SEO Case Study: Strengthening Authority and Organic Visibility
Digital Strategy Consultants is a Dublin-based digital marketing consultancy. I joined its SEO team for a four-month engagement between December 2023 and April 2024, taking responsibility for off-page SEO and link acquisition.
Working from the client’s priority pages and keyword targets, I developed a focused outreach campaign that secured 11 relevant backlinks from eight referring domains. During the same period, the website recorded improvements in estimated organic traffic, keyword visibility and Ahrefs Domain Rating.
Results at a glance
- 11 backlinks acquired from eight referring domains
- All acquired links were standard followed links
- 120% increase in Semrush-estimated organic traffic
- 36% increase in keywords detected in Google’s top 100
- Ahrefs Domain Rating increased from 29 to 33
The challenge
Digital Strategy Consultants operated in a competitive search market spanning SEO, digital strategy, consulting and marketing services.
The client had identified the commercial pages it wanted to strengthen and supplied a set of target keywords associated with each page. My role was to support those priorities through relevant off-page placements without treating Domain Rating alone as a measure of link quality.
The campaign therefore needed to:
- Identify websites with genuine topical or contextual relevance
- Find natural editorial opportunities for the client’s target pages
- Use anchor text that accurately represented the linked service
- Secure links that would remain live beyond the campaign
- Strengthen the site’s backlink profile as part of the wider SEO strategy
My approach
Prospect research and qualification
I researched potential websites and evaluated each opportunity before beginning outreach. The assessment considered more than a website’s headline authority metric, including its relevance, content quality, organic visibility, outbound-link patterns and suitability for an editorial placement.
I used the same principles covered in my link-building checklist.
Approximately 86 prospects were contacted during the engagement.
Page and keyword alignment
The client supplied a list of priority landing pages and the keywords associated with them. I used this brief to guide prospecting, content selection and placement decisions.
For each opportunity, I reviewed the existing article and looked for a subject where the client’s service could be introduced naturally. The anchor text was chosen to describe the destination page accurately and fit the surrounding discussion—not inserted into unrelated content simply to obtain an exact-match link.
For example, a reference to an e-commerce analytics service was placed only where the article’s subject supported that recommendation and the linked page matched the reader’s likely intent.
Outreach and link acquisition
I conducted targeted outreach and secured 11 backlinks from eight referring domains. All 11 were standard followed links.
The referring domains are not disclosed here to protect the client’s backlink strategy. However, the links were selected for their contextual fit and were still live during subsequent checks after the engagement.
Campaign outcomes
Estimated organic traffic increased by 120%
Semrush’s estimated monthly organic traffic increased from 221 in December 2023 to 487 in April 2024.
This represents an increase of approximately 120% over the four-month comparison period.
Ranking-keyword visibility increased by 36%
The number of organic keywords detected by Semrush in Google’s top 100 increased from 746 to 1,014.
The distribution also changed during the period:
- Keywords in positions 1–3 increased from 9 to 12
- Keywords in positions 4–10 increased from 28 to 29
- Keywords in positions 11–20 increased from 82 to 106
- Keywords in positions 21–50 increased from 168 to 268
The site also achieved strong rankings for relevant service-related searches, including a number-one position for “keyword research agency” at the time captured.
Domain Rating increased from 29 to 33
Ahrefs Domain Rating increased from 29 to 33 between December 2023 and April 2024. Ahrefs also recorded an increase in the site’s total backlink count from approximately 2.6K to 2.7K.
Domain Rating is a third-party indicator of backlink-profile strength rather than a Google ranking factor. I use it as one supporting measure alongside link relevance, referring-domain quality, organic visibility and link retention.
What I contributed
This was a collaborative SEO engagement rather than a campaign delivered in isolation. My direct contribution was the research, qualification, outreach and acquisition work that produced 11 links from eight referring domains.
The wider improvements in estimated traffic and keyword visibility occurred during the same period. They provide useful campaign context, but they should not be attributed exclusively to link acquisition because rankings can also be influenced by content, technical changes, competitor activity and search-engine updates.
The increase in Domain Rating is the outcome most closely associated with the off-page work, although it should still be treated as a directional third-party metric rather than proof of search performance on its own.