Compare The Market: Linkbuilding

Compare The Market were looking for an SEO agency that could significantly improve their Search Engine rankings across all core markets, and take responsibility for non-brand traffic to the site.

Background

The site was not on the first page for a number of key terms, two major factors influencing this were a back link profile which showed hundreds of thousands of links from the same domains and a lot of orphaned internal pages. STEAK were also tasked with achieving rankings increases without proposing to add lots of new content - CTM as a brand did not want to include sections of the site dedicated to commenting on the insurance industry as a whole, or large advice sections such as those on moneysavingexpert.com.

Approach

STEAK undertook a large link building campaign aiming to build new high-value links to the site from relevant sources, as well as a huge analysis of existing links to the site, looking to address the issue of the site appearing to have a 'spammy' link profile. This was done even with the restrictions around unique new content being added to the site on a regular basis.

STEAK were the first agency to attempt to improve SEO rankings by, in part, removing low-quality links from a link profile and openly talk about it in public.  By replacing these links with better ones, we managed to improve the weaker ranking factors without impacting on the overall volume of links to the site for long.

Social media links

In addition to this, we looked at the potential for links from the hugely popular social media pages associated with the CTM figurehead, Aleksandr Orlov. Any value being passed from these properties in the eyes of search engines was not being realized and STEAK managed to leverage these assets and add further high-value links as well as helping create processes that would continue to add to the volumes of these over time.

The results were that by February, generic traffic to the site had doubled year on year and volumes continue to increase, record traffic levels from natural search continue to be produced.

Results in 8 months

• Total keywords in position 1 went from 1 to 23 over the 8 months (2300% increase)
• Total keywords in the top 5 went from 25 to 64 (156% increase)
• Average ranking across target keywords went from 21.38 to 11.23
• Traffic to the site from non-brand keywords doubled, YoY