For years, me and my colleagues have worked hard to create a stable and devoted audience for our website.
I won’t go into the details of our site, but I will tell you that it deals with travel and leisure in the states of Colorado and Utah. Not only do we feature features and information about the many fun things people love to do in these states all year round, we also offer discounted ski lift tickets and other tickets to some of the most desirable destinations and activities the two great states have to offer.
As I mentioned, we have always been lucky enough to have a dedicated and consistent audience for our site. That being said, ever since Google Panda came around, we saw that there were some competitors who just seemed to be getting more out of their search engine optimization than we ever were.
That’s why we decided to reach out to OutReachFrog, a small but powerful agency that specializes in helping sites like mine reap the incredible benefits of white-hat link building.
So what is link building? To put it simply, link building is the process in which one site with strong domain authority and organic traffic links to a site with less domain authority and less organic traffic. This action not only does this lead to an increase in organic traffic as the more popular site helps to funnel clicks to the less popular one, it also helps by signaling to Google’s algorithm that the smaller site should be trusted and – in time – ranked higher in valuable keyword and longtail key phrase searches.
If you’re familiar with all this SEO jargon – and you certainly should be if you run any kind of website – you likely know just how much of an impact this kind of work can have.
But this brief breakdown isn’t enough for you. For that reason, let me go over some of the most incredible improvements I observed after I opted to work with OutReachFrog.
Strategy
Before I go over the improvements I saw, I want to break down the strategy OutReachFrog and I agreed upon. While they offer clients to choose between both a la carte links or monthly services, I opted for a service of $1,000 per month as I wanted to see improvements to get an upper hand on my competition.
I was assigned an SEO expert as part of my strategy and they broke down what I can expect. Essentially, while every monthly service is different, OutReachFrog guarantees that you will be getting a number of links with strong domain authority and organic traffic within your specific niche. While the number and strength of these links do fluctuate, their SEO experts seem to know exactly what is needed in order to see strong results.
Trust me, the improvements were not immediate. And you should not expect them to be. Google does not look for single big splash moves for sites, instead their powerful algorithm focuses on trends over an extended period of time. That’s why building multiple links is always recommended if you are looking to reap long-term improvements.
Now, without further delay, let’s go over the impacts that I saw.
More Referral Traffic
This was without a doubt the fastest impact I saw as a result of my first few built links. OutReachFrog had some of their expert writers – who they told me work as journalists and researchers as well – write up my first blog posts. Once they were posted to some high domain authority sites, both national and local, within my niche, I saw a major uptick in my organic traffic.
In fact, when all was said and done my organic traffic had increased by over 25 percent within the first six weeks of my link-building strategy.
The links you get from link building campaigns tend to exist for life and readers of the content are always likely to click on them, especially if the content that you get published is engaging, information and well written.
Finally, one added outcome that I did not foresee was that the links OutReachFrog built for me actually resulted in my site gaining additional links through organic means. That essentially means that other site owners who read the content that was posted on the host site encouraged them to refer to my site on their own site as well. It’s a bit jumbled, but it is a very common outcome for this kind of strategy. Not only does this improve the chances of even further organic traffic going forward, it can also help improve your site’s domain authority for free!
Improved Domain Authority
When it comes to ranking high for valuable keyword and longtail key phrases, the name of the game is domain authority and page authority. The higher your site’s domain authority, the better the chances that you will rank well for valuable keywords and key phrases.
Given the fact that a minimum of 75 percent of clicks go to the first page of search engine result pages, it is crucial to rank as high as you can in order get the most clicks as possible.
When it comes to link building, the only real way that you can improve your domain authority seems to be through extended trends of link building. So, if you are only looking to increase your flow of organic traffic, a la carte could be the right choice for you. If you want stronger DA, a link-building strategy over the span of a couple months is the way to go!
For me, I didn’t see a real impact in might site’s DA until three months in. That was with nearly 15 links built during that time. Luckily, thanks to its age and history of strong and consistent content creation, my site has always had a fairly strong domain authority. While it did not increase by a lot, I did see my ranking in valuable keywords improve.
