Case Study: The Impact of Email Outreach on Organic Keyword Rankings

admin - September 15, 2016July 12, 2023

Most articles you read about SEO focus mainly on SEO practices, updates etc. The side that we don’t hear enough about it the business side: getting new clients, customer engagement and customer retention.

Starting an SEO business is very much ‘chicken and egg’. The only way to learn effective SEO is by actually doing it for clients – but you need to convince the clients to use your services.

SEO is such a fascinating industry because literally, the only way to practise is by working on client’s accounts.

As an SEO you always need to be focused on your next goal. Most people are only ever capable of doing one thing at one time. So keeping this in mind you can develop a repetitive pattern with your work, basically becoming an SEO machine.

Teaching yourself how to do SEO Properly:

There are other ways of learning SEO besides working on client’s account – like building another website in a certain niche, playing around with it and trying to make it rank. Also, you can try a few different things on your own website.

By and large, the best way to really improve is by working on a handful of other companies’ websites.

Having access to a number of websites and experimenting allows you to see the different variabilities. You can start to gain a little bit of understanding about the randomness and test the results of various future SEO practices.

Using email outreach, SEO Genius have been able to gauge the positive movement caused through email outreach. We can try to get an understanding of the correlation between backlinks and increases in rankings.

Case Study #1 – Simple Handyman Services email outreach campaign

With Simple Handyman Services’ website an outreach campaign saw the Ahrefs (toolset for SEO) Rank jump by almost 20 million:

This was a really great result as it demonstrated that the guest blogging email outreach technique works – my articles are being published along with juicy backlinks to my client’s website.

But what impact was this having on my google rankings? Well for Simple Handyman Services the results were very nice. You can see that some keywords have been bumped onto the first page of Google:

This, in turn, has had a very nice impact on traffic – The first page rankings are starting to bring in some consistent traffic for this business.

Case Study #2: Launch Film Productions email outreach campaign

For Launch Film Productions email outreach has also been quite effective – although arguably not quite as effective. An email outreach campaign for Launch films saw them pick up a number of backlinks for some websites with fairly high authority.

However instead of an increase in the Ahrefs Rankings we actually saw a drop occur:

This was unfortunate and there seems to be no explanation for it. Thankfully there has been an increase in the rankings for some important keywords.

It is important to point out that some keywords stubbornly stayed the same and saw literally no movement at all:

So what can conclusions can we draw from this? Did Simple Handyman Services just pick up better backlinks or was it something else? Also, why do some keywords move and others don’t?

Some keyword movement appears mainly to be random. Although looking at this information we can establish that anchor text is a ranking factor: ‘Simple Handyman Service’ and ‘Launch Film Productions’ anchor text backlinks have seen a considerable lift in the ranking for keywords ‘handyman services’ and ‘wedding productions’.

Implications for Client-Agency Relationship:

Launch Film Productions could easily be upset with the outcome of this campaign. They might feel as if they haven’t improved for their most competitive keywords. As an agency, you could send them a detailed report but in this situation giving them a follow-up call to reassure them could be a good idea.

When it comes to SEO there is so much that is in the hands of Google. There seem to be so many random variables that it can be a little bit off-putting at times. Regardless of this consistent efforts will always have an impact.

There are even affiliate marketers who use this randomness to their advantage. They can build a effective websites and one of them will rank well for competitive keywords while the others never make it to the first page.

For a client who doesn’t seem to be moving it can be rather frustrating. They want to see improvements and it makes it harder for the agency to convince them to stay.

Keeping the Client on Board:

In today’s world, people want to see instant results. Clients don’t want to hear that it can take months to start seeing results. It might lead them to pull the plug on the service altogether.

The best thing that an agency can do is just to reassure them that they are doing the work. They might even be able to show them other areas where they are seeing a bit more movement – maybe sharing them the insights from their Google My Business account.

Clients crave information and they want to see the progressive movement. The agency needs to know what the client wants to see and ultimately needs to be able to provide it to them.