We need a link building strategy to help improve our rankings

Eventually most SEO campaigns hit a saturation point where, despite having optimised the site and improved their rankings, some keywords have just not broken the ground on to page one, and maybe haven’t even come close. It’s as if you have hit a glass ceiling beyond which it is very difficult to progress.

This is the point at which your content, combined with your existing link-based credibility (something we refer to as SEO Health™), has peaked. Yet, when compared to top ranking competitive sites on the keywords you are targeting, your SEO Health is still inferior to theirs. Meaning there is still a gap to close. This is very common with popular generic keywords and certain sectors where the standards of search engine optimisation between sites are very high and aggressively pursued by many competitors, such as financial services, insurance, gaming, travel, etc.

If you’re at this point, with the site fully optimised, and the bar still not reached, the only way to continue to improve SEO Health, is through link building. Linking is the component of the algorithm that search engines pay most attention to, and the only part of the algorithm for which there is no saturation point. This makes link building the most reliable breakthrough solution for achieving top rankings on major keywords.

Recognising this growing issue in SEO projects, we have developed a portfolio of link building services called link Catalyst™, it focuses on specific keyword objectives and blends a multitude of link building techniques to deliver strong and assured ranking growth on those major keywords, where other techniques and even other linking strategies have failed to deliver traction.

Consider the following case study of a leading financial services provider. Having spent nearly two and half years pursuing SEO with two separate agencies and an in-house team, rankings for major generic terms (like loans, mortgages, etc), could not be effectively raised to page one, despite continual optimisation of the site. Eventually Greenlight was engaged for its Link Catalyst link building programme, to close the remaining gap via linking campaigns. Following this, Greenlight began a comprehensive link building strategy, focussing each link project specifically on major key phrases and target pages for “loans”, “personal loans” and “mortgages”.

Rankings began to ascend within weeks of beginning the programme, and within 3 months we were already in breaking distance of page one. By month five of the campaign they were placed within the top half of page one, allowing them to reach a further 60% of their total search audience, and where the resultant traffic increased loan applications through search by over 1000%.