Two of my site’s target keywords ended up just below the top 5 on the first page of Google’s SERP. While I’d love it to be number one, this is the first time in a quite a while that I have noticed any marked improvement.
As for the longtail key phrases, I was in the top 3 for a number of specific ones. While they are less valuable than the keywords, they certainly helped me gain a large number of valuable leads.
Improved brand visibility
This is something that cannot necessarily be measured through your organic traffic, but there is absolutely no question that it can have a seriously positive impact on your success overall.
When it comes to gaining new leads and new customers, it is often a matter of who people have heard of. Sure, there’s a lot of money to go around in the world of attractions and adventures in Colorado and Utah, I’ve always wanted a slightly bigger piece of the pie. We did great in the winter months thanks to my connections with some of the larger mountain resorts, the spring and summer months were typically a bit lighter due to more established companies have a stranglehold on activities like whitewater rafting, fly fishing and guided mountain climbing.
Knowing this, OutReachFrog targeted a number of high DA sites that dealt primarily in these kinds of warm month activities.
With those months coming to an end, I can safely say that the links that were build last winter and spring certainly helped me through the summer. Don’t get me wrong, I still have quite a bit of work to do before I am enjoying as much traction in the summer months as I do in the winter months, I am making headway.
More brand authority
Brand authority is different from both brand visibility and domain authority. But it’s certainly another reason to keep posting evergreen content on your site while engaging in link-building strategies.
As previously mentioned, when links are built it increases the likelihood that you receive organic links built as an outcome. To take full advantage of that potential, you want to make sure that you and your team are creating great content to give other site owners even more reason to link to your site.
If you can obtain a reputation of being an expert on certain topics, this will dramatically increase your site’s reach and reputation amongst users who are likely to use your site.
Knowing this, I had my teams right a number of articles on skiing and snowboarding related topics. From when the best weeks to hit the slopes were, to what to do when an avalanche occurs, our ability to create a reputation of specific knowledge helped us improve our traffic and our sales.
Edging out the competition
OutReachFrog utilizes powerful programs that allowed them to do an audit of not only my site and the links that I had already built through the years, they were also able to perform audits on some of my site’s major competitors.
From there, they actually identified a number of high domain authority sites that had linked to my competitors in the past. From there, they decided that it would be beneficial to me to get some links of my own on those sites. This not only helped me and my site by finding out where my competitors get a lot of their links, it also helped by having my site be a presence on those host sites as well. That gave me and my site a chance to expand my market and potentially beat out the competition for future leads.
This may seem a bit cold-blooded, but if you know anything about the Internet, you know that it’s a dog-eat-dog world.
Long-term investment
I’ll be honest, at first I was pretty turned off by the expenses that I was making when it came to link building. $1,000 a month was not a major expense for me but it was still something that I was not necessarily prepared to make when I first started learning about OutReachFrog and other link-building agencies.
What I realized however, what that when it comes to built links and pay per click ads, building links is the dramatically more affordable investment. The reason why is quite simple when you break it down.
Essentially, the way pay per click ads work is that you are paying ‘rent’ on a monthly or yearly basis to see temporary boosts to your traffic and visibility. There is no doubt at all that pay per click is extremely valuable and can have a hugely positive impact on your site and your bottom line, but once those ads stop running, you will very likely see a drop in your organic traffic as a result.
On the other hand, link building can have an impact for years and years even though nothing is being done to actually change them. The reason why is because the vast majority of sites leave content on their site forever. In fact, that content actually helps their domain authority stay strong, just like it helps your domain authority stay strong as well.
If you’re still having an issue figuring out how link building compares to pay per click, consider it like leasing a car compared to buying one. Even if you are making monthly payments on a car loan, you are in many ways paying for your future as you will one day own the car outright. When it comes to pay per click, that is much more like leasing a car. That’s because when you lease a car, you are making monthly payments, but are not necessarily ever going to own the car outright.
As with your car, you can choose what to do with it once you own it. There are a ton of ways at your disposal to help build your links. That being said, coordinating with a link building agency like OutReachFrog is like hiring a trained mechanic to make changes to your car rather than going it alone.
