How CIENCE's Link-Building Strategies Helped Boost Domain Ratings
SEO Outreach
Key Takeaways
- SEO and link-building have become must-have marketing strategies.
- Companies can benefit from allocating a team to work full-time on SEO and link-building.
- Because of its outbound expertise, CIENCE can successfully help companies develop their link-building strategies.
About eTeam
eTeam is a custom software development company specializing in web and mobile apps. It has a strong presence in the eCommerce industry, providing services such as online store optimization and cybersecurity solutions.
Incorporated in 2016, eTeam has worked with some of the world’s largest and most valuable companies, such as Apple, Google, Walmart, GameStop, and BestBuy. In recognition of its commitment to building high-quality, cost-effective software, eTeam has received twenty-three international awards and was included in Clutch’s 2021 list of the Top 100 Fastest-Growing Companies.
The Story of eTeam
Despite ranking among the fastest-growing companies, there was one domain where eTeam wasn’t seeing satisfactory growth: increasing its online visibility. eTeam had been struggling with this problem for a while. In 2018, it partnered with an SEO (search engine optimization) company. As this company was not able to deliver satisfactory results, eTeam eventually called off this partnership and reverted to trying to increase visibility on its own.
The two most common metrics used to measure online visibility are DA (domain authority) and DR (domain rating). These metrics are scored between one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood visibility. Importantly, this is a logarithmic scale, meaning that an increase of ninety to ninety-one is several orders of magnitude more difficult than an increase of ten to eleven points.
eTeam managed to achieve a DA and DR of around thirty-five points but plateaued there. It held this number steady for quite a while, but, no matter what it tried, eTeam could no longer improve its score.
Fortunately, at this time, CIENCE was developing a new service to increase online visibility. Through its internal efforts to improve its DA and DR, CIENCE realized that it already had some powerful tools which could be easily and profitably turned toward helping other companies improve visibility.
CIENCE's first client for this new service was Hirebook, also a sister company of CIENCE. eTeam, having heard about the impressive results this partnership was achieving, was eager to try out CIENCE’s novel approach to boosting online visibility. Given that eTeam operated in a completely different industry, this partnership presented the perfect opportunity for CIENCE to help out its colleagues while also stress-testing and growing a new service.
Challenges & Scope
Before teaming up with CIENCE, eTeam had been frustrated in its many attempts to improve its DA and DR scores. With the help of CIENCE’s industry-leading, link-building strategies and smart SEO practices, eTeam would be able to dramatically increase its online presence.
Challenges
Several challenges stood in the way of eTeam increasing its online visibility. Their website’s blog had not been updated for a considerable time. It was lacking content, which meant that people spent less time on the website and came away less familiar with their brand.
Another challenge was the fact that only a handful of high-quality backlinks were pointing to eTeam’s website. Backlinks are inbound links to one web page sent from another. They can pass on authority to a website, boosting its DA and DR. But not all backlinks are the same when it comes to passing on authority. Backlinks sent from web pages with a high DA or DR score will confer more authority. Thus, a handful of high-quality backlinks will have a more positive effect on DA and DR than hundreds of low-quality backlinks.
Need
In order to attract new customers and clients, eTeam needed to increase its online visibility. To do this, eTeam would have to upgrade its SEO strategies, regularly post content to its blog site and social media, and optimize its website so that visitors were provided with a great experience. eTeam also needed to secure high-quality backlinks to increase the likelihood of targeted keywords ranking highly on search engine results pages.
Opportunity
By optimizing SEO and garnering high-quality backlinks, eTeam had a great opportunity to connect with potential customers in the app and software development industry. Enhancing its website could massively increase traffic flows to its blog, gain traction from search engines, attract attention, and boost visibility.
Why CIENCE?
