Growing the domain rating and increasing search positions is a burning and painful question for many businesses. Ouch!🤕
Up until recently, it had been a touchy subject for us, too.
We turned for help to a few SEO agencies and individual SEO specialists so that they’d grow our search positions. However, we ended up only losing the search positions results we had achieved before🤷♀️.
So, with nothing left to lose, one day, we decided to change our approach.
Taking the risk paid off! In less than 6 months, we were already enjoying +20 points to DR with zero budget on paid links🚀.
Here's our domain rate at the beginning of our journey in May (this is a screenshot from Ahrefs that I used to track progress):
Here's what I got at the end of the year:
We also saw a few other favourable results that I’m happy to tell you about.
✔️An increase in keywords numbers in positions 1 - 3 for the US: from 50 to 156.
✔️An increase of organic traffic in our target location, the US. It grew from 1,000 in May 2020 to 6,000 in December of the same year.
✔️We scored first position for our main target keyword.
It’s not a secret. The main factor of DR growth is the number of quality and high-authority referring links that a website has.
My goal was to get at least 30 backlinks per month.
In the beginning, I had a lot of doubts regarding the attainability of this task.
But you know what they say, the best blaze brightest when circumstances are at their worst.
So, I just braced myself and started the journey. And it turned out to be just fine, there even was a month when I got 51 backlinks😅.
The strategies that I used to get backlinks and increase the domain rating of my website: both good and not so good🤷
👉A quick SaaS link exchange - it helped to quickly increase DR for the first month by 7 points.
👉Expert comments on media and brand blogs. Helped us to gain links from media outlets like Wordsteam (domain rating 90), CEOBlogNation (domain rating 71), GoodFirms (domain rating 83).
👉Outreach strategy for getting backlinks. The strategy that turned out to be the least effective for us and didn’t generate as much positive change as expected
👉Guest Posting. Our guest posts appeared on G2, TheNextWeb, Sales Hacker, Crunchbase, etc.
I understand that this short squeeze is not enough to create an action plan for you to grow your DR.
I placed the full story with all the pros and cons, challenges, and templates for every strategy here👇👇👇
https://nethunt.com/blog/how-we-increased-website-domain-rating/
🙌P.S. I’ll answer all your questions about our process of DR growth under this post, so feel free to ask
This is a great breakdown, and an even better deep-dive, thank you for sharing! One thing that I have found has been super beneficial to obtain high-value backlinks in a more effective, lower workload timeframe is to utilize HARO.
Where I was once pre-writing a 1,500+ word article then shopping it around for outreach as a pre-completed piece of content, instead I send short pitches to 3-5 HARO requests per day, and typically get a couple of responses/links out of it on medium to high value sites.
absolutely! HARO is a great way to get backlinks from high-authority websites if you don't have time for long-reads.
We've been doing this the past month and it's gone really well. We pay a productized service to do it for us, but it's the exact same strategy.
Nice! Do they also write the comments on your behalf? Or are they just looking for opportunities and ask you to provide comments?
I use Jolly SEO and they write the comments. They're expensive, but they're good. Most of the quotes are pretty spot on with how I would write them.
It probably helps that I've got a ton of previously written content to draw from, but either way, they've done a good job.
🎉
Thanks for sharing Anna! Definitely a good read!
Thanks! I hope some of the approaches I tried will help you as well. Of course, if you are also on a struggle to growing your DR ;)