DR Increase from 0 to 63: How HARO Links Skyrocketed Gigworker’s SEO Authority

INTRODUCTION

Employees: ~ less than 10

Project Duration: Jan 2019 – Dec 2020

GOAL SETTING

When Gigworker came to us:

• Their DR (Domain Rating) a major signal of SEO authority was 0 [Source: Ahrefs] 
• They wanted to leverage Digital PR and SEO Outreach [specifically media exposure and authority backlinks to supercharge their thought leadership, traffic, and sales]

Related Thought Leadership Statistics

• 65% of buyers say thought leadership significantly changed the perception of a company, for the better, due to a piece of thought leadership
• 70% said it’s very important that thought leadership motivates the reader to take action and 71% said educational content counts as thought leadership

Finalized Goals

Thus based on the above requirements, we came up with these goals for our SEO campaign:

• Devise a Performance Marketing based Journalist Outreach campaign whereby the client would pay for earned citations only  (such a pay-for-performance model has been at the core of all our Digital PR and Offsite SEO endeavors) 
  
• To increase Gigworker’s DR (domain rating) as it’s the main indicator of whether your website will be able to rank well on search engines
  
• To enhance the personal brand of Gigworker.com’s founder Brett Helling as a thought leader by publicizing his E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) within the gig economy, and digital media asset development fields.
  
  Helling is an entrepreneur, author of a popular gig economy book published by Loincrest Publishing, and the founder of several high-profile web properties.

PROCESS

Keeping Gigworker’s goals in mind, our Pay-for-Performance campaign focused on earning high-authority and legit backlinks (aka Digital PR Links) for them,  by sending personalized pitches to journalists using HARO or Help a Reporter Out (now known as Connectively).

RESULTS

Within two years of working with Gigworker, we achieved the following results:

More than 100 High-Quality Digital PR Links via HARO

We earned links from the likes of:

WEBSITE	ARTICLE TITLE	ANCHOR TEXT	DR(DOMAIN RATING)	MONTHLY ORGANIC TRAFFIC
Agility PR Solutions	2019 reading list—10 books to check out before entering media relations	GigWorker	76	25.9K
Referral Rock	40 Marketers Break Down Their Brand Reputation Management Strategy	GigWorker	80	54K
Techopedia	Job Role: Systems Analyst	GigWorker	88	2.5M
Best Company	10 Tips for Online Security	GigWorker	72	87.5K

Brett Helling Quoted in Hubstaff [DR = 79; Traffic = 211K]

Hubstaff is a time-tracking SaaS that enables companies to review and improve the productivity of onsite, offsite, and virtual employees/workers/vendors. It also has:

• a DR of 79
• Organic Traffic of 211,000

Thus Gigworker.com earning a backlink from Hubstaff was a massive win considering its high relevance to gig workers.

To top it off Brett Helling being quoted on Hubstaff (as can be seen below) was an additional boost to Gigworker’s E-E-A-T, SEO, and PR visibility.

DR Boosted from 0 to 63

Here is how this impressive increase materialized in real time: 

45,000+ Keywords Ranked

Due to the authority increase powered by quality backlinks (and ,of course , the potential if not probably impact of other contributing factors such as the client’s content team), the website was ranked for over 45,000 keywords within no time.

30,000+ Monthly Visitors from Organic Traffic

Gigworker.com also started to receive 30,000+ monthly visitors. This was ‘free’ organic traffic; no paid channels were involved.

At the time this organic traffic was worth $58,000 (in terms of monthly PPC cost).

In other words, use paid channels (e.g. Google AdWords) to bring in this traffic, they would have to spend $58,000 each month.

But working with us at DMR.agency saved them a fortune.

TESTIMONIAL
While Brett Helling doesn’t mention Gigworker specifically in the Trustpilot review below, he does describe how we helped grow another one of his web properties from 0 to 1.5M monthly unique visitors.”

SUMMARY 

So as can be seen our pay-for-performance Journalist Outreach service delivered these benefits: 

1. increased organic traffic (on a budget that wasn’t backbreaking) 
2. massive boost in DR in no time
3. Strengthening the personal brand of the brand’s top executive as a thought leader, expert, and authority within preferred industry and general digital media

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