Ranking #2 For Main Keyword On Fresh Site In 3 Months

This case study will cover how we took a fresh site to #2 for its main keyword in just a few months, ranking only below a government site.

We were also able to rank over 25 other keywords in the top three and generate thousands of monthly traffic for the business to its main offering.

Let's get right into it.

The Niche

This client site is in a very, very niche area of therapists for a specific type of worker.

Their offering is a program that allows workers to get back to their jobs quickly by accessing the professional help they need. The search volume for this program and semantically related keywords totaled thousands per month.

When we did our initial review of the niche, we quickly realized it was not very competitive at all. Around three competitor sites were operating in the niche and doing fairly well, all with very low domain ratings and poor SEO overall.

Our Strategy

After our initial review, we knew that we could get the site to rank pretty quickly by doing the basics well.

This means optimizing the on page SEO, producing quality content, and building high-quality links.

Our plan was to publish 5-10 backlinks per month, alongside 3-5 pieces of content - nothing major, but enough to quickly surpass the competition if done correctly.

Obviously, this wasn't the full strategy, we also handle things like local SEO, technical SEO, and much more, but the basics formed the 20% that would get 80% of the results.

Links We Built

When building links for this site, we had to spend quite a bit of time figuring out how to find the most niche-relevant links given how specific the offering was.

We decided to focus mostly on therapy and legal-related sites, allowing us to cover the topic from both of these points of view in guest posts and link insertions.

We focused on high quality links as always, with the main focus on the home page as this was the page that was targeting the main keyword.

The Results

The results on this project were very positive, and led to the client continuing the campaign at the time of writing this article.

In numbers, here's a summary of the results:

#2 ranking for top lead gen keyword.
25+ other keywords all ranked in the top three, including several other variations of the main lead gen term.
Over 1,000 organic traffic per month.
Total outranking of all competitors.

This was definitely faster than usual for this type of project, although we are starting to notice more sites ranking quickly, especially in certain niches.

Is This Normal For A New Site?

Usually, new websites get stuck in the Google sandbox for 6-9 months, roughly.

This makes it much more difficult to rank during this time, but clearly, it is still possible to rank quicker than this if a few conditions are met:

Low(er) competition niche
Ability to build links and content quickly
Highly targeted SEO strategy
Ideally, home page that targets the main keyword

It also depends a lot on the type of website that is being ranked as well. Ecommerce or local sites tend to get indexed and rank quickly compared to generic informational (niche) sites.