+312%
organic revenue in 9 months
Hospitality · 8-month engagement
Falak · Page 1 for 12 target terms via link building
Falak's boutique hospitality brand had strong on-page SEO already in place from a previous agency, but a thin backlink profile (31 referring domains, mostly low-quality directories) meant zero of its 12 target terms had ever reached page 1.
12/12
target terms on page 1
RankingsClient: Falak
The challenge
When on-page work is already solid, the remaining gap is almost always authority, and authority only comes from real editorial links, which is exactly the vetting-heavy work most cheap link vendors skip. Falak had been burned by a PBN-heavy campaign 18 months earlier that a manual action later penalised.
The strategy
A link-building-only engagement (no on-page changes needed): pure editorial link acquisition against the 7-point vetting criteria, sequenced against Falak's specific target-term list rather than a generic 'more links' approach.
What we did
The work behind the number.
Links
19 links placed over 8 months: guest posts on hospitality and travel publications, 3 HARO placements, and niche edits into existing high-authority travel guides. Every placement logged on a live Google Sheet.
Strategy
Anchor text mapped precisely to Falak's 12 target terms, sequenced to avoid the pattern that triggered the previous penalty: natural anchor diversity, no exact-match anchor over-optimisation.
Results
Before and after, side by side.
Target terms on page 1
0
12
Before
After
Domain Rating (Ahrefs)
18
44
Before
After
Referring domains
31
68
Before
After
Timeline
How it played out.
-
Month 1
Vetting criteria applied, prospecting begins
Full backlink audit confirmed the thin, low-quality profile. Prospecting started against hospitality and travel publications.
-
Month 3
First 6 links live, DR climbing
Domain Rating moved from 18 to 28 as the first wave of editorial links indexed.
-
Month 6
8 of 12 terms on page 1
Steady link velocity through the campaign: 8 of 12 target terms had reached page 1.
-
Month 8
All 12 terms on page 1
Full campaign result: 12/12 target terms page 1, DR 44, referring domains more than doubled.
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+245%
qualified leads in 7 months
+180%
organic traffic in 5 months
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