An eco-friendly manufacturer nobody could find
Good product, decent site, almost no authority. Eight months of placements on genuinely relevant publishers moved them from invisible to page one on the terms that actually sell.
- Placements
- 34
- Average publisher DR
- 46
- Campaign length
- 8 months
- Sector
- Sustainable manufacturing
Domain rating
Organic keywords
Page one rankings
Monthly organic traffic
Referring domains
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain rating | 18 | 42 | +133% |
| Organic keywords | 156 | 892 | +472% |
| Page one rankings | 3 | 23 | +667% |
| Monthly organic traffic | 847 | 4,847 | +472% |
| Referring domains | 42 | 118 | +181% |
Measured over 8 months. Percentages are calculated from the two columns beside them rather than written in, so they cannot drift apart from the figures.
Where they started
They made a product their market wanted and could not be found by anyone looking for it. DR 18, 42 referring domains, and 847 organic visits a month for a business selling into industrial buyers.
The site itself was fine. Nothing technical was holding it back, which is worth saying because it is often the first thing blamed. The problem was that almost nobody credible had ever linked to them.
What we did
Placements on manufacturing, sustainability and trade publications with real readerships in the sector, rather than general business sites with better metrics and no relevance.
Anchors were kept mostly branded and partial-match. With a profile that thin, an aggressive exact-match run would have looked exactly like what it was.
How it ended, and the caveat
Page one for their most commercially valuable terms inside eight months, and a lead flow that finally reflected the product.
The honest caveat: they were starting from almost nothing, and moving from DR 18 to DR 42 is a far easier job than moving from 42 to 60. Early numbers in any campaign look dramatic because the base is small.
What the campaign actually was
Mix
Guest posts, with six niche edits in months five and six
Pace
Four to five placements a month, never more than seven
What went wrong along the way
No campaign runs clean. These are the parts that cost time, and they are worth reading because they are the parts most likely to happen to you too.
- Two publishers went quiet after accepting a pitch and never published. Both were replaced, neither was billed, and one of them has since come off the list entirely.
- The client insisted on an exact-match anchor for their main commercial term in month two. We said we thought it was early. They wanted it anyway, so we placed it, and then rebalanced with branded anchors for the next six placements to keep the ratio sane.
- Month four produced almost nothing visible. That is normal and it is still an uncomfortable conversation to have with a client who is paying monthly. Rankings moved properly in month five.
What to take from it
Relevance beat authority here
The placements that moved the needle were trade publications in the DR 30s, not the general business sites in the DR 60s. In a specialist B2B category the audience overlap matters more than the metric.
The site was already fine
No technical work was needed, which is worth saying because a slow site or a thin page would have capped what links could do. Check that before selling a link campaign.
Eight months was the real timeline
Meaningful movement started in month five. Anyone promising this in eight weeks is describing a different kind of link.
The other two
A trucking equipment manufacturer with zero page-one rankings
A manufacturer with no page-one rankings whatsoever in a niche where the buyers are specific and the search volume is low but valuable.
B2B SaaSA B2B SaaS product competing against much bigger budgets
28 placements averaging DR 50 or better, all inside the SaaS and B2B software space, over six months.
Have a look at the list
Every site with its price, nothing to fill in first, and nothing to pay unless a link actually goes live. 365 days of cover on every placement.
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