Search engine optimisation

The site whose links kept rising while its traffic fell

An e-commerce site losing 21,000 keywords and 67,000 visits in 30 days while its backlinks kept growing. Ranking keywords went from 54.9k to 102k.

4,300

keywords in the top 3

777

Client: Withheld by agreement with the client
Sector: E-commerce

The challenge

The site was losing 21,000 keywords and 67,400 visits in 30 days.
Across those same 30 days its backlinks grew by 5,900 and its referring domains by 376.
Somebody was working and reporting numbers that went up, while the site went down underneath them.

What we did

Cleaning the link profile: disavowing what was doing harm instead of adding more on top.
Working on the content that actually ranks rather than on the number of pages.
Measuring on keywords in the top three, not on total keyword count.

What came of it

Ranking keywords from 54.9k to 102k.
Top-three placements from 777 to 4,300.
Domain Rating from 36 to 40.

Where it started

Where the site stood

The site was losing 21,000 keywords and 67,400 visits in 30 days. Across those same 30 days its backlinks grew by 5,900 and its referring domains by 376.

Somebody was working and reporting numbers that went up, while the site went down underneath them.

01·From the work

The links kept rising and the rankings kept falling

The first thing we did was stop looking at the numbers that were rising and look at the ones that were falling. Backlinks up 5,900 and referring domains up 376 across 30 days — while keywords fell by 21,000, visits by 67,400, and top-three placements by 634.

A report saying the links went up is literally true and practically wrong. The number that moves is not always the number that matters.

Ahrefs, before: the small figures beside each large one are the ones telling you the direction.

02·From the work

What we refused to do

We did not add links on top of a profile that had a problem. Adding to an unhealthy profile enlarges the problem rather than covering it.

We did not build new pages before fixing what was already there, and we did not measure success on total keyword count, because that is the figure that flatters a report and says nothing about the work.

03·From the work

What happened after

Ranking keywords recovered and grew: 54.9k to 102k. More to the point, keywords in the top three went from 777 to 4,300 — and those are the ones with somebody ready to buy behind them.

Referring domains fell from 2,500 to 2,000, and that was deliberate: what was disavowed was doing harm, not good.

Ahrefs, after: 102k keywords · 4,300 in the top 3 · DR 40

Traffic

The figures, off their own boards

The screenshots come straight from Ahrefs Site Explorer. The site's name and domain are withheld by agreement with the client; everything else is as it stands.

Before: 54.9k keywords (down 21k) · 220k visits (down 67.4k) · 777 in the top 3 · DR 36
After: 102k keywords · 4,300 in the top 3 · DR 40

Outcome

The outcome

102,000
Ranking keywords
Ahrefs · was 54,900
4,300
Keywords in the top 3
Ahrefs · was 777
40
Domain Rating
Ahrefs · was 36

Work like this starts with a call about where you actually are

If this is close to what you need, the Search engine optimisation page carries the whole method: what you receive, and the number the work answers to.

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