How A Company from the Fintech’ Space Grew from 4000 to 420K Visitors in Just 6 Months

This is a TRUE SUCCESS story from Jibran Qazi – Founder of Hunter Canada, a cognitiveSEO long-time customer and SEO expert.

Jibran Qazi is an SEO consultant, growth hacker, and founder of Hunter Canada, a company that helps tech firms achieve exponential traffic growth. Enjoy his story, written and documented by himself, and see how he managed to grow an app in the Fintech space, increasing its number of monthly visitors from 4000 to 420K+ in just 6 months.  All organic traffic from Google, no PPC, no paid ads.

1. Success Story of 420K+ visitors increase 
   1. Social Proof
   2. The Numbers
   3. First 30 Days
   4. First 60 days (2 months)
   5. First 120 Days (4 Months)
   6. First 180 Days (6 months)
2. How To Get Exponential Results For Your Own Site
3. The SEO Process
   1. Negative SEO Check on Main (Mysite.com) + Subdomains
   2. Build Citations
   3. Add Your Link to Reliable Directory
   4. Add Text
   5. Moving Forward
   6. Using Phrases As Anchor Text
4. The Link Building Strategy
   1. Forget About NoFollow Links
5. Conclusion

1. Success Story of 420K+ visitors increase 

The length of our contract was 6 months which started on May 29th, 2018 and ended on Nov 29, 2018.

Let’s start with some social proof, shall we:

1.1 Social Proof

If you zoom into the email, you’ll see I got them on the first page for “Invoice” and “Receipt”.  Two massive keywords. Not sure if they are still there but during that time, they sure were.

1.2 The Numbers

For obvious reasons, I can’t share the exact numbers but this should give you an idea.

Which lead to over 350K downloads of their app.

Let’s break down the month by month increase.

1.3 First 30 Days

Success to these guys was a 30% increase in the first 3-6 months. I handed this to them in the first 30 days.

In fact, I more than doubled it. Over 60%.

1.4 First 60 days (2 months)

During these months and pretty much every month after I started, the growth was (As expected) simply exponential.

370%+ increase in traffic in just 2 months.

Over 1200%+ increase in just 3 months.

1.5 First 120 Days (4 Months)

Over 3000%+ increase in traffic. In fact, this was the first time the traffic went over 140K.

1.6 First 180 Days (6 months)

This is where I took them over 8000% in organic growth and had over 420k people in total. All in 6 months.

2. How To Get Exponential Results For Your Own Site

To get such results in your own niche, you must rank for some high volume keywords. I got this Fintech company on the first page for the following massive keywords:

• Invoice;
• Receipt;

Considering they weren’t even close when I benchmarked everything in the beginning, these are pretty solid results.

I literally beat out sites like Wikipedia, Shopify, Office.com and many more established sites with massive advertising budgets.

3. The SEO Process

Since I can’t share exactly what I did for legal reasons, let me share some “general tips”. I just applied my 3 step formula again:

1. Fix what’s wrong (Site Architecture).
2. Optimize Site (On-Page SEO).
3. Build Links (Starts from day 1).

If you’re new to SEO, or not sure what ‘link juice’ is, start here.

The only difference is instead of approaching these steps in a sequence, you should perform all 3 steps at the same time in a holistic way.

Now you can use lots of tools for the first two steps (Depends on your preference really) but the main one that really helped me get this site (Plus my other clients/sites) to the next level was hands down, Cognitive SEO.

Here’s why:

• If you want the deepest backlink data, there is just no comparison.
• For the past 3 years, I’ve been using it for the initial NegSEO cleanup and then ongoing monitoring.
• When I’m considering getting a backlink from somewhere which looks a little odd, CognitiveSEO allows me to take a deeper look.

Guys, the thing is if you want great results, you have to use quality tools. CognitiveSEO is one of them. So generally speaking, here is how you should usually approach a site.

3.1 NegSEO Check on Main (Mysite.com) + Subdomains (help.mysite.com)

Always do a NegSEO check on your main domain and any subdomains first. Sometimes spammy links from your subdomains can kill your traffic over time. I love how CognitiveSEO allows me to look up subdomains for NegSEO as well. Very important.

When disavowing, always make sure you manually check the metrics of the sites you want to disavow. Sometimes you can disavow good ones as well and that could hurt you a lot.

There is a world of difference between a spammy site vs a low quality site. You need to disavow spammy site not low quality sites.

According to Cognitive SEO, 97% of Google is made of low-quality sites. Check out Google’s very own backlink profile below:

3.2 Build Citations

Citations are links from local business directories. It is surprising how so many businesses (Established or not), have not paid any attention to these.

Quality citations are a great source for backlinks and another great way of diversifying your backlink profile.

3.3 Add Your Link to JoeAnt

If there is one directory that I swear by to this day, it is JoeAnt. Love how they’ve maintained their quality throughout all these years. So always make sure you are present on JoeAnt.

It will give your site two things. A quality backlink and another diverse source that your backlinks is coming from. In this case, it would be from a directory.

3.4 Add Text

Try your best to turn your main pages (Pages you want to rank), into long copy.

These days, you need to have around 3000+ words. You don’t have to do it right away but keep adding text little by little.

3.5 Moving Forward

Most of these changes that I’ve mentioned here take the first 30-60 days. Usually 60 days as all the changes you are making need to get re-indexed as well. I used a service called One Hour Indexing for this.

Oh wait … What about backlinks?

Again, nothing special here either. Just you typical, manual, white hat link building (Blog comments, Forums, Directories, etc).

When it comes to SEO, it’s link building that takes most of my time. 2-4 hours a day at the very least. I recommend getting 15-20 links a month and see how your site reacts to it. Then you adjust your numbers accordingly. That’s really it.

3.6 Using Phrases As Anchor Text

Forget about one or two-word anchor texts. Most of the anchor texts that I use are between 5 to 7 words. Yes you read that right. It looks natural and it works.

In most cases, using the keywords isn’t necessary either.

4. The Link Building Strategy

Now, this is something I haven’t seen anyone discuss so I would like to share this. After finding quality link opportunities, where and how do you point them?

Well first, never link to the homepage. As the homepage usually already has enough links coming in. I’ve read case studies where they only link to the homepage and get great results. Like I said earlier, everyone has their own style and this is what has worked for me.

Once I reach the top, I randomize this pattern every 30 days so it all looks natural for Google as well. Think of link building as putting different coats of paint. Just make sure each coat (link building cycle) is different.

4.1 Forget About NoFollow Links

Forget about NoFollow or not. Just get links that fall in your pre-determined metric’s range (One I mentioned above).

You need both kinds of links (Heck I say get all kinds of links from all kinds of CMS’s) so you get quality links from diverse sources. That’s the key to successful link building.

Please stop ignoring ‘NoFollow’ links. If they are coming from a good authoritative place, get them. Nofollow links from Forbes or Wikipedia are still world-class links. Never check if a backlink is NoFollow or not. Haven’t done that in ages.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, if you do the following, you’ll get great results:

• Pay attention to where and how the ‘link juice’ of a site flows. Be obsessed with link juice.
• Make smart changes that work for you and Google. A healthy balance here can always be achieved.
• Write about things your competitors aren’t.
• Never stop getting backlinks.
• Use proper tools to get a deeper look at your backlinks (Current and the ones that you want to acquire).
• Run your own tests.

That’s pretty much it.

Disclaimer

This is not a paid post. cognitiveSEO made no agreement with the author.
This is Jibran’s success story, written and documented by himself.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.

About the author

  Jibran Qazi is an SEO consultant, growth hacker, and founder of Hunter Canada, a company that helps tech firms achieve exponential growth.