185% Traffic Increase for High Value Pages

Online learning platforms allow users to take courses in a wide range of subjects from the comfort of their own home.

Our client is one of the biggest names in this industry, having been established way back in 2010.

From an SEO perspective, these guys have a strong foundation: expertly written content from experienced veterans in the field and a ton of high-quality multimedia content.

The problem? A lot of their competitors have the same advantages. Securing the top spots on search engines is challenging.

Our client knew they could use link building to give themselves a rankings advantage over competitors.

That’s where we came in. In this case study, we’ll explain how our link building campaigns helped our client boost traffic by a staggering 3 million monthly visitors.

💡 Our Strategy

Our client wanted to boost traffic to its IT and software development courses. In particular, it wanted to target commercial pages; in other words, those aimed at converting customers.

They also had ambitious targets to build 30 links per month.

Most webmasters understand that linking to a commercial page boosts its sales, whether through direct referral traffic or by helping it rank higher.

Therefore, building free links to these pages at scale is almost impossible. Instead, it’s common to pay for them.

However: Our client strictly forbade us from paying for backlinks. This meant we had to find alternative ways to build these backlinks.

⛰️ High DR competitors

Our client’s competitors included well-known brands with super-high authority scores. Here are just some of them:

• LinkedIn Learning (DR 98)
• Coursera (DR 91)
• Skillshare (DR 87)
• MasterClass (DR 86)

⭐ Our solution

Here are some of the techniques we used to meet our client’s precise requirements and to beat high authority competition:

✅ Link exchanges

As paying for links wasn’t an option, we offered webmasters a link exchange instead.

However, we knew that reciprocal links are less valuable than one-way backlinks. Instead, we offered the website a link from a third website (usually one of our link-building partners).

This process was more time-consuming, but it allowed us to:

• Avoid paying for backlinks

• Meet the client’s link velocity targets

• Build high-quality backlinks

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✅ Resource pages

Our client has a wealth of expert-written educational content perfect for building links to.

Because our client is one of the biggest names in the educational content industry, webmasters trust their content and are keen to link to it, and this time, they (probably) won’t want payment.

Building links from resource pages was, therefore, a no-brainer. This involved contacting websites with popular, relevant resource pages and suggesting they add a link to our client’s useful content.

We started by building a list of resource pages to target. We did this by:

• Using Google search operators, like “coding intitle:resources” to find resource pages organically.

• Seeing which resource pages linked to our client’s competitors.

Producing a list of target websites in this way allowed us to build links at scale.

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✅ COVID-19 resources

COVID-19 struck during our link building campaign. Many organizations published pages of COVID-19 resources to help their audiences learn during the pandemic.

We added these new types of resource pages to our strategy. This led to a huge increase in backlinks to the site.

Although many of these resource pages have been removed since pandemic restrictions were lifted, some of the backlinks (like the one on the page below) still exist today.

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✅ Technical guest posts

We have a talented technical writer on our team, which means we can write informative articles about how to code or develop for WordPress. The idea is to provide readers with basic insights and encourage them to visit our clients' courses to learn more.

Our writer wrote valuable pieces on some highly technical subjects. Not any writer could have done this, and the websites we targeted loved it.

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✅ Black Friday listicles

Every year, our client offers Black Friday discounts on its courses. Many education websites share lists of Black Friday deals with their audiences.

Telling these websites about our client’s deals was a quick win.

Here’s a good example:

Source

🚀 The Results

We built 681 links with some of the biggest names in the software development and tech industries.

🚀 Some of the high authority sites we built links with include:

• DreamHost (DR 94)
• Keap (DR 92)
• Liveabout Dotcom (DR 88)
• WP Explorer (DR 84)
• Cooperative Connected Vehicles (DR 82)
• StuDocu (DR 76)

🚀 As a result of our campaign, our client is ranking in the top three for the following high-difficulty, relevant keywords:

• online courses software (KW Difficulty - 91)
• web coding course (KW Difficulty - 85)
• aws courses online (KW Difficulty - 85)
• online javascript courses (KW Difficulty - 82)
• c++ tutorial for complete beginners (KW Difficulty - 79)
• online course in python (KW Difficulty - 79)

As a result, our client’s traffic increased by more than 3 million monthly visitors. The equivalent visibility would have cost them $218,588 in paid advertising!

And this momentum has continued since!

🔥 Use Link Building to Drive Traffic and Conversions

Our client knew what they wanted to achieve and understood how they wanted to do it.

Luckily, we’re used to working with strict guidelines and achieving challenging targets, and in this case, it was all the easier thanks to our client’s high-quality content.

We helped them drive a ton of organic traffic to specific technical courses on their website, boosting their brand in the industry and helping to drive conversions.