How We Helped a Gift Registry Move from Position 9 to 2 for a Highly Competitive Keyword

By the numbers:

• #2 position on Google for a highly popular keyword
• 14+ increase in domain authority
• 389 newly discovered keywords

With the growth spurt in online shopping and eCommerce, people everywhere are turning to search to find and buy gifts. Gift registries, like our client, are a smaller slice of the bigger eCommerce pie but still have to compete with virtually every other eCom site. With many retailers having their own gift registry service, our client needed a way to stand out in the SERPs.

Before Authority Builders, our customer who runs a gift registry online store had a healthy domain authority of 35 and a handful of powerful keywords. But given the competitiveness of the industry, they believed they could surpass what they’d been able to achieve on their own.

We pursued a combination of link-building and keyword usage to help grow overall site authority. Here’s how we did it.

The Strategy

We’ve been working with our client over the last 30 months using our ABC Plus 500. This service allows us to analyze which pages require links, and then built those links accordingly. Additional links focus on the home page to grow the website’s overall authority. 

Manual backlinking allows us to focus on three core areas:

The first is niche sites that are relevant to our client. Despite the popularity of gift registries and eCommerce, links would be more successful when they’re contextually relevant. 

The second is anchor text. The anchor text we use in the links gives search engines additional context. We aimed to use high-traffic keywords that the client should rank for but also make sense to the pages we’re linking to.

The third is anchor text ratio. This ratio is super important to maintain a natural link profile. Too many exact match phrases can negatively harm authority and SEO because the links look “farmed.” We chose a mix of exact and partial match keywords to maintain a natural-looking link profile.

The Results

Before the campaign, our client had a 35 domain authority, which now sits at 49 (a 14-point increase). We also increased the position of one of their main target keywords (baby registry) from position 9 to position 2 in search results.

In this process, we also discovered 389 new keywords, each of which gives the client the potential to rank organically and drive website traffic. The client also had a healthy amount of organic keywords before we started working together, and 105 of those keywords have shown improvement. In total, the client ranks in the Top 3 positions for 75 keywords, which help to drive 1.9K visitors to the site.

Last Word

Gift registry sites like our client face competition from all directions. With eCommerce maintaining a firm grip on consumers across all categories, it’s essential to maintain a strong online presence and authority to rank well in search engines.