a veteran in the game and it shows.  I mean… the man used to be commissioned by the Australian government to teach SEO. The guy is good. He’s a beast at E-commerce SEO, as you’re about to find out in this monster of a piece. Read More

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The Story of 10Beasts.com – An Uncensored Interview with Luqman Khan

About a year ago, I was introduced to a site called 10beasts.com. At the time, it was an 8-page affiliate website in the technology niche that quickly busted out of the sandbox in six-figure profitability within 8 months.  December 2016, it broke $80k. This site became incredibly popular when it was featured on Glen Alsop’s Gaps.com.  I mean, how often does someone go public with an affiliate website of this level? Fast forward one year… 10Beasts grew in size and earnings and flipped for over half a million dollars. And then the unspeakable happened. It got penalized with an unnatural links manual action in Google Search Console. And guess what? The penalty had recovered in 5 days. Meet Luqman Khan. Luqman is the creator, builder, and recoverer of 10beasts. In this no-holds-barred interview, Luqman discusses the entire story of 10beasts, how he got it ranked, how he sold it, and how he recovered it. Read More