If you’re looking for proven case studies showing how other sites grew their traffic and earned backlinks, this is the post for you.

In fact, this post shows you seven different success stories where sites grew their traffic and backlinks.

SAAS – from 3328 to 46548 organics visits in 8 months

A SAAS company with a growing customer base and high domain authority naturally earning links had a growth and marketing team in place.

But their organic traffic, compared to their competitor, was lagging behind.

They were publishing content on their blog, but it wasn’t organically growing traffic, subscribers or customers fast enough from this channel.

I was an early customer and regularly posted some tips and videos about how I was using their solution.

Then one day, the CEO commented in their Facebook group, “should we hire you?“

I replied that I would be open to it.

Therefore we had a series of conversations and calls about their content marketing strategy and what I would do before we arrived at an agreement.

Using my click forecasting strategy, I presented opportunities at the funnel’s top, middle and bottom with SEO potential.

My role was to write high-quality copy for the topics they were targeting.

However, some of the topics required coding and web development, skills that I did not possess.

As the CEO was invested in both organic growth and coding, around 25 pieces of new content were created.

And now, 8 months later, the organic search traffic has grown from 3328 to 46548 visits a month, according to Ahrefs.

I’m under an NDA, so I cannot discuss the actual search traffic numbers, but they’ve had enormous growth in people signing up to try their solution.

In addition, the monetary value of their traffic has exploded from $4,000 to $45,000 per month.

Ahrefs calculated traffic value by multiplying the number of organic visits x Google’s average cost per click for those keywords.

Earning 35 unique links naturally with investing in outreach

Other SEO experts tell you to create great content and do email outreach to earn links to your website.

But, they seldom show you the results or explain the process they use to deliver them.

Furthermore, many businesses just starting out simply don’t have the financial resources to invest in earning the links they so desperately crave to boost their domain authority and keyword rankings.

Therefore, I decided to practice what I preach and create great content that could naturally earn links to my website without email outreach to promote the content or ask for a link.

So here’s the exact process that I used to earn links naturally.

1. Identify industry statistics or checklists that I could create myself.
2. Identify and round up all the relevant statistics.
3. Position a summary of the key statistics right at the top of the web page.
4. Add content assets such as infographics to the page.
5. Publish the article.

The average cost of a link is around $350; these 35 links would have cost me a whopping $12,250.

21 links earned with broken link building

By trade, I am a traditional marketer that was late in specialising in SEO, and much of my work was doing keyword research and on-page optimisation for developing and designing new websites.

But, I lacked the necessary off-page and link-building experience.

I’ve done plenty of cold sales outreach before, but for some reason, I would puke up at the prospect of reaching out to strangers asking them to link to me.

“Our worsts fears lie in anticipation“, Don Draper, Mad Men.

Therefore, I invested in link building training, and one of the first tactics I used was broken link building.

Broken link building is a straightforward concept; identify relevant pages with a broken external link and reach out and offer the website owner your page as a replacement link.

Anyone can find one broken link and offer their page as a replacement.

This approach isn’t scalable, so here’s the process that I developed.

1. Use Ahrefs to identify relevant 404 pages with lots of referring domains.
2. Identify the names and emails of the websites with the broken link.
3. Recreate a better version of the broken page.
4. Craft email messages in outreach software to notify people of the broken links.
5. Use your powers of persuasion to offer your page as a replacement for their broken link.

Oh, come on, Fraser, broken link building is dead.

Maybe, but I bet your inbox is getting hammered with spam emails offering you guest posts.

Broken link building might be old and outdated, but if you can craft your emails in a respectful and valuable tone, the recipient will thank you on many occasions for identifying a problem they were unaware of.

Tax accountant traffic – from 150 to 1300 organic visits

An accountancy firm in Glasgow had a website that I previously built, which was not responsive to mobile devices.

And I had tried for a few years to persuade them to improve the site functionality and content.

But the owner told me he didn’t believe his website could generate new clients.

So I ended up meeting up with him and others on a working vacation in Barbados.

This time spent meant I could talk openly and in-depth about what I’d done to my website to attract and get paying customers.

I opened up about everything; the content to create, design, link building, conversion, email marketing, and follow-up.

Therefore, as a result, I could sit down and discover how he wished to evolve away from bookkeeping and general accounting into specialising in tax.

From these discovery sessions, which involved a few beers and Barbados hospitality, I could map out a plan of action to grow organic traffic and customers.

Step 1: Several discovery sessions about the client’s business and his aims for the website.

Step 2: Used keyword research to identify keyword opportunities and produce a click forecast.

Step 3: Shared the click forecast with the client, who decided on the topics to target.

Step 4: Outsourced content writing.

Step 5: Designer hired and site re-built on WordPress.

Step 6: Publish

As a result, the organic traffic grew from 150 to 1326 organic visits in less than 12 months.

Creating SEO content for Ahrefs

Ahrefs, one of the biggest players in the SEO industry, with over 1 million monthly visits from Google and many brilliant content creators, was looking to expand.

And rather than hiring writers full time they looked to some of their customers to create content for them.

They asked me to choose a topic to write about which I identified competitor content gaps with traffic potential.

Then they gave me a test article to draft and write.

But, imposter syndrome kicked in because “I’m not a real writer”, and I’ve only ever written content for my site.

Then I had to write following their brand’s style, copy guidelines and an editor.

Edits and changes were getting pinged back and forward between the editor and me like a game of table tennis.

I was about to through the towel in when I told myself this was the opportunity to pass on these experiences from the industry’s best content marketers to my clients.

And therefore, I finished the first article and have continued to produce other marketing articles that contain much of my years of industry experience.

So, if you’re going to hire someone to do keyword research and writing, then do what Ahrefs has done to me.

Give a copywriter with industry experience a test article to write.

Do they follow guidelines, feedback, and deadlines?

Ecommerce site generates 21% of organic traffic from blog posts created

Tom runs an e-commerce business, and he contacted me looking to “improve our SEO as it’s not something we’ve really done so far”.

I researched and scoped out traffic potential opportunities for him that involved publishing 10 articles.

But after a few months, Tom was concerned about the articles not being indexed in Google.

So I proposed some internal link improvements, but still, there was no improvement in rankings.

Eventually, after 6 months, the articles started hitting the top of the search results.

And after 9 months, these articles now account for 21% of this total organic traffic.

Therefore, if you don’t have patience like Tom, I recommend a mixture of internal linking and external link external and content promotion if you want to rank faster and higher.

Accountant website zero to 1622 visits

I was referred to an accountant near London, and they wanted a website that generated traffic and business enquiries from the search engine results.

But they didn’t have a plan or strategy for growth.

Therefore I proposed my click forecasting strategy that identifies topics relevant to their business with traffic potential.

Then I hired a copywriter to produce the content from the briefs I supplied and rebuilt the website on WordPress using a fast, professional theme.

The traffic grew from nothing to 1662 organic visits at its peak.

This resulted in the client hiring me for another SEO project.

Here’s the process I used for both projects.

Step 1: Use keyword research to produce a click forecast.

Step 2: Share and decide the topics to target.

Step 3: Outsourced content writing.

Step 4: Site built on WordPress.

Step 5: Publish.

Conclusion

In this post, I summarised 7 different SEO case studies that show how companies were able to increase or improve their organic traffic, links, and content.

SEO is not easy and takes time, investment, effort, and patience.

However, it will pay off with improved search engine visibility and organic traffic growth when done right.