New site link building project - building TF & CF for SERPS step by step

Hey guys - new to this forum & wanted to share what I'm doing as a relative newbie to link building on a new site & hoping to pick up some tips.

So, new site created in Feb 2017, obviously has TF 0, CF 0, no social shares. It's a brand new domain (should have bought an older one, but there you go).

In Feb 2017 I created a dozen decent content pages (it's a reviews site, all content unique by me and >1000 words per post).

By mid March 2017, no SERPS at all but everything was indexed by google.

Set up a Facebook page for the new site & invited all my current friends. Got a 10% hit rate for likes to the new site, started to post all new reviews there & shared them.

Listed the site to a half dozen directories, I know this isn't great, but from a starting point of zero backlinks have to start from somewhere I guess.

Also searched around for relevant forums to my site, registered for a few & started posting 1 or 2 posts per day with no spam / no links or comment about my site - just helpful answers or joining in discussions etc to establish a basic level of status on each forum.

By end of March 2017 (6 weeks into the project) I had the metrics up to TF 9 / CF 20 / 30 social shares, and started to see a few impressions per day through the google SERPS (like 7 average per day).

I'm using a free account at majestic to monitor the TF & CF (trust flow / citation flow) plus the backlinks generated, and Google webmaster console to track the incoming clicks / impressions from search - both tools are free of charge.

Continued doing all the above on a daily basis, forum commenting, facebook friend adding & sharing, finding new forums etc. Once a week I go through the facebook friends suggestions & add a bunch that have over 50 shared friends - essentially boosting the pool of everyone that I can invite to like the new page.

Then every other week I go through the new added friends & invite them to like the new site page, slowly building it up.

Now mid April (8 weeks into the project). No new content has been added to the site since start of March, but stats have boosted to TF 19 / CF 35 / social shares 60. There had been a direct boost to the google SERPS which have seen a steady increase in average position and now return an average of about 40 impressions per day, with an average of 4 clicks through to the site.

It's slow & steady, but all the technical measurements I can make show a nice upward trend which is nice. This should be easy to replicate for anyone else that is starting out with a new site too.

I will continue to update this thread over the next few months as I continue to do more of the same, using only natural link building methods (no paid links / no paid advertising) so we can see how it goes & what is possible.

Would appreciate any comments if there is something else I should be doing, or also if you are on the same journey & want to share how you are getting on that would be great!

Cheers - Matt

 

Link building is progressing at a rate of maybe 3 links per day, social shares increasing by 10 a week - it's not super fast, but the plan is to be hitting 100 impressions in google SERPS per day by end of April 2017, 300 impressions in google SERPS per day by end of May 2017.

The last things I have fixed in order to improve basic google rank, are to get rid of any 404 pages that seem to sporadically pop up when using a WordPress site (installed a 404 re director addon which automatically redirects missing pages to the homepage) as any errors on the page can have a negative impact on your overall google rank.

Also focused a lot on the page loading speeds (which were initially all over the place - average was about 3000ms) - page load times also impact your google rank. See the green graph below... page load times were all over the place when I had the site on a free shared hosting plan. I moved the site 3 weeks ago to a better rated hosting provider that specializes in WordPress sites (not free, costs $5 per month which is not too bad). Saw an impressive reduction in page load times (now around 200ms - 15x faster than before) which will definitely boost the google rank.

If sharing this project is helping you, I would really appreciate a bit of feedback. I'm happy to share my progress if it is of benefit to anyone

Cheers - Matt

 

Ok - been 2 weeks since the last update, everything is flying now. Target was 100 SERPS by end of April, but smashed this with the last 4 days all being over 200 SERPS. Daily click rates are also increasing in line with the SERPS as expected, now showing 10-15 clicks through per day, and accelerating daily.

No changes to the plan, still just building the links but at a slightly increased rate now of around 6 per day, with every post now having 6-10 external links in. I've been tweaking the strategy a little due to now having some actual data to work with, but I guess not much point saying how / why here.

From the dead silence it looks like there is no interest here in this thread, so I will save the details for elsewhere - but if anyone is interested in EXACTLY how I'm doing this & how you could do exactly the same, just say so & I will spend the time to update.

Cheers - Matt

 

Interesting to follow I'll come back when as you post new updates!

 

great information it is helpful to all newbie who always looking for strategy.

 

Ok - so the SERPS performance is now over 200 SERPS/day - nice growth in the last 2 weeks. The graph shows the same trend as before, but if you check out the scale to the left hand side you will see how it is all basically x6 - very positive.
This was achieved by simply continuing the link building to the existing page structure, but now shifting from adding links in to the home page on to adding at least 2 backlinks for every content page.
Also, as there is now some SERPS data to analyse, I saw that 1 page in particular was outperforming all the rest. I looked at that page & saw it had a slightly different keyword structure setup in the META KEYWORDS, so I replicated that across all the other pages. Result after 3 days, was that all the other pages now perform a a roughly similar level to the 'best page'.

The whole point of concentrating on gaining SERPS data initially is that this is what drives the traffic - without SERPS you get no organic clicks (which is what you really want to focus on - getting clicks).

Now the SERPS are on the up, I can analyse exactly what changes / links boost the SERPS, and replicate that across all other pages on the site to get the best performance all across the board.

The focus this week is now on increasing the position rank in the SERPS, which in turn will boost the CTR (click through rate), which will give me the click data that is truly the end goal of this.

As the 100 SERPS/day target for the end of April was smashed, new targets are 300 SERPS/day for mid May, 500 SERPS/day by end of May. After that, the targets will be click based rather than SERPS based & the launch of the new site will be complete.

End of May target is to have 30 organic clicks /day which will allow the initial monetisation to start for the site (it's an Amazon affiliate review site) - I have a 12 month plan for the site which is going smooth so far, will keep updated here so long as anyone wants to know.

Thanks - Matt

 

this is a good read. thanks for sharing. will be looking into your progress. also will be starting a new project soon. Maybe I'll be trying this process. not a bad to do something new for a campaign.

 

Nice post! I am in the same boat, registered a new domain and trying to build links. Thanks for being thorough in your journal, it is actually very helpful to me.

I'm following this and looking forward to seeing your progress.