There were two main parts of this campaign: SEO and link-building. CIENCE quickly set about optimizing eTeam’s website. There are many technical aspects of SEO, such as anchor text and “no follow” attributes, which can make a real difference to a website’s domain rating. CIENCE then set about adding eTeam to many different web directories across the globe. It also began utilizing different social media channels, regularly posting on sites such as Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
The second part of this campaign, link-building, is what sets CIENCE apart from the competition. Its innovative approach to securing backlinks is a real point of difference. CIENCE has years of experience using an orchestrated approach to outbound outreach, wherein prospects were contacted across a number of different channels in a precise order, designed to maximize conversion.
CIENCE realized that its wealth of outbound expertise could be used not only to target prospects to set up a sales meeting with, but also to reach out to prospects to exchange high-quality backlinks with. The techniques and methods used are exactly the same.
CIENCE’s team was already equipped with industry-leading sales and analytics tools. They understood how to prepare research to make each outreach touch perform better. Thus, CIENCE utilized its wide-ranging experience of how to best communicate with prospects to create a unique solution to gain high-quality backlinks.
Results
eTeam’s partnership with CIENCE, which began in October 2021, is ongoing. The campaign has been incredibly successful. eTeam quickly added ten points to its DA and DR scores, growing from around thirty-five to forty-five. This is a rapid increase for so short a time, with metrics that continue to grow steadily and consistently. CIENCE has helped eTeam to lay solid foundations build a stronger online presence.
“The team at CIENCE has helped increase our domain rating in a fraction of the time, cost, and total resources it would have taken our internal team to accomplish the same tasks,” said Victor Grytsai, COO at eTeam. “CIENCE’s team has shown mastery in maintaining and improving process excellence and has an incredible depth of experience. They helped us build processes to ensure we get value from their SEO outreach from day one, meaning the ‘ramp up’ period was minuscule.”
The link-building part of this campaign achieved impressive results, with an average yield of 150 to 200 new backlinks per month. Many of these were of very high-quality, such as one from a Microsoft partner with a DR of seventy points.
By building collaborative relationships with prospects, CIENCE brought eTeam an influx of new opportunities. The sizeable increase of eTeam’s online presence is a testament to the effectiveness of CIENCE’s novel approach of applying orchestrated outbound techniques to backlink prospecting.
Partnership Success
Given the incredible results this partnership achieved, it is impressive to note that eTeam is only the second company to undergo this backlink service. Although CIENCE’s new service is at an early stage of development and refinement, and still evolving and adapting to new tools, the results are nonetheless extremely promising.
CIENCE and eTeam’s partnership has been characterized by close cooperation and constant, transparent communication. Both parties are eager to continue collaborating with each other and are excited to boost eTeam’s visibility metrics even higher. eTeam had long been discouraged by its low domain rating, so when CIENCE was able to get things moving again, a real sense of excitement and determination gripped everyone involved in the project.
“I’m pretty happy and satisfied with the results that we've brought since this really proves and demonstrates that SEO is such an amazing tool,” said Andrea Lara, marketing development specialist at CIENCE.
For any potential client thinking about collaborating with CIENCE, this partnership sheds light on three important takeaways to consider. The first is that SEO and link-building are becoming increasingly important marketing strategies. Although these are fairly new techniques in the marketing industry, they are rapidly gaining in importance, and any company that ignores these tools will quickly be left behind.
The second key takeaway is the absolute necessity of having either an outsource company or an internal team working on SEO and link-building. Merely recognizing the relevance of these tools is not sufficient. Companies also have to have someone consistently cultivating and improving online visibility. No matter how good the content on your website is, without search engine visibility or backlinks pointing at the web page, the content loses its value.
The final takeaway is the sheer effectiveness that CIENCE’s service provided. “We know that SEO and link-building are gaining relevance in the market, so there are several companies out there offering these services with different approaches,” said Kristian Rivero, marketing development outreach manager at CIENCE. “But CIENCE’s approach is very special, specific, and customized.”
In just a few short months, CIENCE was able to dramatically increase eTeam’s domain rating and domain authority. By applying its wealth of experience in orchestrated outbound outreach to link-building, and by utilizing smart SEO practices, CIENCE ensured that eTeam would be more visible to potential clients, helping the company grow long into the future.