Affiliate Blog Increases Organic Traffic by 140% in 4 Months

Challenge

Roller Skate Dad is a blog that brings up-to-date roller skating news, interviews, tips, and skating information to all those interested in the sport. Started by a skating enthusiast and a former Ice Skating player Jeff Stone, the website is a knowledge hub for all skaters. 

While Jeff was putting up a good fight by publishing top-quality content, he could not win the battle to gain steady traffic growth. Started in 2018, the website broke the 10k organic traffic milestone in 2021, but for the kind of in-depth content that Jeff puts out, that was just scratching the surface. 

Being a web developer by profession, Jeff was able to keep the website in its sublime state. He already knew on-page SEO, and looking at the site, we were able to find that he got everything right. We also did a complete website audit to understand what’s stopping it from reaching its potential. 

Though the website publishes affiliate content, Jeff makes sure that he does an impartial review so that it helps users make an informed decision. With him being an expert and a former player, we knew that E-A-T was not a factor that was causing trouble for the website. 

Jeff wanted us to help the website come out of the traffic stagnation and move the existing ranking to the top positions of Google, which can help him increase the affiliate revenue. 

Solution

We did the SEO audit and found that the website saw only a marginal increase in referring domains for two years. 

Additionally, the numbers were fluctuating and never really went more than 200 till November 2022, which was the time when Jeff finally decided to give our blogger outreach campaign a try. 

Jeff was pretty clear about what he wanted – genuine backlinks with high relevancy and traffic. We helped him identify the pages with traffic and revenue potential with many keywords within striking distance of making it to the top 3 positions. 

We built high-quality backlinks for him from sites with genuine organic traffic and high topical relevance like what Jeff intended. Before we started the backlink campaign, the website had 174 referring domains in total. 

Over the next three months, we built 223 high-quality backlinks to the website, especially the blogs and home page, taking the total number of referring domains to 397.

Additionally, we helped him optimize the website’s speed just to be sure that the new Google Page Experience Update didn’t come in our way to rank higher. 

Result

In November, just a month before we started the link-building campaign for the website, the organic traffic reached 16,215. 

Three months down the road, the website saw a 69% increase in organic traffic, registering 27,552 organic visitors and an 81% increase in overall organic sessions. 

As I’m writing this case study, the website has already beaten this all-time high record as it is about to touch 40k organic visitors in March.

So, what propelled such an uphill roller coaster ride for Roller Skate Dad?

As I mentioned earlier, the low-hanging keywords we identified during the audit were the key to success. 

While the content Jeff wrote got them perfectly positioned in the top of Google rankings, what was lacking was the high authority required to push the way up. In fact, the backlinks we built just did what it was required to do. 

As you can see, the website continues to make daily improvements in the keyword rankings, and most of the keywords have a very high search volume. 

In December 2021, the website had just around 615 keywords ranking in the top three positions and about 1,765 ranking in the first page of Google.

With the backlinks that we built, these numbers shot up to 2x, with keywords ranking in the top three reaching 1,156 and the ones in the top 10, touching 3,524. 

You can also see a 20% increase in the number of keywords ranking in Google for the site, which ultimately increases the chance of higher organic traffic in the days to come for Roller Skate Dad.