SEO Case Study: German Market Backlink Building Directly to the Commercial Page Boosted the Average Position From 40 to 15 in 3 Months

u/Dabar

[SEO Case study] German market backlink building directly to the commercial page boosted the average position from 39.6 to 14.4 in 3 months

You can check the result screenshot on my LinkedIn profile /jurekljajic/
Let's start!

Client: Real Estate agency from Croatia

Goal: TOP10 positions on the German SERP for most of the commercial keywords for the chosen page (keywords such as "buy [property type] Croatia")

Monthly budget for links: 800€
The page currently ranks for 464 keywords as shown on the screenshot and gets over 15k impressions/month.

The process of building backlinks
• We used Scrapebox (67$ and my girlfriend bought it to me) to scrape hundreds of German travel blogs using different Google operators such as "gastartikel" and similar.
• Buzzstream (24$/month) to send the outreach (you get the 2 weeks trial period when you register).
• We hired a girl that speaks German fluently for 8$/hr that helps us negotiating the price of the links and writing the content

(For agencies) How much time do you need for a process like this that generates 6-10 backlinks:
• Lead scraping and filtering – 2-3h
• Setting up Buzzstream campaign – 4h
• Communicating/negotiating – 4h
• Article writing/editing/publishing – 6-10h

(The same quality backlinks like this are being sold for 500€+ on different marketplaces and if you do the outreach yourself, you can get them for 70-120€. Huge savings)

We managed to get the page rankings up pretty quickly with 7 out of 10 backlinks being indexed as we speak.

We will be adding more links until we reach the TOP 3 position for the most important keywords and then it's all about onpageseo and testing (meta titles, h1, conversion optimization, etc.)

I must say that Germans are pretty tough when it comes to their guest post pricing model. We got lots of replies asking for 500€+ for a single link so don't be surprised! Just skip those depending on your budget.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
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seo case study german market backlink building directly to the commercial page boosted the average position from 40 to 15 in 3 months

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xfd
Did you get any free links this way? Also, since the German market is smaller, would you say that you might run out of prospects doing it this way?

I must say that Germans are pretty tough when it comes to their guest post pricing model. We got lots of replies asking for 500€+ for a single link so don't be surprised! Just skip those depending on your budget.

It's not just Germans. Some sites are very strict about their pricing. I've also found people saying ridiculous prices only to come back and beg me to post on their site.. Makes no sense but whatever 😀

Dabar ✍️
Like 1 out of 30 links is free. There is definitely lots of space to improve our process and that would result in more free links.

We are getting there. Sure we can run out of prospects but there is an infinite number of cross-niche sites you can generate. After you use them all, it's time for digital Public Relations (PR) and news site placements lol

That's true, there is lots of nonsense in the guest posting world 😀

xfd
This is how it's done if anyone out there is wondering how they can save $$ by doing your own outreach. If you're OK with paying for placements then you'll be surprised at the quality of sites you can get as long as you're willing to be patient. I also find that the cost of the site does not equal how good of a link it is. I've had AMAZING links for $50 and shitty links for $200++.

What I like to do is check for outgoing links, the less they have the better the link equity is. That can make a $100 Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) 30 link better than a $500 DR 80 link with 50000 outgoing links.
Dabar ✍️
This is so true. If you find an article that's already ranking/getting traffic with some backlinks on it, you can do a link insertion and take advantage of link equity even more.

Another strategy would be writing a guest post that is optimized for some long-tail keyword (possibly a question) like "What is the best way of optimizing meta titles for real estate websites?" You publish it on the guest blog and hit it with few forum links – it will rank and not only it will pass the SEO juice but the referral traffic as well.

P.S. How do you judge what number of outgoing links is good for you
xfd
I'm not a big fan of T2 linkbuilding simply because it's a bit unethical.

As for the question, it's hard to say. I always value lower outgoing links higher than a site that has tons of links going out. Some people don't post any link offer on their site and that's normally what I target for my sites.
Dabar ✍️
Thanks for sharing! :)
thinkdesign
Google eventually de-values paid/sponsored links. So, entire effort of buying 8 out of 10 links will go vain?

is it worth paying 100 EUR for a link
InternetWeakGuy

Google eventually de-values paid/sponsored links

Source
thinkdesign
Check this out- kind of an idea of what Google thinks about guest posting

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-guest-posting-for-links-warning/372115/#close
InternetWeakGuy
Mueller is pretty notorious for making misleading or incorrect statements, and this is another instance – as someone who buys guest posts week in and week out, I can tell you that when he says they devalue those links he is 110% wrong.

Guest posting works, and I can count on one hand the number of links I've bought that have had no effect on the target page (but then I don't buy shit links).
thinkdesign
If you get a link placed in a credible high Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) site, it is still safe. But how many of the SEO pros or link selling agencies doing this?

Read this: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/<year>/05/a-reminder-about-links-in-large-scale
I do think Google algorithm is smart enough to figure out websites creating/accepting posts in an abusive way.

I have connected with many link selling agencies (you want I can name them). They are charging huge money which is bad and sites are not even worthy

For sake of quick wins, we should not damage the web world and ultimately the goal of WWW is to help each other with valuable information. Marketers ruin everything
Dabar ✍️
Exactly. You can't really win without paying for links.

I mean, you can if you keep creating one awesome digital Public Relations (PR) campaign every month and generate 20 placements in each. But who has the budget for that. Not the clients I work with.
Dabar ✍️
It won't go vain. Do you think Google knows exactly which links are paid and which are not?
What kind of mess would Google create if every page using paid links would drop in rankings or even get penalized? You could then simply destroy any competitor just by buying links on his website xD

psyick
So over three months you spent 2400 euro, gained 18 – 30 backlinks and that was enough to make that much difference for competitive SERP improvements?

Did you use e.g. Domain Authority (DA) to select guest post sites?

Dabar ✍️
That's more than enough. We now did research to improve on-page SEO and will be adding Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) (more content), more internal links, testing meta titles. TF-IDF analysis is something we are going to do as well.

I used Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR), URL Rating, Trust Flow (TF)/Citation Flow (CF) ratio, organic traffic and looked into what are other keywords that the website is ranking for. Relevancy is the most important thing here. Would be good to look for outbound links as well but you'd quickly run out of pages.

There is this tool called domdetailer that gets you all the popular SEO metrics for cheap. Combined with Ahrefs batch analysis, you got all you need.

psyick
Thanks that is encouraging. I am happy my on-site is sorted, and I'm working on adding content, starting with FAQs too actually, but backlinks for me are the, er, missing link. Keen to learn it myself now and guest posts seem the way to go.

Did you do any competitor link intersect stuff to find guest posts or just find them direct
Dabar ✍️
Guest posts are definitely the way to go. Just be careful where you are getting links from. Don't forget to implement Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) structured data.

About link intersect – yes I always do it when I want to rank for a particular high-search volume keyword. I analyze the backlink profile of every other page ranking in TOP10 and try to match them. It's important to match them in on-page SEO as well (including the number of incoming internal links)

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